Yves Saint Laurent was once quoted as saying, “I am no longer concerned with sensation and innovation, but with the perfection of my style.” I wish I had that kind of singular focus. While I’m mostly interested in tailored clothing, my eye wanders when it comes to casualwear. I find myself sampling here and there, being drawn to new brands and styles every so often. Here are six newish companies I’ve been looking at this past year. Perhaps you’ll find something to like as well.
Most menswear reviews go something like this: a ridiculously trivial problem is blown out of proportion, and some expensive item is proposed as the solution. The slightly uncomfortable experience of being caught in a drizzle, for example, can be solved with a handmade raincoat with bonded seams; the slightly-off fit of ready-to-wear shoes can be solved with something bespoke; and any difficulty in understanding Four Pins can be solved with someone young and hip, serving as a personal translator.
In reality, most things have a steep diminishing returns curve, and much of what you need can be satisfied for not too much money. For ironing, I recommend Black & Decker’s D2030 iron, any kind of non-countertop ironing board, and a basic spray bottle (since most irons are terrible at spraying mist or steam). All three can be had for less than $100.
In the last year, however, I’ve fallen in love with steam stations, which are irons that give continuous and powerful blasts of steam. Although they’re not as effective as the infomercial above would like you to believe, they’re surprisingly not that far off. With one in my hand, I feel like a disgusted prince, sending servants away with a few flicks of the wrist. “Begone, wrinkles!”
The problem with steam this powerful, of course, is that you risk puckering seams, delaminating fusing, and taking the shaping out of tailored clothes. Jeffery Diduch has done a lot in educating people on StyleForum (including me) about this subject, and you can see the ill-effects a steamer can have on a garment below.
Keep reading
At the end of An Englishman Abroad – a 1980s BBC television drama about the real life events of Guy Burgess – Coral Browne is sent to do some West End shopping on Burgess’ behalf. Burgess, for those unfamiliar, was a British intelligence officer who was exiled to Moscow for having sold secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War. He says in the film that he’s not unhappy in Russia, but it’s clear that he acutely misses the everyday cordialities of an English gentleman’s life, and the things that go along with it. So, to help him along, Browne gets some things from his old clothiers – suits from Tautz, and shoes from John Lobb. She has no trouble until she goes to “Seka” (which is supposed to be Sulka) to order some pajamas. Burgess wants them to be white or off-white, or navy blue silk. “Only then,” he says, “will my outfit be complete.”
At Seka, Browne is denied, and the salesman says that the firm is only too happy to be rid of a national traitor as a client. She sharply replies, “must traitors sleep in the buff?" You can see the whole sequence at the 50 minute and 40 second mark of this YouTube video. It’s a fun watch, if only to check out some of the real life shops of Tautz/ Hogg, Sons & JB Johnstone, John Lobb, and Turnbull & Asser (the last of which is where the Seka scene was filmed).
Anyway, the movie came to mind this weekend as I put together an order with Ascot Chang. Fox Flannels is holding a sale on their A1285 cloth, which is a slightly dark shade of mid-grey flannel that I think would make for some great trousers. A generous 40% can be taken off the price with the code WOEcloth, and you can expect another 20% off if you’re exempt from VAT. That puts the price lower than what Minnis charges.
I figured this sale would make for a good excuse to pick up some of Fox’s mid-grey windowpane flannel as well, which I’m planning to send to Ascot Chang to be turned into a dressing gown with white piping. It should look much this gown sold by The Merchant Fox as ready-to-wear, but will better fit my skinny frame. And while I’m at it, a couple of linen and linen/ cotton blend pajamas to go with, probably in white, off-white, and light blue. No poplins, as light-blue pajamas in plain weaves look vaguely clinical.
Keep reading
Like many style enthusiasts, I like clothes with unusual details. I just often prefer mine to be hidden. So, sport coats with poacher’s pockets, boots with unseen straps, and pants with an unnecessary number of buttons. The newest project is a leather jacket with a special Japanese lining. I got the idea from Greg at No Man Walks Alone, who was working on a similar project last year until it fell through. Since I won’t be able to get one from him, I’ve been thinking about buying a jacket elsewhere, and then taking it to an alterations tailor to have the lining replaced. Ideally, the jacket would be a café racer, black and austere, constructed from a heavy cowhide, and accented with silver zips. It’d look tough and mean, but also have a special lining inside that no one would see. The only question is what fabric to use.
At the top of the list is boro, a Japanese folk fabric originally used by thrifty farmers and fishermen. Here, a large piece of cloth is repaired with scraps and rags over the course of a few family generations. The result is something that looks like a Japanese version of an American patchwork quilt, where hundreds of indigo patches are pieced together with roughhewn stitches. I imagine those various shades of blue would look fantastic next to black leather.
