No Man Walks Alone is an advertiser on this site, but also one of my favorite stores. In the last ten years, the average menswear shopper has become a lot more sophisticated – they know just as much about Neapolitan tailoring as they do about directional casualwear. No Man Walks Alone serves that kind of customer. They have classic suits and sport coats, but also interesting clothes for the weekend. It’s one of the few shops where a guy can pick up a wardrobe for almost any part of his life.
This weekend marks their fifth year of doing business, and to celebrate, they’re holding a sale. For the next five days, you can take 20% off any order with the checkout code 5YEAR. The code even works on already-discounted sale items. Here are ten things I think are particularly worth a look:
Everyone in menswear seems to believe his part of the world is in decline. Ivy Style’s Christian Chensvold, for example, yearns for a preppier past, when Brooks Brothers still made proper button-downs. A Continuous Lean’s Michael Williams romanticizes a time when America still had manufacturing. The Art of Manliness’ Brett McKay is trying to revive traditional masculinity. And StyleZeigeist’s Eugene Rabkin can’t seem to find one good thing about designer fashion. For him, clothes are hurtling towards greater superficiality, hype, and crass commercialism. In a Business of Fashion op-ed about how “fashion has become unmoored and lost its original meaning,” Rabkin is so down and depressed, he can’t even get worked up about his own indictment. He dispiritingly ends his essay with: “In other words, whatever.”
Samuel Huntington calls such writers “declinists” for how they assert things are getting worse. He was talking about weightier matters than men’s trousers, but the idea of an earlier, better time runs deep in the history of Western intellectual thought. In his book The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman outlines the long shadow of Western pessimism. “While intellectuals have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for more than 150 years, its influence has grown faster during that period than at any time in history,” he notes.
Herman starts his book with 19th century thinker Arthur de Gobineau, who resigned himself to the idea that the Aryan race would one day be tragically “contaminated” through its contact with the Latins, Gauls and other “lower orders.” He then moves on to declinists of every stripe, “from philosopher-pessimists such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, cultural pessimists such as Henry Adams and Brooks Adams, and historian-pessimists such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.”
For all the guides on how to dress for your complexion, you only have to look at how black has been redeemed in the last ten years to see how color in fashion is often more about social meaning than simple color theory. During the late-aughts, menswear writers confidently declared that nobody should ever wear the color. Black suits are for morticians and the help. Black dress shirts are déclassé. Black trousers go with nothing. Black sport coats look like orphaned suit jackets. And black leathers don’t acquire the patina that makes a pair of well-polished, well-worn brown leather shoes so handsome. In fact, giving up square-toed black shoes in favor of more anatomically correct brown ones became something of a rite of passage for well-dressed men. And in binning those shoes, many have learned to avoid black entirely.
To be sure, some of those rules are sensible. Suits are typically easier to wear in navy or gray, rather than black, and black dress shirts are questionable at best. But as men have become more comfortable with fashion, black has seen a resurgence. It’s a color that connotes mystery, sophistication, power, elegance, and even sex appeal. It’s understated and urbane, dignified and dangerous. And for those reasons, black persists in menswear.
In a New York Times article published earlier this year, Jonathan Wolfe asked Valerie Steele, the director at The Museum at the FIT and author of The Black Dress, why New York City’s unofficial uniform is about wearing black from head to toe. “It’s only some New Yorkers who wear black, but it’s the kind of people popularly identified with this city – fashion people, artists, and hipsters,” Steele answered. “New Yorkers start to become associated with wearing black in the late 1970s and early ’80s. That’s when you get a sort of perfect storm of different style tribes wearing the color.”
When Hubert de Givenchy passed away earlier this year, many noted that his relationship with Audrey Hepburn helped set up today’s fashion-Hollywood complex – a system where designers dress famous faces so they can raise their brand’s profile and move units. Except, the relationship is so thoroughly deformed today, few would recognize the connection. Givenchy and Hepburn had an honest relationship and found in each other kindred spirits. They worked together to craft mutually supportive identities. Givenchy was Hepburn’s courtier; Hepburn was his muse. Today, however, clothiers and celebs work on a pay-for-play basis. Celebrities will profess their undying love for a brand one season, they say they like something entirely different the next.
One of the few exceptions is Daniel Day-Lewis, who by all accounts has a genuine interest in style. He’s a second-generation Anderson & Sheppard customer and once studied shoemaking under the late Stefano Bemer. In preparing for his role in Phantom Thread, where he played the fastidious courtier Reynolds Woodcock, Day-Lewis learned how to cut, drape, and sew – at one point even recreating a Balenciaga dress all by himself (I admit to being skeptical, but that’s what was reported). George Glasgow Senior, of renowned British shoemaking institution G.J. Cleverley, tells me that when the actor is in London, he often stops by the shop to talk about shoes. “He has a keen eye and a very strong interest in clothes,” he says.
