There’s a small shop in Rome called Gammarelli that’s tucked away behind the Pantheon. At first glance, it may not seem different from the many family-owned clothiers scattered throughout Italy. The small, rectangular space is fitted with glass counters and glossy wooden shelves. On the main floor, there are bolts of cloth stacked neatly on top of each other for customers to peruse. Towards the back of the shop, an old, wooden staircase spirals up to the workroom, where tailors labor away on benched tables peppered with pincushions and pieces of chalk. The shop’s head tailor can sometimes be seen here running up and down between the floors for fittings, while a tall, bearded man in a tweed sport coat on the main floor scribbles down orders on a notepad. But between the worsted wools and crisp cotton wovens, you’ll also see deep purple robes, ceremonial swords, and feather-trimmed hats. On the signage outside the shop, below the name Gammarelli, the words read: Sartoria Per Ecclesiastici, or “clerical outfitters.”

If there’s such a thing as timelessness in dress, you can find it here at Ditta Annibale Gammarelli, purveyors of ecclesiastical clothing since 1798. For over 200 years, whenever a new pope is elected, the shop’s tailors and managers rush out the Vatican to meet the supreme pontiff in a chamber called the Room of Tears. They present to him a custom, white papal cassock, cut to a floor-brushing size, and made with some thirty handsewn buttonholes. The Pope slips into his Gammarelli garb and dons the traditional papal accessories: an ermine-trimmed red velvet shoulder cape known as a mozzetta; a white skullcap known as a zucchetto; and a pair of red leather papal shoes. He then steps out on the balcony of St. Peter’s to greet the faithful. 

Over the years, after this initial ceremony, each Pope has accessorized his dress slightly differently. John Paul II ditched the red slippers in favor of cordovan colored walking shoes made in his native Poland. When Benedict XVI restored the use of swanky bright red slippers for outdoor attire, Esquire voted him “Accessorizer of the Year.” That prompted the Vatican’s official daily paper to issue the stern reply: “The Holy Father is not dressed by Prada, but by Christ.”

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Even when it’s online and you can shop from the comfort of your own home, Black Friday still feels like a mad dash to find the best deals. Over at Put This On, we’re rounding up the best of Black Friday promotions. The list is massive, with the number of sales going into the hundreds, and we’ll be adding to the list over the weekend as we learn of new deals. For those who want something more manageable, I’ve pulled together some of my favorites in these three posts. Combine those with the ten sales listed below, and you have what I think are the most exciting Black Friday deals this year.

Todd Snyder: Up to 30%; Code BLACKFRIDAYNOW

Todd Snyder’s sale is perhaps the best on today’s list. For one, the company is a natural step-up for guys who love J. Crew. After all, Todd himself was once a designer at the brand and his company now occupies the physical space where J. Crew used to have their men’s flagship Liquor Store. I like his long topcoats, suede jackets, and collab Champion sweats. Todd Snyder’s prices are fair even at full retail, but they come down a little lower today with the checkout code BLACKFRIDAYNOW.

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Mr. Porter’s massive selection puts them in everyone’s orbit. Whether you favor classic tailored clothing, Japanese workwear, or oversized, minimalist contemporary garb, Mr. Porter likely carries more than a handful of brands for you.

Today, Mr. Porter started their Black Friday promotion, where you can take up to 30% off select items. Inis Meain’s sweaters are expensive, even with the discount, but absolutely exquisite and a joy to wear. Engineered Garments, Blue Blue Japan, and Kapital are personal favorites for workwear; SNS Herning is great textured knitwear you can layer under heavy coats (be sure to size up). 

Given the scope and size of their inventory, your best bet is to filter by sizing and brands to see what you like. That said, here are ten items that I think are worth highlighting. 

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I remember when Black Friday was about waking up early to try to beat the crowds, only to wind up standing in line and wondering whether the savings are worth the trouble. Thankfully, nowadays, everything is held online, which means you can snag the best deals without ever having to leave your couch. But still, it helps to have some intel.

Every year at Put This On, I roundup Black Friday sales for our readers. The list, which comes out on Friday, is massive and often reaches into the hundreds of stores. For those who want something more manageable, I also list some of my favorites here. Since some stores have already started their promotions, here are nine early-bird specials that I think are notable. More will come as the week moves on and new deals emerge. 

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When it comes to American style, few companies tower over our history like Brooks Brothers. After all, it was out of their Manhattan store where many Americans first bought their oxford button-downs, polo coats, penny and tassel loafers, Shetland sweaters, bleeding madras, and natural shouldered suits. Brooks Brothers figures so strongly into our cultural identity, they even shaped how we discuss clothing.

The sack suit, for example, is not called so because it fits like a sack. Instead, it’s a tailoring term that Brooks Brothers picked up in 1901 to advertise their “No. 1 Sack Suit.” During the Victorian era, the term sack — sometimes spelled sac or saque — referred to how the garment is made with two relatively straight back panels, rather than the four curved pieces that shape the back of a frock coat, morning coat, or tailcoat. Brooks Brothers followed in that utilitarian tradition when they made their first-ever mass-produced item for men, which was first worn by store clerks before it made it into corporate boardrooms. Brooks Brothers’ No. 1 Sack Suit carried men from the turn of the 20th century into the “jazz clubs of the Roaring Twenties, through the dark days of the Great Depression, on to college campuses in booming postwar America.” Consequently, the suit’s name also became shorthand for Ivy Style. Technically, all suits are a sack cut, but a sack suit refers to a particular iteration made famous by this New York clothier.

