Category: Uncategorized

 

I’ve been finding all sorts of really good films lately. The latest (and possibly greatest) is this one on English silk. Like last week’s video on Peal, this gives a rare look at one of England’s most important craft firms – David Evans & Co. David Evans was the last of the old London silk printers before they closed in 2002. During their 155-year history, they printed luxury silks on the banks of the River Cray for clients such as Holland & Holland and Drake’s.

The film takes us through David Evan’s factory, but it’s not really about David Evans per se. It’s actually about the last days of English hand block printing, which David Evans specialized in until the 1980s. Hand block printing is an incredibly slow, labor-intensive process that combines the skills of an artist, tool maker, and carpenter. In some ways, it’s the simplest and earliest method of all, and because of that, has more or less disappeared on a large-scale commercial basis (at least in England). Today, most of the silks you’ll handle have been either silk-screened or ink-jet printed. Those are obviously more efficient, but they arguably lack the humanistic, artistic edge of hand block printing.

The process starts with a block maker, who transfers a design to a block of wood. A separate block is needed for each distinct color, so if you have a paisley design with five colors, then five blocks will need to be made.

Keep reading

Here’s a fun little piece of Brooks Brothers history: a small pamphlet on how to dress for certain times of the day, titled Clothes and the Hour. My source at Brooks Brothers tells me they published this in 1912, but a quick Google Books search will pull up various advertisements for the pamphlet dating back as early as 1906. So who knows.

Anyway, apparently at that time, Brooks Brothers recommended that men wear bedroom slippers and dressing gowns at 8am in town (with dressing gowns costing up to $1,400(!) in today’s dollars). They also recommended negligee shirts in the morning made from lightweight silks, linens, cottons, or wools. A negligee was one of the four types of shirts men used to wear in this period - the others being the dress shirt, the work shirt, and the outing shirt. Dress shirts had bosoms, which could be plain, plaited, or tucked. As you’ll see in the “afternoon section” of this pamphlet, Brooks recommended dress shirts made entirely of white linen or ones that just had linen bosoms. These were typically starched in the laundry so that they’d set well. The other three types - the negligee, the outing, and the work shirt - were usually made without bosoms, and differed by what kind of materials were used. Either way, all shirts were made with a front-plait closing (what we might think of as “popovers” today), or a coat front (the style most of us wear, with the front of the shirt cut fully open so we can slip it on like a coat). 

For afternoon wear in the city, men were recommended something still very familiar to us: a sack suit, dress shirt, gloves, cravat, and some kind of coat. Recommended coats included Chesterfields, Mackintoshes, Ulsters, and even vicunas. What would a vicuna coat cost in the early 20th century? $950 to $1,050 in today’s dollars for ready-to-wear, or $1,300 to $1,500 for made-to-measure. That’s pretty amazing when you consider that a custom vicuna coat today would run you anywhere between $50,000 to $100,000 (a price so shocking that someone recently published a book about it, which A Suitable Wardrobe recently reviewed).

So if you were ever hoping for a vicuna coat, you might have missed your chance by a hundred years.

Keep reading

 

I found a great little half-hour video on Peal & Company on YouTube recently. For those who appreciate the history of British shoemaking, this is a rare opportunity to see a glimpse of a world long gone.

Peal & Co., as many readers may know, wasn’t always just a name stamped inside of Brooks Brothers’ shoes. They were once the largest bespoke shoemaking operation in the world. Having been founded in 1791 by Samuel Peal - an English cordwainer who first made a name for himself by patenting a new way of weatherproofing boots - they eventually built a list of clientele that stretched throughout North and South America, Europe, and East Asia. Sales reps would travel abroad to meet with men, measure and trace their feet, and then take their orders. These notes were then posted to Peal’s factory back in Acton Vale, London, and the finished shoes were delivered six weeks later. This “traveling bespoke” system was so successful that by the time of the company’s closing, two-thirds of Peal’s production went for export. 

The client list was impressive. There was the regular run of Hollywood stars (Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Henry Fonda, Steve McQueen, etc); industrialists such as Henry Ford; intellectuals such as Hugh Trevor-Roper; politicians such as the John F. Kennedy; and almost every diplomat, aristocrat, and king from that period. It’s hard to imagine this many people ordering bespoke shoes from just one firm today.

Keep reading

My shirtmaker Ascot Chang was at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel this week, and they confirmed for me something I’ve been suspecting for a long time. After a year of unhealthy eating and not enough exercise, my shirts seem to have shrunk about an inch in the waist. So my pattern will be adjusted for future orders, which makes me think: as exciting as it can be to try out new tailors when you’re abroad, if you plan to have the majority of your clothes custom made, it’s good to have someone you can dependably see on a regular basis. People’s bodies change, and although adjustments can sometimes be made over the internet with a little guesswork here and there, nothing beats having your tailor see you in person. 

Anyway, while I was there, I decided to flip through some flannel shirtings. Pictured here are some brushed cottons and Viyella wool/ cotton blends. Viyella is an English fabric that was first woven in 1893, making it the first branded fabric in the world. I actually thought they had moved on to becoming a clothing and home furnishings company, and no longer made their famous blended shirtings, but it seems Ascot Chang had two books full. Maybe these are old stock? I forgot to ask.

