For many men of my generation, who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, our first introduction to classic style was at a Ralph Lauren store. That’s where we fell in love with things such as sporting tweeds, chambray work shirts, and the chalky hand of ancient madder. Ralph Lauren didn’t invent these things, of course, but they presented them in a way that felt sexy. Brooks Brothers has been many things, but it has never been sexy. 

In some ways, Drake’s is doing that for a younger generation, albeit at a much smaller scale. As the brand has expanded beyond just accessories, taking on tailoring and sportswear, it’s been able to present a fuller vision of how classic style can be worn today. These lookbooks have become incredibly popular in recent years, often getting posted on sites such as Reddit’s Male Fashion Advice within minutes of their release. And much like how Ralph Lauren helped translate classic style for me, I think Drake’s is putting a new spin on the language. Instead of showing pinstripe suits in luxuriously paneled offices, with decor reminiscent of an expensive lawyer’s sanctum, they feature softer takes on classic menswear in more relatable environs. Tweeds and duffle coats are shown being worn at university campuses, seersucker suits in Southern diners, and brushed Shetlands on moss-covered, rocky shores. 

This season, the team went to Lanzarote, one of the seven main Canary Islands located just off the coast of Morocco. It’s a short four-hour plane ride from London, making it a popular fly-and-flop destination for vacationing Brits (many retreat there for some much-needed winter warmth). But for Drake’s, the subtropical archipelago was also an excellent solution to a real problem. How do you shoot a spring/ summer lookbook in the middle of January, when it’s snowing in London? To show their collection in a warmer clime, they headed to the one place known as the “Island of Eternal Spring.” 

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If you were on social media in 2016, you probably remember the Great Cargo Pocket War. It all started with an innocent article in The Wall Street Journal about how bulky cargo shorts were driving a wedge between people in their relationships. One of the men in the story said that, in the course of his 11-year marriage, he’s noticed as many as fifteen pairs of cargo shorts go missing. On the occasions he’s asked his wife about them, she admits to throwing them out or deflects to another subject. He’s now down to just one pair, which he guards closely (they’re hidden in a small nook somewhere). “I don’t let her get her hands on them,” he said. “I wish I had caught on sooner.”

Tom Lommel, an actor in Los Angeles, said he loves cargo shorts because they’re like wearing “socially acceptable sweatpants.” He reserves them for when his wife is away from home, however, because wearing them feels like he’s breaking a marriage vow. “I wish that were the truth,” his wife disputes. “If he was only wearing them when I could not look at him, that would be perfect.”

The article sparked a fierce internet debate. Fans of the style say cargo shorts are hard wearing, easier to move in, and practical in terms of storage space. Detractors say no one human being needs that many pockets. Cargo shorts and their related pants have become the symbol of aging frat-bros, uncool dads, and the sort of people who carry vape pens, tactical knives, and Soundgarden CDs on their body. Cargo pocket defender and International Relations professor Dan Drezner went a step further when he wrote in The Washington Post: “Cargo shorts are great and anyone who opposes them should just acknowledge their misandry and be done with it. […] Any article of clothing that helped defeat Hitler is an article of clothing that should never go out of style.”

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For the truly fashion-obsessed, the shuttering of Gallagher’s Paper Collectibles ten years ago marked the end-of-an-era. The dingy, subterranean shop in the East Village was one of New York City’s greatest institutions. Inside was a veritable treasure trove of vintage fashion magazines, books, and photo prints. Stacked in corners and along shelves, you could find Vogue in all its editions, dusty issues of Harper’s Bazaar, 100-year-old copies of Town & Country, the now-defunct Mademoiselle, and more arcane titles, some of which were published in the 1860s. 

If you think this is just a local hangout for art students and the occupationally hip, you’d be wrong. In between preparing for their seasonal collections, award-winning designers used to come here to rifle through yellowed pages and plunder archives. Michael Gallagher, the store’s proprietor, once told The New York Times: “We get them all, Hedi Slimane, Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs big time, John Varvatos, Narciso Rodriguez, the Calvin assistants, the Gucci assistants, Dolce & Gabbana, Anna Sui – you name it. They all come here for inspiration. At least that’s what we call it.”

It’s no secret that designers copy. Menswear is full of work, sport, and military references, some of which have carried through into a professional dress. Penny and tassel loafers entered the canon because they were so thoroughly imitated. In the designer world, Tom Ford has been known to lift from Halston; Alexander McQueen stole from Vivienne Westwood. Helmut Lang once moved his operation from NYC to Paris to thwart copycats, but he himself replicated a disco bag from the indie design collective Three As Four. Diet Prada tries to publicly shame designers for copying, but with notable exceptions, they have little effect. Everyone knows how fashion works. When Oprah asked Ralph Lauren in 2011 how he’s been able to keep designing for so many years, he answered: “You copy. Forty-five years of copying; that’s why I’m here.”