When it comes to a more casual style, however, many of the more influential companies radiated from up-and-down the West coast. From Levi’s, we get five-pocket jeans and much of American workwear. Lee and Wrangler were to Levi’s what Ivy shops such as J. Press and Chipp were to Brooks. Later came sneakers from Nike, sportswear from Patagonia, and the dream of a leisurely, forever young, California lifestyle from brands such as PacSun, Vans, and Stussy. The other giant is Eddie Bauer, which is now sadly a shell of its former self. For nearly two generations of Americans, however, this Seattle-based company was one of the best sources for down-filled parkas. But it was an accident of history that it was ever American at all.

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Woe betides anyone who takes life advice from me. I am, after all, a man who wound up writing about workwear on a blog called Die, Workwear. But for the academically inclined who may be hustling to get grad school applications submitted before December 1st, let me impart some advice: don’t go to grad school. Get a turtleneck instead.

A turtleneck will confer you all the same benefits of having a graduate school education. For one, you’ll feel smugly superior to other people and have false confidence that you’ve become more attractive (you are not, and you have not). You get to say “residency” with a convincing and assured tone. You’ll fit right into any event billed as being part of a “speaker series.” Like having a graduate diploma, a turtleneck will not increase your job prospects. You will, however, become slightly more annoying to everyone around you. Consequently, you will likely suffer from incurable loneliness and social isolation. The only difference is that graduate education can cost you upwards of a quarter-million dollars. To put that in perspective, that’s like buying 5,000 turtlenecks from J. Crew or three from Cucinelli.

How did this workwear garment become such a symbol of the smug and insufferable? The story of the turtleneck follows the same arc of almost everything associated with high-society. Things that once gave more than a whiff of moral laxity are today used as a cudgel against rebellious youths. At the turn of the 20th century, proper gentlemen in frock coats frowned up upon lounge suits as the ill-attire of workwear men and lowly store clerks. Today, a suit-and-tie is seen as the entry card to proper society. Similarly, jazz was once labeled as the “devil’s music” for its focus on improvisation over a traditional structure, performer over composer, and the black experience over conventional white sensibilities. Now it’s something people list on their Facebook profile to seem high-class and sophisticated. (Anyone who thinks rap music represents some kind of new degeneracy needs to listen more closely to blues classics such as Victoria Spivey’s “Dope Head Blues” and Charley Patton’s “Spoonful Blues”).

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In the early 1980s, when prep and power dressing dominated the American landscape, a few Japanese designers were preparing for a revolution. In the West, many of our trends in literature, architecture, and fashion derive from the Regency era. We wear navy suits because, in the early 19th century, British men of means paired navy coats with cream-colored breeches. About a generation later, Regency blue gave way to Victorian black when Queen Victoria decided everyone should look somber. Nearly 200 years later, these norms remain. Most men today wear navy, black, grey, and white — following in the steps of those early-19th-century traditions — and pair navy coats with lighter colored trousers because of Beau Brummell.

For a select few, this all changed in 1983 when Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto debuted their now-legendary spring/ summer collections in Paris. Thoughtlessly dubbed the “beggar’s look” by critics, these so-called rags were quite calculated in their design. Their asymmetric, deconstructed, and artfully ripped clothes enshrouded their wearers in mystery. As Yves Saint Laurent noted, fashion in the early 1980s was all about color and lots of it. These Japanese artists, on the other hand, deliberately avoided vivid color and made heavy use of a monochromatic palette, from “strong and varied hues of black to the simplicity and crispness of shades of white.”

“Kawakubo’s and Yamotmo’s black was often an unassuming, harmonious shade, reminiscent of Japanese ink painting,” wrote the authors of Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion. “Their expressive use of a black palette also partook of the qualities celebrated in Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s book In Praise of Shadows (1933), which finds in shadow the essence of the Japanese aesthetic and speaks of the Japanese skill with light and shade. The designers’ choice of color, unfettered by any Western paradigm, was perceptively singled out by The Washington Post as the distinguishing feature of their style, along with the purity of their aesthetic. The French newspaper Libération likened Kawakubo’s and Yamamoto’s creations to their intense black-and-white films of Kenji Mizoguchi, while French Vogue compared them to calligraphy scrolls, which symbolize a beauty devoid of color.“

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Our emotional associations with texture are arguably innate and perhaps even universal. In an article published in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Hilary Davidson examined the fabrics people are buried in. What is the last thing someone ever wears, and who decides what emotions those garments embody? Davidson analyzed excavation findings from British cemetery sites, where the bodies of poor mid-19th century Londoners were often laid to rest. “The choice of interred textiles and garments — such as a satin baby’s bonnet, pinned silk ribbons, and a false waistcoat— their qualities and construction all bespeak emotions around pride, dignity, religious feeling, tenderness, and socially codified grief,” she writes. “Clothing fragments become a substitute fleshliness as the bodily tissue they cover wears away, the last traces of the invested, materialized emotions surrounding death.” The softness of some of those garments was also presumably meant to bring the dead some eternal comfort.

Such associations between texture and emotion mostly follow a predictable pattern. We like things that are soft, silky, and smooth; we dislike things that are sharp, cold, and jagged. There’s a reason why challenging days are described as “hard” and “rough,” while sweet moments make you feel “warm and fuzzy.” One study published in Acta Psychologica found a relationship between body temperature and feelings of exclusion. When people feel socially excluded, the mere act of holding a warm beverage can make them feel better. 

Similarly, in a series of psychological experiments, University of Michigan professor Joshua Ackerman found our thinking can be affected by the physical things we handle. “These influences are not trivial – they can sway how people react in important ways, including how much money they part with, how cooperative they are with strangers, or how they judge an interview candidate,” Ed Yong wrote of the study in Discover. “Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances, but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.”

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