So it was great to see Day-Lewis wearing the fisherman sweater pictured above, knowing it came from his wardrobe and that he had chosen it sincerely. The photo is from a W Magazine cover story published earlier this year. In it, he sports a striped Breton shirt, some heavy jewelry, and a fantastically rugged, moss-stitched sweater fashioned after something he inherited from his father. And true to form, instead of the sweater being supplied by a big name fashion house – who would have gladly paid for such exposure – it was from a small, unknown knitting cooperative located in British coastal town. My friend Pete wrote about it at Put This On: “The sweater caused a stir in knitting circles, and the knitters got to the bottom of it. His sweater, apparently, comes from a maker called Flamborough Marine, an outfit that still makes the sweaters entirely by hand.”
If you were to shop for a cashmere sweater today, you’d be buried in options. Over at Mr. Porter, you can find nearly 250 models, ranging from chalky pastel turtlenecks to NBA intarsias selling for about $1,750. More affordably, J. Crew’s “Everyday Cashmere” collection retails for just under $100, and it comes in Kelly-Moore-sounding colors, such as “rustic amber” (which is orange) and “safari fatigue” (which is green). You can even find cashmere pullovers nowadays at Costco. They’re located somewhere between the aisles for bulk Cheerios and 98″ plasma screen TVs.
The newest name in cashmere is Naadam, a young upstart promising to deliver luxury sweaters for less than what most stores pay wholesale. They have a over a dozen videos on YouTube, which charmingly pitch their story as two young guys from New York City who made it out to the hinterlands of Mongolia. There, they get stranded somewhere outside of the nation’s capital, ride old motorcycles, and drink goat-milk vodka with nomads. A year later, they return to the Gobi desert with $2.5 million dollars in hand and the bold idea to buy cashmere direct from herders, so they can cut out the middlemen and start a direct-to-consumer knitwear brand. This, supposedly, is how they’re able to offer cashmere sweaters for $75. In every one of their sleek, expertly produced videos, a little baby goat bleats (that’s always the best part).
Until recently, the cashmere trade remained mostly unchanged for the last five hundred years. From the mountains up Tibet and away across the back of the Himalayas to Bokhara, cashmere traveled much like the way it did before Marco Polo explored the Great Silk Roads. It came down from the mountains in countless little loads on the backs of yaks and horses – sometimes buoyed down interminable waterways on rafts and boats – before reaching a major hub, where it’s put on modern transport and swiftly whisked away to another country. If you’re wondering why cashmere should have to travel so far across Asia, just remember the stories of the still unconquered Everest. Across the vast barrier of the Himalayas, there are few routes.
Even if they’re both into style, the online communities for men’s clothing and fine horology exist on different islands. Guys who are into suits and Japanese workwear are often not that up on watches. And guys who are into watches are not always interested in clothes. These communities speak different languages, and have different standards for what makes something good.
If you’re on this side of the divide – the one that’s more interested in menswear than mechanical movements – finding the right watch can be a challenge. For one, prices are dizzying. While you can get partially canvassed suits nowadays for $500, and full-grain leather shoes for half that amount, the ticket price for an entry-level, quality watch usually starts in the low four-figures – collector’s pieces are five-figures. That can make experimentation prohibitively expensive. Secondly, if you’re concerned about how to find a watch that actually complements the rest of your wardrobe, you have to learn a new visual language. Which watches go with suits, which go with workwear, and which go with contemporary menswear?
I recently chatted with Greg Lellouche, co-founder of No Man Walks Alone (a sponsor on this site, although this isn’t a sponsored post) about how to find the right watch for any given wardrobe. Greg has been an avid watch collector since the late 1990s, when he bought his first one, the Sinn 142 ST you see him wearing above. Since then, he’s collected everything from vintage Rolexes to Speedmasters to Reversos. When he worked on Wall Street, Greg’s coworkers used to turn to him for advice when they were looking to buy a new wristwatch with their annual bonus.
Much of men’s style takes after British tailoring, when dress norms were set during a different time period and climate. This is why, when we imagine a fall wardrobe, we think of the kind of heavy tweeds and wool overcoats that used to be seen in periodicals such as Apparel Arts. And yet, today, the cold season has been noticeably pushed back – late September still feels like summer and we’re months away from heavy outerwear weather. The biggest challenge for dressing this time of year is managing the wide temperature swings that can bring warm afternoons into chilly nights. Back when he was still writing about men’s style, Will Boehlke used to call this “shoulder season.”
It’s easy to dress well for early autumn if you rely on suits and sport coats. Instead of lightweight Frescos and linens, you want jackets in ribbed corduroys, mid-weight tweeds (nothing too heavy), and worsted wools. Worsted is just another way of saying the wool fibers were combed before they were spun into yarn, which makes the resulting fabric a little smoother and clearer finished (as opposed to woolens, which are left uncombed and are consequently spongier).
There’s also a class of fabrics colloquially referred to as faux or citified tweeds. These are smooth, tightly woven worsteds made in rustic patterns reminiscent of traditional checks. They carry the distinctive colors and patterns of Scottish estates, as well as the tonal range best associated with the British countryside – bark, moss, and heather. They wear warmer than true summer fabrics, but don’t trap as much heat as real tweeds. Which is to say that they fit exactly in the middle. A couple of faux tweeds, along with a heavier navy sport coat in hopsack, serge, or this Sportex, and you’d have your early-fall tailored wardrobe covered.