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Selkirk is a small Scottish town perched on a hillside overlooking the Ettrick Water, a tributary of the fast-flowing River Tweed, which is where some say Scotland’s most famous fabric got its name. For generations, the people here were celebrated for their shoemaking skills, but like other Border towns, Selkirk was eventually swept into the woolens trade. People have been weaving fabric in the Scottish Borders since at least the Middle Ages, but the trade for much of this time was small, rural-based, and organized through a scattered cottage industry. In the old days, Scottish tweeds were woven at home from local and native wools, often Cheviots that were spun into woolen yarns. Whatever was made was only worn by the local people. 

This all changed sometime around the turn of the 18th century. With the signing of the Treaty of Union, Scotland and England became new state of Great Britain. The Industrial Revolution was just starting to emerge and Hawick received its first four knitting frames. Certain towns – Hawick, Galashiels, and Selkirk, included – were conveniently located along the main roads connecting Edinburgh and Carlisle. This gave them access to London and other major cities, helping them distribute finished woolen goods and, when steam power replaced water, bring in fuel. More importantly, the Union gave Scotland better trade opportunities with Britain’s colonies around the world. Soon, people as far flung as India and the Americas were wearing Scottish tweeds and tartans. 

What the first wave of globalization gave, the second took away. Like other Border towns, Selkirk is quieter now. The looms stopped chattering a long time ago and today the town is better known for its bannocks, a type of dry fruitcake. During the heyday of Scottish manufacturing, the knitwear trade employed nearly 10,000 people – more if you counted wovens. Hawick had sixteen mills and Pringle alone produced more than 66,000 garments per week. These days, Hawick has half that number and Pringle has long offshored their production. Last week, one of Scotland’s three remaining Harris Tweed mills, Carloway, suddenly stopped production and is facing possible closure. Five years ago, Caerlee Mills, makers of the legendary Ballantyne, shut off their machines after 225 years operation (the building was soon after demolished).  

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For much of the 20th century, men’s media was about general interest publications giving readers the information they needed for “right living.” They told men how to dress for the office, grill meat on weekends, and mix delicious cocktails for after-dinner parties. As Cathy Horyn once wrote, “almost no one cares about this sort of thing anymore.” Online, audiences can easily find communities that share their specific interests and advertisers can target people more closely than ever before. It’s no longer enough for a publication to just say it’s “for men.”

This is Will Welch’s challenge at GQ. Welch was recently promoted to Editor-in-Chief at the magazine, replacing Jim Nelson, and while GQ isn’t losing money, it’s lost some cultural relevancy. To get readers to return, Welch promises to make GQ to be about more than just telling men how to match pocket squares with ties. This month’s music-themed issue, for example, covers Frank Ocean and dives into John Mayer’s Visvim-heavy wardrobe. And when Welch headed Conde Nast’s smaller, but edgier, GQ Style title, he featured the romantically styled designer Haider Ackermann, cult-favorite streetwear label Noah, and Gauthier Borsarello’s private Paris showroom, which is full of vintage inspiration. With Welch now at the top of GQ’s masthead, we can expect something similar between the main magazine’s covers. 

“Instead of dictating what’s good and what’s bad from some sort of imaginary mountaintop, if we can be meaningfully participating in a community of people – helping to elevate and tell the stories of the people who we think are doing really exciting things – to me that is a higher calling than, ‘don’t wear those pants, wear these pants,’” Welch told Business of Fashion. “If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up not being much of anything to anyone. So we’re making GQ less a big tent and more the only place to go when you want a rich, intelligent, and transportive plunge into all the stylishness the world has to offer.”

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Danish explorer Peter Freuchen stood like an arctic bear when he was photographed alongside his wife in 1947. The image, shown above, made its way around the internet some years ago because of Freuchen’s magnificent outfit. Freuchen, already a giant of a man, was wearing a Sasquatchian sized fur coat – single-breasted, nearly ankle-length, with a collar so tall that it almost cleared his bald head. His wife, who was more typically dressed for the occasion, did not look amused. 

Freuchen was a real-life Most Interesting Man in the World. He was a writer, an arctic explorer, and a resolute anti-fascist. During the Second World War, he fought Nazis as part of the Danish Resistance and once gave Triumph of the Will director Leni Riefenstahl the finger at a film premier. But it wasn’t the Nazis who almost killed him – it was snow. Throughout his life, Freuchen took many 1000-mile dogsled journeys across Greenland’s northernmost tundra. During one of those arctic adventures, however, he found himself caught in a particularly bad blizzard. 

Hoping to wait out the storm in a snowbank, he buried himself beneath the ground’s surface, only to find that the snow above him was swiftly swirling around and turning into a thick layer of ice. Before long, Freuchen was encased in what was a frozen tomb. Quickly losing strength, he struggled for hours trying to claw his way out using nothing but his bare hands and some frozen bearskin. Freuchen had all but given up when he got an idea, which he details in his autobiography Vagrant Viking. 

