Avre Friday Briefing - #51
Batch No. 3 — The U.S. Navy Shawl Collar Shirt
Pre-orders are open. Limited to 150 pieces.
Last week we opened Pre-Orders for our Batch No. 3, the US Navy Shawl Collar Shirt. It's 13.75oz premium American selvedge denim, pre-washed for a soft and broken-in handle.
Selvedge
Selvedge refers to the self finished edge of a woven fabric - the red and white line in the image below. The shuttle passes the weft thread back and forth across the full width of the fabric, which means the edges are self-finished rather than cut which in turn means no fraying. The selvedge line you can see behind the placket on this shirt is a byproduct of how it's made, not intended to be a decorative detail.
We still think it's a lovely detail, admittedly most of the time only visible to the wearer!
What we're reading - Kolymsky Heights
Gerald Seymour's 1994 classic thriller. A scientist at a remote Soviet research station in Siberia — one of the most inaccessible places on earth — manages to get a message out: he has something the West needs to know, and he needs to be extracted. The novel follows the single operative sent to get him out.
It has a reputation as one of the finest British thrillers ever written, and it earns it. The sense of place, the cold, the distance, the logistics of moving across a landscape designed to be impossible to cross. Nice tension builder too. Strong recommend.
On this day - 6th March 1945
On March 6, 1945, eighty-one years ago today, as American troops entered Cologne, retreating German forces, including SS units, used explosives to destroy the Hohenzollern Bridge - one of the city's great rail crossings. The idea was to slow the Allied advance and it was a pattern repeated along the entire length of the river. Every bridge the Germans could reach, they blew.
On March 7th, troops from the 9th Armoured Division crested the hills above a small town called Remagen, 25 miles south of Cologne and found the Ludendorff Bridge still standing. The demolition charges fired but failed to bring it down. Sergeant Alexander Drabik sprinted the full length of the bridge under fire — the first Allied soldier across the Rhine. Within a week, seven US divisions had established themselves on the eastern bank. The bridge collapsed on March 17th, but by then it didn't matter.