January 30

With a side of frot:

Seeing red:

Italian artist Stanislao Lepri

(1905-1980)

Our celebrity guest: violinist Charlie Siem
Born in London on January 14, 1986

Vivaldi: Winter from the Four Seasons
Berlin Philharmonic; Charlie Siem, violin soloist

Charlie Siem modeling a double-breasted suit by Armani:

From the March 2013 issue of Esquire magazine:

The only downside to playing the violin is that you never know when you're going to be asked to play. I could be out to dinner or having a drink at a bar, and someone could just give me a violin and I've got to be ready to play. I'm always on duty, so I tend to wear suits. I've got double-breasted and single-breasted, mostly dark blues and grays. I'm obsessed with them, and I always have been.

I've also always had very specific tastes in terms of how those suits should look and feel. Where I went to school, Eton College, we had to wear dark trousers, a tailcoat, and a stiff, starched collar every day, and that was fine with me: Part of the reason I wanted to go there was because I've always loved dressing up. But I didn't necessarily like wearing those kind of suits — I wanted to wear my kind of suit. They had a thing at Eton called "formal change," which was when your tail suit had to be mended and you got to wear a blazer and a tie, or a suit if you had one. I always tried to wear one of my suits instead of my school dress. That was my way of expressing myself. That was my rebellion.

There was only one problem with my preference for dressing up all the time: To play the violin, I had to wear badly fitted jackets that allowed me to move the way I needed to move. And because I loved clothes and I loved to perform, this was a big problem. So when I was 19, I went to a tailor to get a proper tailor-made suit — something that would fix this problem of mine. And the suits he made me... no luck. So I went to another tailor a few years later — someone who made clothes for people who shoot and hunt — and he found a way to make me a structured, fairly close-fitting jacket with a slit in the back so that I could have full mobility in my shoulders to perform. It made all the difference in the world.