One of my favorite menswear shops, The Armoury, just started a YouTube channel. Jeremy Kirkland, who heads up their marketing, tells me it’ll be a place where they can answer popular questions (e.g. what men should look for in a suit), as well as showcase some of the brands and artisans they carry. “We want to make things easygoing and approachable,” he says. “Sometimes people assume there’s a bit of pretentiousness in tailored clothing. We want to break that stereotype.”

The channel currently has a video on how a suit should fit, as well as a nice run down of their Ring Jacket line (good for guys who might not be able to stop into their Hong Kong or NYC locations). Jeremy tells me they’ll also have special appearances in the future. Taka from Liverano & Liverano will be stopping by to explain the Florentine cut; Pino from Orazio Luciano will talk about Neapolitan tailoring. Other artisans will be coming by as well to answer questions about fit and quality, giving people a broader understanding of men’s clothes (even if they might be shopping elsewhere). 

You can check out the channel here. The next video should come out later this winter.

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I love finding new and interesting brands. And luckily with fashion, the pace is fast enough for there always to be something exciting around the corner. For the last two years, I’ve been doing these posts on new brands I’m watching – and with every post, the number of companies I want to talk about seems to grow. I’ve worked to keep these lists down to seven, but this one could have easily stretched to ten. 

Granted, not everyone here is actually new. Some are actually old, heritage companies that have been around for ages – they’re just new to me (and hopefully, you). The scope is also more on contemporary casualwear, not tailored clothing, but if your interests are as broad as mine, maybe you’ll find something to like here as well.  

(To see previous years’ posts, you can click here and here).

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Couple of really good Labor Day sales happening this weekend. The first is at Man of the World, where you can take 50% off select items with the checkout code TAKE50. Most of what’s included is home furnishing, but there are also sport coats, dress shirts, and vacation wear. The two stars of the show, however, might be the Edward Green shoes (which come down to about $600 after the discount) and GlobeTrotter luggage (just north of $1,100). Hard to ever find those things on sale – nevermind 50% off. 

The other is No Man Walks Alone, who’s having a 20% off sale on all tailored clothing (i.e. suits, sport coats, dress shirts, tailored trousers, and ties). I wrote a post earlier this year about how I think Sartoria Formosa is one of the best values right now in ready-to-wear. Made to bespoke standards and comes in a flattering cut (softly tailored with a little drape in the chest). With the $100 tailoring credit and 20% discount, sport coats start around $1,000, suits $1,500.

The G. Inglese shirts are also some of the best I’ve seen anywhere in terms of value. Not cheap, but they have great collars and an impressive amount of handwork. Rota trousers come with a slim leg line, but medium to high rise (a combination that’s hard to find nowadays in ready-to-wear). I also love Drake’s ties, but was really impressed with Tie Your Tie, Bigi, and Calabrese at the last No Man Walks Alone trunk show. 

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I like clothes in the summer that make you feel like you’re at home. Loosely-cut linen shirts that feel like pajamas, softly-tailored sport coats that disappear from your mind, and unlined loafers that wear like bedroom slippers. With the right clothes, every cafe and office can vaguely feel like you’re still bumming around your living room. 

I recently picked up a new pair of unlined pennies – Edward Green’s Harrow, which I’ve been pining over for years. On the surface, they’re just an unlined loafer with a pie-crust apron, much like you’d find on the company’s Dovers. The design, however, is actually by Wildsmith, a famed bespoke shoemaking firm that lasted for seven generations before shutting down. The company used to travel with some of London’s best tailoring companies, offering what they called their “three s’s”: shoes, shirts, and suits. 

The style was originally a bespoke country-house shoe made for King George VI, younger brother to the Duke of Windsor, Edward VIII. As the story goes, they were made slightly big so that he could wear them indoors with shooting hose. At some point, Wildsmith shut down the bespoke side of their operation and sold ready-made shoes produced by Edward Green (and, at times, Crockett & Jones). That’s how the Wildsmith loafer became the Edward Green Harrow. 

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There are a lot of guides these days on how to dress for your body type. Some people argue that shorter men do better in two-button jackets, as they have a longer lapel line (and thus give the illusion of greater height by virtue of extending those vertical lines). Others say that heavy men should avoid double-breasted jackets, as the extra bit of wraparound cloth can add visual weight. 

I’ve never bought too much into those arguments, partly because there are so many good counterexamples to every rule. Plus, most of those writers seem to rely more on rhetorical devices than actual evidence. 

There are two rule-of-thumbs I follow, however. First, shorter jackets make you look heavier than you are, which means they’re only ever good on stick-thin models whose shoulders are broader than their hips. Second, if you have a less-than-athletic figure, you may benefit from having a little extra room in the shoulders and chest. The second is known as drape; the first an extended shoulder. 

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It’s been tremendously fun putting together these custom cloth runs. Subscribers have mostly been from Western Europe, East Asia, and the United States, although I’ve been happy to see other parts of the world represented. Earlier this year, a reader from Lebanon called me to phone-in his order, and we chatted for a while about Lebanese and Neapolitan tailors. 