If prep ever makes a comeback, it’ll be because of lookbooks like Drake’s. For this coming fall/ winter season, they shot their collection of brushed Shetlands and tweedy outerwear against the collegiate Gothic architecture of Oxford University. The combination makes the photos look as though they were lifted straight out of Take Ivy. One of Drake’s employees, an Oxford alum who helped put this project together, led the team through his favorite parts of the campus and his old, familiar watering holes.
Drake’s Creative Director, Michael Hill, doesn’t want you to think this is about Ivy Style, however. “We’ve always been inspired by Ivy clothing, but this isn’t about recreating a look,” he says. “It’s just that we’re close to Oxford and it’s a beautiful setting. Ivy is a style that inspires us greatly – we look back at provenance and history a lot. But this is also very much about doing something right for today, in our own way, and presenting our clothes in a manner that we feel was fun and playful.”
Playful is a good way to describe some of the new items this season. There’s a pocket square decorated with a spinning collage of space-floating astronauts (if you buy a truck-ton of those squares, I imagine they could make for cool wallpaper inside a nursery). I also like the single-stick London Undercover umbrellas that feature an archival print on the underside of the canopy, as well as the brightly colored, Kelim scarves (I bought the blue one). For the bold and fearless, there are block striped Shetlands coming soon. Those look as though Drake’s mashed together all the Shetland yarns they’ve run separately in the past and turned them into a single sweater. David Hockney, a man known for his eccentric embrace of color, would be proud.
A couple of years ago, former Eidos designer Antonio Ciongoli and Stoffa founder Agyesh Madan headed to India to work on a collaboration. They developed two hand-dyed indigo fabrics – one shirting weight, the other trouser weight – and came up with a hand-block pattern for some prints. Unfortunately, the collaboration never came to fruition. Eidos’ parent company, Isaia, wasn’t sure how the market would react to unstable dyes (in contrast to synthetic dyes, natural dyes fade and run easily). Like Brooks Brothers’ customers in 1959, who angrily stormed back into the stores and complained about how their madras shirts were bleeding in the wash, they worried that people would mistake the character of natural dyes as defects.
The work wasn’t all lost, however. Madan eventually used part of that trip for a Drake’s collaboration, and Ciongoli used it as inspiration for a new line. Since stepping down as Creative Director at Eidos – which is now run by Simon Spurr – Ciongoli has started 18 East, a new menswear apparel brand under Roller Rabbit. The line is debuting tonight at New York City’s 180 the Store.
18 East isn’t necessarily a travel line, but it’s about traveling. The number 18 refers to how R is the 18th letter of the alphabet (a nod to their parent company, Roller Rabbit), and East is an allusion to Eastern manufacturing. “Everything we make is with small, artisanal suppliers,” Ciongoli explains. “When people talk about handwork, they’re often talking about how someone is operating a machine by hand. But handwork here means real handwork – even the embroideries are done purely by hand.”
Hidden in the history of the tassel loafer is the story of why men’s dress has become increasingly casual with each passing generation. In the post-war period of the late-1940s, right when tweed jackets and Shetland sweaters dominated prep schools and Ivy League campuses, debonair actor Paul Lukas came back from Europe with a pair of oxfords. Their laces had little fringed tassels at the end, which Lukas thought made them look jauntier. So he took them to a couple of custom shoemakers to see if they could make something similar, and they in turn took the job to Alden. The company’s president at the time, Arthur Tarlow, came up with tassel loafers. That makes Alden’s model the original, and Paul Lukas the first man to wear this style.
Alden’s tassel loafers were an instant success, but they didn’t exist in a vacuum. If you flip through any men’s clothing catalog from this period, you’ll see how much the idea of comfort had already supplanted Edwardian norms of propriety. Instead of high-button dress boots and gaiters, American clothiers were selling low-cut shoes such as white buckskins, brown oxfords, and canvas tennis shoes with rubber soles. In his 1982 Town & Country essay on loafers, which was later collected in his 1985 book Elegance, Bruce Boyer wrote: “To see these newer low-cut shoes side-by-side in the [1915] Brooks catalogue with the then more traditional higher-cut shoes is to realize immediately that back in 1915 the tide was unquestionably turning – had already turned in reality – and that men were allowing themselves more comfort in their dress. Heavy suits and boots, stiff collars, and high hats were all on the way out. Lightweight tweeds and flannels, button-down shirts and soft golf caps, Shetland sweaters and white bucks, had arrived.” The only thing missing from those 1915 catalogs were loafers, which were “the logical extension of comfortable and casual dress that marks the current century.”
Tassel loafers were the norm by the 1960s, worn to business offices and government buildings alike, and favored by college graduates who wanted something dressier than their school-day pennies. But the tide turned again in the 1990s, when the style became a synecdoche for the country-club set and dishonest lawyers. In an all-too-often-cited New York Times article, Neil Lewis once reported that the term “tasseled loafer” was not just a way to describe a simple slip-on anymore, it was a political epithet:
