Seven Great Black Friday Sales

Even when it's online, and you can shop from the comfort of your home, Black Friday still feels like a mad dash to get the best deals. Every year around this time, I round up a list of Black Friday promotions at Put This On. Those lists are huge -- the number of sales included typically ends up being in the hundreds. To make things more manageable, I pull together lists of some notable sales here, and include suggestions for what I think are special products. Here are seven Black Friday sales right now that I think are noteworthy. 

MR. PORTER: UP TO 30% OFF; NO CODE NEEDED

The first is Mr. Porter, where you can find select items discounted by as much as 30% off. Since Mr. Porter's inventory is ginormous, I recommend using the site's filters for brands and sizing. Some of my favorite labels here include Chimala, De Bonne Facture, Drake's, Engineered Garments, Filson, Howlin, Inis Meain, Lemaire, Margaret Howell, Monitaly, Orslow, Our Legacy, Private White VC, RRL, Stoffa, Valstar, and Yuketen. Remember that things tend to move quickly at Mr. Porter, but returns are free. Historically, their Black Friday sales are also often better than what they include in their first round of discounts during end-of-season promotions. 

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Things I’m Excited to Wear This Fall

A few months after the world shut down this past spring, Cathy Horyn of The Cut interviewed Raf Simons about what he thought of fashion's possible future. Simons, who's known in fashion circles for introducing a generation of men to the skinny black suit, was sitting in his apartment in Antwerp at the time while wearing elasticated easy pants and a hoodie. He ruminated on what fashion might look like after this pandemic. "'I think there must be a bunch of people out there, when they start thinking about fashion, who don't want to be reminded of the shitty time they had at home in the last five months. But —' He hesitated. 'It's just so personal. I have no clue. [...] honestly, I haven't worn a piece of fashion in months.'"

That's mostly the feeling I get when I think about fashion nowadays. But recently, I've been enjoying Mark Cho's new YouTube series, titled "Dress to Ingest." In a series of relaxing videos that run between five and ten minutes, Mark sits down with various Hong Kong restaurateurs to talk about their signature dishes. The videos are meant to give people some context on where they can wear tailored clothing, here being at restaurants. "They say you don't appreciate it until it's gone," Mark tells me. "Tailoring is often misunderstood only as a 'formal' option, but there's a difference between 'formal' and 'dressed up.' 'Formal' is serious and somber. 'Dressed up' is simply being invested in your appearance for your benefit and others around you. There has always been something precious about breaking bread with friends and family. Given how seldom we see each other now, why not give these rare occasions the celebration they deserve?" 

I don't wear tailored clothing as much as I used to, given that I mostly spend my days at home. But I've tried to make an effort to wear nicer clothes when I can -- a sport coat for short walks around the neighborhood, better flannel shirts even when I'm at home, a nicer pair of pants that I used to reserve for going to the city. "Outside" clothes help break up what's become a very monotonous life at home. Plus, on the few occasions when I can safely meet with friends, I've taken the opportunities to "dress up" more than I used to. The future of fashion is still uncertain, and yet, clothes continue to be one of our small comforts. In that spirit, here are eleven things I'm excited to wear this season. 

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Too Much of a Good Thing

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A few months ago, when the Criterion Collection debuted their online streaming service, a user on Blamo’s Slack channel noted the film company also sells branded totes. There are three designs, two made from cotton canvas and the other a ripstop nylon. They feature clean graphics, promise to hold almost anything you need, and are downright cheap at just $20 or so. They also inspire you to daydream. “I could use this for grocery shopping,” I thought to myself. “Or carry my books and laptop to the coffee shop.”

Affordability, identity, and imagination are a potent mix for impulse shopping. I made it to the Shopify checkout page before stopping myself. As a sanity check, I reached back to the nether regions of my closet, where I extracted a beige, cotton canvas tote smushed somewhere between my raincoats and umbrellas. I found four smaller totes scrunched up inside — totes within a tote — like nesting matryoshka dolls.

Totes are taking up an expanding part of our lives. If you live in a major US city, there’s a good chance you have them hidden somewhere – in the back of your closet, under your sink, or in your car’s trunk. As counties and states are imposing fees or outright bans on plastic bags, many people are carrying lightweight totes as a way to save money. But totes have also become the new graphic t-shirt. Culturally, they’re everything: a useful item for daily carry, an inexpensive thing to manufacture, a cheap item to purchase, a marketing tool, and a symbol of identity. If you understand what’s happened to totes in the last 20 years, you can understand a lot about American consumer culture.

