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.
Mr. Porter is having a one-day sale today, where you can get 20% off select items with the checkout code JUNE21. The promotion only applies to items marked as “seasonal,” which you can find neatly organized under this “sun shop” section. Don’t bother trying to apply the code to other full-priced products or already-marked down sale items – I tried and it doesn’t work.
The good news is that there’s actually a bit of good stuff in the “sun shop” section. There are some handsome camp-collar shirts from Officine Generale, Gitman Vintage, AMI, and Kapital. I have an older version of that Kapital shirt and wear it all the time with ranch jackets, chore coats, and even on its own with just jeans. Additionally, there are some summer-ready shorts from Orlebar Brown and Officine Generale; mid-length swim trunks from Orlebar Brown; and my favorite chambray, which is made by Chimala. This Rubinacci “Victory” pocket square has a cream-colored background that makes it useful in just about any tailored outfit, but also a bit of pattern that keeps it looking like the solid-colored, cream squares worn by prom DJs (no offense to prom DJs).
I also bought a vintage Lee’s 101-J trucker jacket from Wooden Sleepers yesterday (it’s pictured below). The style was introduced in the 1930s and is known as the first slim-fit denim jacket. But more than provenance, I like the design for its slanted chest pockets, zig-zag stitching, and slightly cropped fit (they’re shorter than Levi’s truckers). You can find them on Etsy for as little as $50, but if you’re looking to splurge, this Kapital trucker looks excellent. Note, Mr. Porter’s website recommends sizing up twice.
END, a contemporary menswear shop based in the UK, always has one of the best end-of-season sales. Since they’re located in Europe, their prices are typically 20% lower than what you’d pay for the same items in the US, thanks to VAT deductions. Which means their end-of-season promotions are even better than what they seem at face value. At the moment, they’re holding their spring/ summer sale, where you can find select items discounted by as much as 60%. Once you account for VAT discounts, however, the sale is actually closer to 68% off.
END’s online inventory is one of the few that rivals Mr. Porter’s (who, by the way, just dropped prices for the third time and are having a 70% off sale). Which means, your best bet is to browse through the sale selection by filtering for clothing categories and sizes. This way, you can stumble upon things you may not otherwise see. If you’re looking for highlights, here are some things I think are particularly worthwhile.
In the course of his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde claimed that some silver miners tried to play a prank on him when he visited the rough, rust belt town of Leadville, Colorado. According to him, about a dozen miners led him to the bottom of a mine shaft with the intention of getting him drunk and leaving him there for a scare. But in a twist, the Dublin wit and writer regaled them with stories about the Italian goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini and Renaissance metal working. The miners asked Wilde why he didn’t bring Cellini with him, to which he explained that Cellini has been dead for quite some time. Living in a town where every man carries a revolver and no one dies of natural causes, the miners enquired: “Who shot him?” Afterward, they took Wilde to a dancing saloon, where a piano player sat in the corner with a sign over him that read: “DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN.” It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.”
Wilde is one of the few Europeans to ever leave the United States with something positive to say about American style – well, sort of. ‘‘In all my journeys through the country, the only well-dressed men that I saw were the Western miners,” he lectured to an audience. In an issue of Harper’s Bazaar published the same year, an illustrator showed Wilde’s admiration for the miners’ uniform. “Their wide-brimmed hats, which shaded their faces from the sun and protected them from the rain, and the cloak, which is by far the most beautiful piece of drapery ever invented, may be dwelt on with admiration,” Wilde said. “They wore only what was comfortable and therefore beautiful.”
Compare this to when Albert Camus sailed into a New York Harbor in March 1946 to promote the English release of his novel The Stranger. During his three-month stay in Manhattan, Camus didn’t quite know what to make of the city’s “swarming lights” and "frantic streets,” but he was staggered by how the material abundance contrasted with the depravations of post-war France. He was less impressed, however, by American neckties. “You have to see it to believe it. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable,” he later told a journalist. Seventy years later, Noam Chomsky recounted this anecdote to Glenn Greenwald after the two were introduced to each other at the University of Arizona. Confused, Greenwald asked Chomsky if he was trying to say something about his decorative, purple satin tie. Chomsky said plainly: “Yes.”
In some Neapolitan travel guides, you’ll find warnings to “not go down small, dark alleyways, especially in the Spanish Quarters.” It’s not bad advice, although often overstated. The Spanish Quarters — known as Quartieri Spagnoli to Italians — is a low-income neighborhood that suffers from high unemployment and a strong influence of Camorra, one of Italy’s oldest crime syndicates. It’s also a city planner’s nightmare, not because of the crime or poverty, but the disarray. The cobblestone streets are tight and narrow, and they’re flanked by peach-colored buildings covered in grime and multiple layers of half-peeled, wheat-pasted fliers. Fresh laundry commonly hangs overhead from the network of clotheslines that crisscrosses between buildings, waving like raggedy banners over the swarms of people below. On warm afternoons, screaming children and roaring Vespas zip alongside each other. Buildings stretch upwards forever, and for some reason, you always have to climb up five flights of stairs to reach the first floor.
