Trousers are pretty straightforward, at least when compared to jackets. Except for what goes into the waistband, there’s no real internal construction to speak of – just pocket bags and lining, which are hidden underneath the garment’s shell. They’re also a lot easier to fit, which makes them nice for custom tailoring. Once your tailor has your pattern down – one for flat front pants, and another for pleats – you can order trousers straight-to-finish. 

I recently received my first order from Salvatore Ambrosi, the famous (and at times infamous) tailor from the Spanish Quarters of Naples. Salvatore, for those unfamiliar, had a meteoric rise eight years ago when he was first introduced to the online community of bespoke tailoring enthusiasts. People were crazy for his stuff, but after a few good years, Salvatore couldn’t keep up with the increasing number of orders. Deliveries were delayed and emails went unanswered. As far as I know, everyone eventually got their trousers or money back, but people are still rightly sour about the experience. The last time I wrote about Salvatore, a well-respected menswear writer emailed me to say I was breaking iGent omertà. He was probably half joking, but also … probably half not. 

Since that debacle five years ago, Salvatore has slowly rebuilt his business. He’s developed a healthy customer base in East Asia, partnered with boutiques to handle the logistics of his orders, and expanded his workshop. Instead of just the small workroom that he and his father used to occupy – and Michael Alden once filmed – his family’s operation now takes up two floors in the same building. 

Things seem to be flowing pretty smoothly nowadays. I received my pants just a short month after my fitting, and I’m happy to say: they live up to their hype. As simple as trousers can be, Salvatore’s are exceptionally good. The pants fit perfectly clean through the legs and seat, and perhaps most importantly, they’re styled quite well. Unlike my English or other Neapolitan trousers, these are slimmer through the thighs, which allows the legs to be nicely pegged without making the hips look too wide. The rise comes to about my naval, but the pants don’t look frumpy because of the slim leg line and pleats. The pleats are subtle, but they help break up the swath of fabric that would otherwise stretch across the lap. 

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Phillip Carr, the director of Saint Crispin’s, is holding trunk shows at The Wingtip in San Francisco this week. I have a pair of chukkas already on order with him, but have been dreaming about my next commission. So far, the plan is to get a pair of Norwegian split toes (model 633) made from the some of the company’s famous crust calf.

Many shoe companies would have you believe that their shoes are handmade, but Saint Crispin’s are the real deal. Their uppers are hand lasted, bottoms hand beveled, and soles hand attached. Instead of using Goodyear welting or Blake stitching (which are machine-executed operations), Saint Crispin’s are hand welted with a pegged waist. By eliminating the stitching, they can get much more shaping into their waists and arches.

It’s that shaping that accounts for so much of Saint Crispin’s appeal. Check out these studded Dainite soles below, for example. Instead of the chunky versions you’ve seen from almost every other maker, Saint Crispin’s carefully bevels theirs to match the narrow waist of their shoes. This is done by first shaping the sole with a chisel, and then fine-tuning it with a rasp. 

As it goes with most things, these are best seen in person. You can check out Saint Crispin’s schedule of trunk shows on their website. They’re at The Wingtip in San Francisco until the end of Wednesday, March 18th, after which they’ll be leaving for East Asia. In North America, you can also find them at Leffot, The Armoury, LeatherSoul, and LeatherFoot. 

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Have you read “The Secret Vice?” It’s a wonderful article by the journalist dandy Tom Wolfe. Published in 1966 in the New York Herald Tribune, it’s about how men in the United States are hooked on the allure on custom tailoring.

“Practically all the most powerful men in New York,” Wolfe wrote, “especially on Wall Street, the people in investment houses, banks and law firms, the politicians, [and] especially Brooklyn Democrats, for some reason […] are fanatical about the marginal differences that go into custom tailoring. They are almost like a secret club insignia for them. And yet it is a taboo subject. […] At Yale and Harvard, boys think nothing of going over and picking up a copy of Leer, Poke, Feel, Prod, Tickle, Hot Whips, Modern Mammaries, and other such magazines, and reading them right out in the open. Sex is not taboo. But when the catalogue comes from Brooks Brothers or J. Press, that’s something they whip out only in private.”