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No Man Walks Alone Starts Sale

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It’s that time of year when I post a spat of seasonal sales. The third big one started this morning: No Man Walks Alone, where you can find select items discounted by as much as 40% off. Their sale is one of my favorites for two reasons. The first is that I get to post a photo of the shop’s founder, Greg Lellouche, and note that he is, in fact, walking alone. The second is the shop’s selection. While No Man Walks Alone is a sponsor on this site, they’re also one of my favorite online retailers. Along with some excellent tailoring, they also carry Japanese workwear, contemporary casual, and a bit of the avant-garde.

The selection here is big, but not massive. It’s reasonably easy to scroll through the entire sale selection to see if there’s anything you want, but No Man Walks Alone also has filters on their site so you can narrow in on sizes, colors, and brands. Some of my favorite makers here include Sartoria Formosa, Drake’s, and Kaptain Sunshine. If you’re looking for highlights, here are ten things that I think are notable.

Valstar’s Plaid Wool-Alpaca Topcoat

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The Amazing Style of British Cyclists

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On a Sunday afternoon in May of 1955, a ragtag group of forty people crammed themselves into The Black Swan, a cozy pub in the market town of Leominster, England. They were responding to a letter published in The Bicycle magazine the previous October. Penned by W.H. Paul — a thin, bespectacled man better known to his friends as Bill — the letter asked if the cyclists of the day were only interested in replicating the road-racing feats of Tour de France competitors. Paul, an enthusiast of the great outdoors, wondered if anyone else liked using bikes to explore less trodden paths.

“I have always been a searcher of the remote, wild, and more desolate country, which is to be seen ‘off the beaten track,’” he wrote. “I wonder if the modern lightweight, with its ‘Continental this’ and ‘super that,’ prompts the rider to keep on the billard-table surfaces of modern tarmacs. Nevertheless, I believe there is still a small select circle who love the rough and high ways amongst the mountains of Wales, the Lakes, and Scotland. […] Who then, would care to become a member of The Rough-Stuff Fellowship?”

The response was immediate and positive. A year after the inaugural meeting, the club grew from 40 hardened riders to 160 scattered across the country — and today is 800 members strong, making it the oldest off-road bicycling club in the world. Riders meet on a weekly, if not daily basis to explore every corner of the British countryside and beyond. They shoulder their bikes as they climb up mountains and wade through streams, then hop on them again to ride across rocky dirty paths and through grass-covered fields. “They prefer a far less beaten track – one where no ascent is too steep, no mud too thick, no destination too distant,” Niall Flynn wrote of the group

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The Most Expressive Garment

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When Volodymyr Zelensky emerged from the voting booth in Kiev last month, he was wearing a dark worsted navy suit and a crisp white t-shirt. It was the biggest night of his life. Over the previous six months, the actor and comedian had been campaigning for the presidential seat in Ukraine. An early frontrunner in opinion polls, Zelensky was expected to win the election handily with over 70% of the votes — and he did. Not long after the polls closed, and with little more than 10% of the votes counted, early results showed Zelensky was coming in for a landslide victory. Incumbent President Petro Poroshenko wrote on Twitter: “We succeeded to ensure free, fair, democratic and competitive elections. I will accept the will of Ukrainian people.”

It was a big night for t-shirts (and a bigger night for Zelensky). About a hundred years after its invention, the t-shirt has gone from being underwear — replacing the union suit, which is the all-in-one undergarment you’ve likely seen in black-and-white cartoons — to an everyday piece of clothing that even presidential candidates can wear on election night. Like chinos, pea coats, and cardigan sweaters, the t-shirt has its roots in the military. Around the turn of the 20th century, the US Navy replaced square-necked, shoulder-buttoning shirts with cropped sleeved undershirts. American seamen wore them while swabbing decks and manning armaments. The shirts were made white (still the garment’s most popular color) for several reasons: white t-shirts are cheap to produce, as they don’t have to be dyed, and they marry well navy uniforms. Besides, since white t-shirts show dirt easily, it was believed they’d instill a sense of discipline and help maintain personal hygiene.