There are two problems with boro, unfortunately. First, it’s a workwear fabric with multiple layers, so it’s sometimes too thick to serve as a lining (especially for something as close fitting as a moto jacket). It’s also incredibly expensive, with good specimens ranging anywhere from $1,000 to $8,000. You can get them cheaper in Japan, but you need connections and someone who can tell you the thickness of the cloth. Unlike dealing with artisans and merchants in Continental Europe, I find fewer people in Japan speak English, which makes shopping via email difficult.
I recently picked up a copy of Ralph Lauren’s 40th anniversary book, which is now available for $25 on eBay. The thing is massive, being a large format coffeetable book with about five hundred pages. Given its size and weight, I think $25 might have only covered the seller’s costs in shipping.
The content itself, unfortunately, is somewhat disappointing. It’s mostly a superficial overview of the brand’s identity, covered through 750 photographs and Ralph Lauren’s personal narration. For those who have followed the company closely over the years, a lot of this will be old ground. There’s stuff about Ralph Lauren’s collaboration with Bruce Weber; how he draws inspiration from the Old West and Ivy Style; and how he designs his women’s collections around the idea of a heroine. The text is short and the photographs plenty. Images are mostly culled from old fashion photoshoots and advertising campaigns, so you get lots of men in tweed jackets and breeks, and women in pinstripe suits or Native-American inspired sweaters, standing and looking serious next to expensive cars, or inexplicably being surrounded by old, tin milk cans and shaggy dogs in neckties. You know, Ralph Lauren stuff.
I wish the editors instead focused on the company’s key designs throughout the years, talked about the design and manufacturing process, and perhaps included a few essays from smart writers. As is, the 40th anniversary book feels a lot like a big magazine filled with nothing but Ralph Lauren ads.
There is one redeeming quality, however. Among the many ad campaign images, there are photos of the man himself – Mr. Ralph Lauren. In every shot, Lauren is sporting what has become his signature style (which, over the years, I admit I’ve come to like). There are those double breasted jackets with massive shoulder pads, the ever present denim tuxedo, and what I think is his personal best – when he’s wearing nothing but jeans and a plaid shirt, or a beat-up leather jacket layered over a clean white tee. This is Ralph Lauren, the man who created the greatest ready-to-wear brand in history.
Keep reading
I want to start an ad campaign, like the one Converse has plastered all over my city, with the catchphrase “Poplins Are Boring.” Poplin, for those unfamiliar, is a type of plain weave, where each lengthwise yarn passes over each crosswise yarn – over and under, over and under, and so on. The stuff is very smooth, very flat, and very, very boring. You can get an up-close view of it at Mr. Porter.
I think I wear poplin maybe once every few years, when I have to go to a wedding or something. Other than that, I prefer end-on-ends or twills, where you get a bit more variegation in color or texture. Not enough for anyone else to really notice, but enough for me to care. I’ve also been wearing the following a lot this summer:
First, there are these London Lounge linens, which have a nice crosshatching of white and blue yarns (sort of like end-on-end), but aren’t so slubby that they look distracting. As with all London Lounge cloths, the prices are painful, but the products don’t disappoint. Even the white linens have a subtle variation that looks better than the plain whites you see in lower end shirts.
Since moving into my new apartment, I’ve been looking for some art to fill an empty wall, and had the idea some months ago to get a Navajo weaving. Little did I know, they cost a pretty penny (at least for authentic, original ones that can be described as having a “patina”). So to get a better understanding of what’s worth buying, I’ve been reading a little about the subject.
One particularly good book is Walk in Beauty, which is an expanded version of The Navajo Blanket, a book published by the Los Angeles County Museum in 1972 to accompany an exhibit. Aside from being a really good introductory text – covering everything from the Navajo’s cultural heritage in weaving to the designs and yarns used in these textiles – it’s also notable that the author, Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, was one of the first museum curators to break with tradition by displaying such weavings as fine art.
You see, up until recently, Navajo weavings were mostly studied by anthropologists and presented as ethnological collections. Which means samples were often viewed and analyzed with an eye towards the normative. Works were valued for being “typical” or “average” for a time or region, rather than for any technical or artistic excellence. Critics say that this, in turn, has inflated the price of inferior textiles, and in some ways, even stunted the Navajo weaving community by giving them perverse incentives.
Kahlenberg broke with tradition in the 1970s when she presented Navajo collections as fine art. In the setting of an art museum, these blankets were said to have taken on new life as woven paintings. New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in 1972 of the showing:
Keep reading
The New York Times had an article a few weeks ago about the return of sneakers, and how some men (mostly New Yorkers) have been trading in their wingtips for gym shoes. It wasn’t a terribly interesting piece, to be honest, as sneakers have never not been popular, and men have been mixing them with tailored clothes for at least a couple of years. For anyone who would even be interested in reading such an article, this is all old news. Instead, I thought the author missed what’s a much more broader and interesting development: the rapid growth of designer sneakers in the last twenty years, which has culminated into the crazy market we have today.