I’m thinking about picking up one of the green/ cream/ gold plaids to wear with brown corduroys and moleskins in the fall, and though the cream tattersall - with grey, burgundy, green, and navy stripes - doesn’t look appealing at first, I think it can work quite well underneath a tweed or corduroy sport coat. Two flannel shirtings to start with, and then maybe a navy thin-waled corduroy shirt with two button-flapped chest pockets if I’m feeling brave. 

Ascot Chang will be doing another tour sometime around November. You can see which cities they visit here. And since this year is their 60th anniversary, they’re doing a promotion where you can get one free shirt with any six you order. Expect prices for basic fabrics to start around $175. 

Keep reading

I’m working on an OCBD roundup for Put This On, so that readers who may not have yet settled on a favorite maker can get an idea of some of the options available to them. I originally wasn’t going to post anything about it here, since I don’t see a need to overlap on content, but what Mercer & Sons sent me is so good that I feel the need to say why I’m heartbroken.

Mercer & Sons is based in Maine, and has been producing American-made OCBDs since 1982. Their site feels charmingly anachronistic – something like an old mail-order catalog – and their shirts are no less old-fashioned. I mean that in a good sense. For one, their collars are unlined. Not unfused, mind you, which is what most other producers make. Unlike an unfused collar, which has a floating interlining, an unlined collar has nothing at all inside. This makes the collar very soft and frankly a bit mussy looking. It’s for the kind of guy who understands the casual spirit of an OCBD, if not the historical accuracy (as Brooks used to make their OCBD collars unlined). Their collar points are also an unapologetically full eight centimeters long (again, just like Brooks used to do). The effect of having these longer, unlined collar points is that you get a more relaxed, full, button-down roll. It’s the kind of charming look you see in old photos, but is disappointingly absent in many modern day skimpy collars. The collar being the heart and soul of an OCBD, I haven’t come across a more handsome option.

Mercer’s oxford cloth is also exceptional, though perhaps not something for the neophyte. It’s scratchy, rough, and heavy – a bit reminiscent of a tweed jacket or a new pair of selvedge denim jeans. Not as uncomfortable against the skin, of course, but clearly tough and meant to be broken in. The warp and weft yarns also have more contrast, which gives the fabric a lot more surface interest. After handling this Mercer, I’m too embarrassed to wear my oxford shirtings from Acorn anymore. To be sure, they’re not much different from what you’d find on most OCBDs today, but that just means almost everything now seems incredibly lacking.

The only thing holding me back from ordering a bunch of these is the fit. Mercer’s shirts fit very, very full. My size 15 shirt, for example, has a chest measurement of 49.5”. The company offers the option of sizing down the body two sizes, so you can put a size 15 collar on a 14 body. However, that still puts you at a 45.5” chest, which is a full 4.5” bigger than my custom shirts from Ascot Chang.

Keep reading

I remember the first time I saw a draped jacket. It was like seeing a suit for the first time. I was in San Francisco, and the man I saw, I’m pretty sure, only wore custom Neapolitan garments, except for his shoes, which were English. On that day, he was wearing a navy wool flannel, pinstripe suit; a crisp, white, spread collar shirt; and a deep brown, pin dotted tie, which was knotted in this rakish, slightly askew way. He seemed to me like the most elegant man I’d ever seen. 

Most people hate draped jackets. For them, it looks like bad, messy tailoring. I was ambivalent about the silhouette until I saw one in real life, and now I’m a die-hard convert. To review, the drape cut was invented by a Dutch-English tailor named Frederick Scholte. He would cut the pattern such that large vertical folds of excess cloth would gather around the armhole. Sometime in the mid-20th century, copycat tailors made this look quite exaggerated, but well executed versions are fairly subtle. Additionally, the appearance of drape often comes accompanied with a swelled chest. The two don’t always go together, but they often do. A swelled chest is when … well … the chest swells. I’ve circled the drape and underlined the swells on the jacket below. 

Having seen a draped jacket with a swelled chest in real life, I realized how stunning this cut can be. The chest appears sculpted in a way that makes the wearer look masculine, muscular, and comfortably relaxed. At least on the man that I saw, his swelled, draped chest gave him a slightly Olympian look. The skirt was also cut tight, which made his hips look columnar. Coupled with his slim trousers, the effect was quite stunning and handsome. This kind of cut would be contrasted against clean chested suits, which lack the excessive cloth and sit much closer to the wearer’s body. That specie of suit can certainly be handsome as well (most suits are clean chested), but I really appreciate the expressiveness of draped jackets. 

Jeffrey Diduch, a tailor who runs a rather informative blog on bespoke tailoring, strongly prefers clean chested suits to draped jackets. However, for the sake of experimentation and honest judgment, he cut a draped jacket from Whife’s draft. Whife was one of the most famous cutters of the 20th century, and the editor of Modern Tailor, Outfitter and Clothier, a massive 3-volume encyclopedia of tailoring that has become somewhat of a collector’s item. The result is below. Mind you, this was cut by a man who prefers a clean-cut chest to drape, and the result below is his first attempt … for himself. Though I’m not a tailor, I imagine tailoring a jacket for yourself is much harder than doing it for someone else. The button stance on the brown jacket could be higher (he was following Whife’s early 20th century pattern), but the coat is still striking. The final product is more of a testament of Diduch’s incredible skill than the drape pattern, but with results this stunning, imagine what I saw in real life. 

Keep reading