Stuffed shirt traditionalists love to mark the t-shirt as the end of Western civilization — the replacement for collared shirts and, ultimately, the suit. It’s true that t-shirts were initially undergarments that were never meant to be seen, but within my lifetime, they’ve always held the same cool appeal as blue jeans. In the run-up to the United States’ entry into the Second World War, a Sears, Roebuck, and Co. advertisement proclaimed: “You needn’t be in the army to have your own personal t-shirt,” suggesting the quotidian garment had an inherent sense of heroism and machismo. A sweat-soaked, sexually magnetic Marlon Brando wore a white tee when he shouted “Stella!” in the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Virile heartthrob James Dean also sported one in Rebel Without a Cause. People who complain that t-shirts aren’t “proper” miss the point. The t-shirt’s military roots, machismo nature, and ability to rouse elites are exactly the reasons why it feels rebellious (although, a strong case can be made that it’s now just part of a middle-class uniform, losing all of its tough political edge).

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A Fisherman on Fifth Avenue

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The Compleat Angler is the book everyone owns, but no one has read. It’s the third most reprinted work in the English language, just after the Bible and Shakespeare. Written by an English tailor named Izaak Walton, it’s ostensibly about fishing, but fishing is just the hook to Walton’s deeper and more contemplative  mediations on all things pastoral. Between his practical instructions on how to be a better fisherman, Walton interleaved poems, song lyrics, illustrations, cooking recipes, and other diversions about nature. He believed that fishing was at once a sport, a social activity, and a spiritual experience – and by connecting with it, we could become better people. 

The thing to know about The Compleat Angler is that it was written during a time of tremendous upheaval. England was in the middle of its civil war; Oliver Cromwell had just executed the king; and the country was trying to set up its first Commonwealth. Walton, a staunch monarchist and devout Anglican, felt displaced, so he retreated to the countryside and sought refuge in fishing. He dreamed of the “Brotherhood of the Angle,” a group where men could set aside their political differences and unite through their shared appreciation of nature. This was transcendentalism before transcendentalism; a rejection of Hobbes’ Leviathan. It was a modest proposal that fishing isn’t really about catching fish, it’s about finding community and peace. As Walton puts it, to “go a-Angling” is to “study to be quiet.” One of my favorite passages from the book reads:

And for you that have heard many grave, serious men pity Anglers; let me tell you, Sir, there be many men that are by others taken to be serious and grave men, whom we condemn and pity. Men that are taken to be grave, because nature hath made them of a sour complexion; money-getting men, men that spend all their time, first in getting, and next, in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemned to be rich, and then always busy or discontented: for these poor rich-men, we Anglers pity them perfectly, and stand in no need to borrow their thoughts to think ourselves so happy. No, no, Sir, we enjoy a contentedness above the reach of such dispositions […]

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Ten Black Friday Sale Highlights

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We’re doing a Black Friday sales roundup at Put This On. The list is massive, reaching into the hundreds of stores, and we’ll be updating the list from now until Sunday as we learn of new promotions. For those who want something more manageable, I thought I’d put together ten sales from the list that I think are worth specially highlighting. Combine this with this past week’s posts on other Black Friday deals and you have nineteen Black Friday sales that I think are worth checking out. 

Marcus Malmborg: Up to 70% off Eidos

As you may have heard, Antonio Ciongoli is leaving Eidos as its Creative Director after next season’s collection. The line will be taken over by Simon Spurr, who’s known for his sleeker NYC sense of style, while Antonio is moving on to do a new men’s line for Roller Rabbit. Word is that the line will be inspired by East Indian traditions, including hand block printing, which I find really exciting. 

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Seven New(ish) Brands I’ve Been Watching

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I love finding new and interesting brands. And luckily with fashion, the pace is fast enough for there always to be something exciting around the corner. For the last two years, I’ve been doing these posts on new brands I’m watching – and with every post, the number of companies I want to talk about seems to grow. I’ve worked to keep these lists down to seven, but this one could have easily stretched to ten. 

Granted, not everyone here is actually new. Some are actually old, heritage companies that have been around for ages – they’re just new to me (and hopefully, you). The scope is also more on contemporary casualwear, not tailored clothing, but if your interests are as broad as mine, maybe you’ll find something to like here as well.  

(To see previous years’ posts, you can click here and here).

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