The idea of designer sneakers is as tricky as the idea of designer clothes. It’s never clear what people mean by “designer” – whether it’s about the name behind the label, the intent of the design, or the “theatrics” of the clothes themselves, as Eugene Rabkin once put it. Either way, we kind of know what people mean when they refer to it, and in this way, the rapid growth of designer sneakers is interesting in the same way designer jeans have been interesting. It’s a deliberate de-democratization of something that used to be incredibly democratic. Sneakers are unique in that everyone from Bill Gates to homeless people wear them, but in the emergence of designer sneakers, there’s a new stratification where there used to be none. Designs from Giuseppe Zanotti and Alexander McQueen, for example, retail close to a $1,000 nowadays, which makes the $100 Jordans we all used to covet as kids seem like a joke.
I admit, I’ve been paying more for sneakers than I ever thought I would, but you’ll never catch me dropping close to a grand. I do wear sneakers a lot in the summer, however, particularly with beat-up denim and casual outerwear. Some expensive, some not, and some not even really considered designer at all.
At the top of the list are the Margiela German Army Trainers. I picked them up in three colorways, and for a while wore the brown and black pairs almost exclusively. Lately, however, I’ve come around to accepting that the white versions are the most useful, even if they’re the least interesting, as they simply don’t take that much thought to coordinate. More affordably, real German Army Trainers can be had for about $80 if you go through a proxy on StyleForum. The biggest difference between them is that the originals won’t have that grey stripe that (I think) help balances out the toe box. They are priced attractively, however, and being the originals has merit.
Keep reading
You could take all the artisanal, handmade, bespoke cordwainers in the world, roll them up into a ball, and I still wouldn’t like them as much as I like Edward Green. Although the basics of their shoes aren’t too different from any other good firm – as, after all, these are just Goodyear welted shoes made from full grain leathers – they have a style and finishing that sets them apart. There’s no company, to my mind, that has a higher batting average when it comes to making tasteful shoes. Their lasts are nicely shaped, their designs elegant, and their leathers are burnished just enough to give them some visual depth, but not so much that they look like the pimp-ish stuff you see coming from Continental Europe (sorry, Italy).
There’s a rumor floating around that Edward Green might be raising the prices of their made-to-order shoes, which would surprise me since they just lowered them. Well, at least for simple customizations (such as a change in leather), where now the upcharge is just £150. In any case, the rumor has me thinking that I should place an order soon, before expensive things just become more expensive. Some notable models to consider:
You can see the company’s updated catalog here. Note, the catalog will only show what’s ready-made and available for order directly through Edward Green. Specialty stores such as Skoaktiebolaget, Leffot, Axel’s, LeatherSoul, and Unipair might have their own special makes. You can also place custom orders through Edward Green or one of their stockists. I’m hoping to order a few basic MTOs next month from Skoaktiebolaget.
(Photos via Gezza’s Eyes, Rugged Old Salt, MostExerent, Leffot, Axel’s, LeatherSoul, and me)
Keep reading
My friend Réginald-Jérôme de Mans once lamented that there are few things anymore unique to a place. “[A]lmost everything is available on Google for comparison shopping, flipped on eBay by some enterprising parallel importer or made especially for discount sale through Gilt,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, redevelopment in the historic shopping areas of the world usually means homogenization to a standard of boring, set to the thudding Abercrombie & Fitch drumbeat that echoes down Savile Row.”
Indeed, one of the most recent houses to fall was Arnys, a Parisian boutique that was as famous for its designs as it was for its quality. In a world where the only ties that seem to be made anymore are striped reps and Macclesfield foulards, Arnys was one of the few places where you could get something original. Granted, I like striped ties and conservative foulards, but they can get a bit monotonous (plus, do we really need fifty makers for such things?). Arnys’ ties, on the other hand, were elegant, bohemian, and even a bit counterculture. Rive gauche style, in a way.
There are two silver linings, however. First, Morigi Milano has some old Arnys ties and they’re available for purchase online. The designs are a lot more wearable than the stuff you see recycled on eBay, and a number look like they’d go excellently with a cotton or linen suit.
Second, as my friend Réginald-Jérôme informs me, Arnys’ tie designer Dominique Lelys is now doing his own thing under his label Le Lys. Sadly, while the ties are more unique than what you’d find elsewhere, they don’t have the same whimsical patterns of Arnys. The front blades are basic – simple stripes, dots, or solid colors – while the back blades are made with a contrasting piece of silk. The ties are unlined and made with a five-fold construction, and you can find them for $175 a piece at Cuffs.
Keep reading