The mess that is the Spanish Quarters is part of a larger character that fills every Neapolitan district. It’s not uncommon to find residences next to businesses, sometimes homes located above storefronts or even the two mixed together into the same spaces. Some of the world’s best tailors are located here, as is Mario Talarico, one of the few remaining artisans for handmade umbrellas. And just a stone’s throw away is the affluent, waterfront district Chiaia, which has designer shops, seafood restaurants, and upscale bars. This is Naples: one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods is a short walk from a Prada boutique and Rubinaicci’s flagship, and yet everything coexists in harmony. It’s an equilibrium that has existed since forever. Even in the 1860s, Mark Twain wrote about Naples’ unmatched tempo in his travel book The Innocents Abroad:
The streets are wide enough for one wagon, and how they do swarm with people! It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every court, in every alley! Such masses, such throngs, such multitudes of hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity! We never saw the like of it, hardly even in New York. There are seldom any sidewalks, and when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a man without caroming him. So everybody walks in the street – and where the street is wide enough, carriages are forever dashing along. Why a thousand people are not run over and crippled every day is a mystery no man can solve.
It’s easy to get down on summer clothes. They don’t have the natural appeal of fall and winter wardrobes – there are no plush cashmere knits or prickly tweeds to draw you in, and there are few opportunities to layer. Over the years, however, I’ve come to appreciate how the changing of wardrobes helps mark the passing of time. Summer allows us to wear camp collar shirts, soft suede loafers, and airy materials, such as Tencel and linen. It’s also a good time to reintroduce ourselves to cheerier colors: warm peach, French blue, and sunflower yellow. If you’re looking for ideas on what to wear this season, here are ten things I’m particularly excited about.
Bold Striped Shirts
White shirts are an all-time classic. During the Middle Ages, being able to wear a fresh linen shirt every day suggested you had wealth and status. White shirts were considered underwear, the first layer against the skin, and were easily soiled during a time of limited hygiene practices. Blue shirts, on the other hand, came much later as part of the uniform of laborers, sailors, and even prisoners.
Like a flying horde of locusts sweeping across a wheat field, Mr. Porter’s end-of-season sales are always a feeding frenzy. After all, where else can you find discounted dress shoes sitting alongside rare Japanese labels and American workwear? Tonight, they started their summer sales event, where you can find select items discounted as much as 50% off. Before you dive in, however, there are some caveats.
First, discounts are still being rolled out, and not everything is up yet. You can expect to see the entire sale selection up by tomorrow morning, but it’s worth checking back often since the stock here moves quickly. Second, the best way to tackle their sale is by filtering for sizes – pants in size 32 or shoes in size 9. That way, you raise your chance of coming across a serendipitous find. Third, if you’re on the fence about something, I suggest buying it. You can always return things for free if they don’t work out.
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.
When UC Berkeley professor David Eisenbud visited the University of Tokyo some years ago, one of the Japanese professors told him they have better chalk than their American counterparts. “Oh go on, chalk is chalk,” Eisenbud said incredulously. As it turns out, chalk isn’t just chalk. Many of the brightest mathematicians on the planet believe that Hagoromo Fulltouch is mystical in some way. They say it can’t break. They say it glows on the board. They say it inspires and invigors, while also leaving a cleaner, smoother, and more elegant line. “The legend is that it’s impossible to write a false theorem with this chalk,” says Eisenbud, now a convert.
At first, Hagoromo Fulltouch was only available in Japan, which meant if you wanted a stick, you had to proxy it like streetwear. That was until an Amazon distributor started selling Fulltouch to American professors, which is how the chalk wound up in so many U.S. math departments. Five years ago, however, Hagoromo president Takayasu Watanabe announced the company would be halting production in February of 2015, and stop sales altogether the following month. American mathematicians went crazy. They bought, hoarded, and stockpiled as much of the stuff as they could. Eisenbud estimates he has a ten-year supply at home.
Soon after the company shuttered, a secondary market emerged. “I didn’t want to become a chalk dealer,” laughs Max Lieblich, a math professor at the University of Washington. “But I did like the idea that I could be the ‘first stick is free’ chalk dealer in my department.” Those who stockpiled the chalk sold sticks to their chalk-less colleagues, presumably at hiked up prices, much like rare and coveted Nikes. But the market came crashing down a year later when a South Korean company bought rights to the formula and started reproducing the “Rolls Royce of chalk” faithfully. Today, you buy Hagoromo Fulltouch in white and a variety of colors on Amazon.
A few years ago, inspired by a photo of Bruce Boyer and an old Mister Crew post, I bought my first hat. It was Lock & Company’s Rambler, a soft trilby that can be rolled up and subsequently stuffed into a pocket. The style is a little more modern and casual than traditional headwear, but upon receiving it, I wasn’t sure how it should be worn. Should it be tilted forward or back? To the side? Can I wear it without looking like a neckbeard? None of the online guides I found helped. No matter what I did, putting this foreign object on my head felt like I was wearing a neon-sign that invited ridicule.
Over the years, I’ve occasionally worn the hat out of necessity: when I’m running out the door and don’t have time to style my hair, or when the Teflon-treated, water-resistant wool promises to give protection from the rain. Eventually, I grew used to it. I can’t say I wear it as well as Bruce, but it no longer feels awkward or unusual. It is, simply, my hat.
Social psychologists call this the spotlight effect, which is our tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our actions or appearance. This peculiar anxiety is captured in the single most common question guys ask when they’re starting to build a better wardrobe: “how can I dress well without standing out?” Whether you’re in Rick Owens or Rubinacci, techwear or tailoring, there’s no way to wear anything exciting nowadays without, in some way, looking different from others. Among men who wear sport coats, no experience unites like having to hear someone ask: “why are you so dressed up?” (Tip: tell them you’re going to see your parole officer for a murder conviction. They’ll never ask you again).
