Post by "Just Ask Eric Musgrave"

A pub was the obvious venue for a surprise party to celebrate the recent 80th birthday of fashion industry legend and all-round nice guy Miles Gray A couple of dozen of us turned up at The Gunmakers in Clerkenwell, right across the street from the former HQ of Ben Sherman, which Miles ran about two decades ago. As the great Nitin Shah, co-founder of Pepe Jeans and another icon of the jeans industry, remarked to me, "Isn't it great that we can still have friends we've known for 40 or 50 years?" My own connection with Miles goes back to the early 1980s when he was running his own company, Razzy Jeans (it was a good name back then!), from the fashion capital that is Brentford. It really was a different era... We have remained good mates ever since, through all the good and lean years and all the inbetween years. It was a pleasure for me to edit Miles's excellent memoir of his long and varied career, which he self-published last year. "Was It Really Work?" is a damnded good read. And he's still a jolly good fella! Well done to Nick Gray Lily Gray and Pia Gray for getting us all together and managing to keep it a secret from the old boy himself. Among the raucous crowd here are Raoul Shah Boo Jalil SARAH FEENEY Phil Wildbore Mukesh Desai Terry Fraser David Boyne Keith Brown charlotte perini (Apologies to all whose names I've overlooked here)