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In an interview with The Telegraph, Patrick Grant of Norton & Sons and E. Tautz once described fashion as being an “ever-moving feast.” I often find that the quick-paced nature of fashion – where things are constantly being created and destroyed – makes the field endlessly interesting. There’s always something new, something different, something to talk about. And while my taste in tailoring leans classic, I like casualwear that’s a bit more progressive and experimental.

For the past few years, I’ve been doing these annual posts where I roundup new brands. To be sure, not all of them are actually new – many have been around for years – but they’re new to me. Here are seven labels I recently discovered. And while not all of them sell things I’d personally wear, I find them inspiring in some way. For more of the same, you can see previous years’ posts here, here, here, and here.

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The first leather jacket I ever bought was an Enrico Mandelli bomber. It’s made from a soft cotton lining and even softer lambskin, with just enough fullness to stay true to the garment’s origins, but is also slim enough to go with tailored trousers. Like many men trying on a leather jacket for the first time, I hemmed and hawed, tugged at my fronts and cocked my head, wondering if I was really a “leather jacket kinda guy.” Well, since then, I’ve acquired about fifteen more pieces, ranging in styles from a Schott Perfecto to the very contemporary Margiela five-zip. Nothing in casualwear can be rightly called a wardrobe essential, but a leather jacket comes pretty darn close. 

Among leather jacket makers, few are as unique as Atelier Savas. The company’s founder, Savannah Yarborough, studied menswear at London’s Central Saint Martins, and then returned home in 2010 to work as the senior designer for Billy Reid (you may have heard of the label). In 2011, she designed one of the brand’s best-selling jackets, a cropped double rider made from of a crinkly tobacco leather. Then, a few years ago, she struck out on her own and started Atelier Savas, a bespoke tailoring company for unconventional leather outerwear. Her company will one day be seen as a pioneer in bespoke tailoring trade or it’ll go down in flames because it’s sitting somewhere out in no man’s land. 

To understand Atelier Savas, you have go to back to the beginnings of the American garment industry. We take ready-made clothing for granted today, but in the long history of men’s dress, it’s a relatively new invention. Up until about the American Civil War, most men had their clothes made for them, either by a tailor, if they could afford one, or by wives and mothers working from home. The only ready-made clothing at this time was workwear, which was often crudely constructed for sailors, miners, and slaves. 

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Kiya Babzani, co-owner of the specialty denim empire Self Edge, is mostly hush about who patrons his stores, but he shared as story once of the most unlikely of customers. One day he received an order for a few things from Flat Head and Iron Heart. Having run the credit card a few times and getting the charge declined, he became suspicious of fraud. So he looked at the customer’s delivery information – Owenscorp in Paris – and reached out. “Oh it’s for Rick,” the buyer explained. “Sorry if the credit card didn’t go through. He wants these things sent to his studio." 

Rick, of course, refers to Rick Owens, who is reverently known to his fans as the “Lord of Darkness.” His clothes are masterpieces in terms of pattern making, far surpassing anything you’d find on Savile Row, but they’re cut for the clinically underweight. The shoulders are narrow, sleeves tiny, and chests tight. If you can somehow muscle your way into his clothes, however, they become beautiful, black coiling sculptures. Owens drapes and twists materials such as beaten lambskins and silky cottons to create garments that look like they’re decaying monastic robes in some space-age Brutalist future. 

What brought Rick Owens to Self Edge? The thing that unites almost every American clothing experience: the hunt for the perfect flannel shirt. Owens found his in the form of a red buffalo check flannel from Iron Heart, but then lost it a year later. His assistant emailed Kiya again, asking if he had another (“it’s his favorite,” she pleaded). Kiya didn’t, but found the same model in blue. "No worries, just mail it. We’ll dye it,” she replied. Of course, that’s impossible. Once a check has been made, you can’t change it into a different color because the yarns have already been woven. But who’s going to question Rick Owens’ garment making techniques – or deny him of his favorite flannel?

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No Man Walks Alone is a sponsor on this site, but they’re also one of my favorite online retailers. The shop’s founder, Greg – who can be clearly seen above walking alone – simply has great taste. He knows his way around a coat-and-tie rig, but also has a good eye for casualwear. For guys who love Italian tailoring and want to build a weekend wardrobe, No Man Walks Alone is a great one-stop shop. 

This morning, they started their end-of-season sale, where you can find select items marked down by as much as 40%. Some of my favorite brands here include Sartoria Formosa, which is wonderful for high-end Neapolitan tailoring, and Kaptain Sunshine, which offers slightly quirky and offbeat takes on Americana and workwear (they’re like LL Bean with a sense of humor and a lot more style). Few stores capture my personal interest in clothing as well as NMWA, especially in the way they mix tailoring with workwear and contemporary styles. Here are ten favorites right now from their sale.

 

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