Last year, I wrapped up a tobacco brown Fresco project. Fresco being a porous weave, high-twist fabric that’s both breathable and wrinkle-resistant (making it good for both summer and travel). And two weeks ago, we just finished deliveries on a slubby silk/ linen I call “summer’s tweed” (partly inspired by this jacket on Taka from Liverano), as well as a rare, patterned Fresco in a blue-and-navy houndstooth. Both projects were about filling a hole in many men’s closets – warm weather suits and sport coats that have the kind of textures and patterns we love in the fall/ winter months, but struggle to find in tasteful combinations in spring/ summer. 

Granted, these runs are only useful for readers who get custom clothes made, but in today’s market, there are so many options – MTO, MTM, and bespoke, either from local or traveling tailors, as well as the occasional remote, online operation. Although good, custom tailoring is always going to be expensive, there are increasingly more affordable options these days. I may put together a list of some of those options in a future post. 

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I don’t know how they do it, but Drake’s seems to get better and better every season. They started as a small scarf company nearly forty years ago, before turning into the tie manufacturer we all know and love. Then in 2013, they bought Rayner & Sturges, the go-to shirt-making factory for brands such as Paul Smith and Ede & Ravenscroft. That factory still produces for other brands today, but the acquisition has also allowed Drake’s to develop their own line of made-in-UK shirts. 

This fall, Drake’s is inching ever-so-closer to becoming a full menswear brand. Along with their sport coats, tailored trousers, and knits – which they’ve carried for a while now – they’re adding raw, selvedge denim jeans and a larger selection of outerwear to their offerings. You can see the difference in this lookbook, which feels really well-rounded. There are tailored clothes for guys who want to look a little sharper during the work week, but also lots of off-duty pieces for the weekend. 

Michael Hill, the company’s Creative Director, tells me he has a lot of favorites in this collection, but thinks the sport coats are a stand-out. “I especially like the linen-cashmere-and-wool gun club,” he tells me. “It’s one of the easiest-to-wear tweeds we’ve done. People wouldn’t think that, with all the color and texture in the jacket, but it pairs so easily with other things.” 

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I found this photo on a friend’s Twitter feed last year. It’s from 1985 and shows the old Holliday & Brown shop in London. For those unfamiliar, Holliday & Brown was a legendary English tie-maker back in the day, although they also made shirts and dressing gowns. Here, one of their customers is being fitted for an ancient madder gown, with a sales associate showing what the sleeves will look like once they’re shortened.

I’ve been wanting an ancient madder gown ever since. Soft and chalky, I imagine wearing one would feel like you’re wrapped in a thin suede. Unfortunately, it seems they’re are no longer available today – at least in the kind of dusty, muted prints you see above. 

Some years ago, scientists found that two of the three dyes used to make madder caused cancer in rats. Which meant, when printers dyed their silks and dumped the solutions out to disposal plants, they risked getting carcinogens into water supplies. They never found a way to filter out those chemicals, so the dyes were banned and replaced with synthetics. Today, only the third dye (indigo) remains in its original form.  

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Summer is a good time for lighter-colored shoes, but they’re not always the easiest to wear. Outside of plain white sneakers – which are admittedly pretty useful, even if ubiquitous – colors that are lighter than mid-brown often stick out too much from your trousers. Most men want to wear things that draw the eye upwards, putting the focus on their shirt, tie, and jacket combination. Lighter-colored shoes, on the other hand, often draw the eye down. 

There are a lots of exceptions. Tan shoes can look great with a pale gray suit, if only because they’re darker than the trousers (the other combination, tan shoes with a navy suit, almost always looks terrible for the opposite reason). I also think they work well with low-contrast ensembles, such as these in this post, or when the shoes are balanced out with a lighter-colored jacket. 

There are also some shoes that are just iconic, such as white buckskins. Having started with students at Princeton in the 1950s, white bucks quickly spread throughout the Ivy League school system, becoming “the shoe” for the style-conscious. Usual combinations included tan chinos or grey flannels, with the dirtiness of the buckskin being a source of pride (much like a well-worn button-down collar). They’re less commonly seen today, but their association with traditional American style endures. 

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Charvet has something like a million shirtings in their workshop. Bolts of fine cottons and breezy linens, stacked shoulder-high from wall-to-wall. It’s the kind of inventory you could get lost in – figuratively and literally – but if you’re willing to venture through it, you’ll come out with the perfect shade of blue. 

I’ve always wanted to commission a Charvet shirt for just that reason, but truthfully, my dress shirt needs are pretty easily satisfied. Like most men, I find blue is blue, white is white. You can mix-in some stripes, and turn to a variety of different weaves, but at the end of the day, a shirt is just a background for your tie. 

Lately, however, I’ve been venturing into slightly bolder, vintage-inspired designs (including Alohas, which I’ll write about another time). For that kind of shirt, you’d have to go to some other place than Charvet – they mostly specialize in the kind of things you’d wear to the office. A better first stop, I think, is Bryceland’s in Japan. 

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