Today, men with The Secret Vice find community online – where they can talk about tailors and clothes without shame. When possible, however, the world of bespoke tailoring is best explored through more traditional social networks. It’s always better to meet with another tailoring enthusiast in person, not only to see what his suits look like in real life, but also to get his thoughts. For a variety of reasons, clients are often eager to give praise, but reluctant to share criticism. To know how someone really feels about their tailor, you have to talk with him behind closed doors.

When I met with George from BRIO last week, he was wearing a blue sport coat and grey overcoat from Sartoria Corcos, a bespoke tailoring shop based in Florence, Italy. George has been a client of many tailors over the years (he introduced many enthusiasts, including me, to Liverano, for example), but tells me that Sartoria Corcos is probably the one he’ll stick with for life.

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For the past five years, if not longer, luxury goods magazines have been publishing the same story about China every week. The market there is booming, thanks to China’s economic growth, but consumers are said to be “unsophisticated.” Most buy luxury goods as status symbols, rather than for the quality they offer. As a person who’s half-Chinese, it’s hard to not get defensive over these characterizations, but it’s also hard to pretend they aren’t true.

There are some exceptions, however. George Wang – better known to some as maomao on StyleForum and Beijing1980 on Tumblr – recently opened a menswear boutique in Beijing. Named BRIO, which is Italian for spirit or verve, it offers the kind of classic, softly tailored Italian style that George has always championed. George was in San Francisco last week, so we met at La Farina for lunch and chatted about his new store.

BRIO is an impressive two stories. The first floor, which is street level, holds all of the shop’s menswear offerings. The second floor is downstairs, where you can find a lounge as well as a barbershop (BRIO has an in-house barber who can give a shave and a cut). The idea is make a space where men can hang out, relax, and have a drink; not just buy clothes. Photos show that the lounge is still a work-in-progress, but the space so far looks exceptionally nice.

So does the list of brands. There are some British makers, such as Begg, Edward Green, and Sanders (BRIO will be carrying Sanders’ Playboy chukkas, which were made famous by Steve McQueen). The rest, however, is largely Italian. The store will have Sartoria Dalcuore for suits, Stefano Bemer for shoes, Rota for trousers, and G. Inglese for shirts. Other brands include:

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If you happened to have missed out on my special run of Tobacco Fresco last year, No Man Walks Alone has a few ready-to-wear suits available in the cloth. Made by Sartoria Formosa in Naples, it features a patch-pocketed jacket that can be used as a sport coat, as well as trousers that can be worn separately. The price is not cheap, but the construction and styling of Formosa’s suits makes them one of the best values I’ve seen in the ready-to-wear market. Getting a suit that can be broken into separates just adds to the versatility. 

I plan to organize a few more special cloth runs this year. Next up is a fawn flannel wool, which will be going through Huddersfield. Stay tuned. 

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Clients of bespoke tailors, rejoice. Harrisons of Edinburgh just relaunched their website and the new layout is fantastic. Pictures of swatches are now bigger, and you can easily see their cloths as a whole or up-close. They also have sections for some newly relaunched collections, such as the famous Carlo Barbera for H. Lesser jacketings. 

There do seem to be a few things missing (the section for W. Bill is obviously much smaller than it should be), but I assume Harrisons will slowly build on its website. If you’re in the US, you can order physical swatches (as well as cloths) through Isles Textile Group. The roundabout process is somewhat slow, but at least now you can easily tell them what you’re interested in. You can also just peruse the site and dream about your next commission. 

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Fashion is a dirty word among tailored clothing enthusiasts. Tailoring is often thought of as being above the frays of fashion, but this oversimplifies the history of suits and misses what’s often exciting about designer clothing. Not all fashion is about trends, even if all trends are about fashion. Just check out the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on Alexander McQueen, for example. It’s hard to not get swept away.

Few fashion designers capture imagination as well as those that came out of Japan in the 1970s and ‘80s. Designers such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo pioneered what can be described as a sort of “Japanese avant-garde.” Although, don’t use that term in public – not just because I made it up, but because all three have said that they resent being pigeonholed by their ethnicity. Miyake and Yamamoto have said that they see themselves more as being part of a “lost generation” – one that grew up on Western culture in Japan, but neither identifies with the West nor the East. Similarly, in an interview in Women’s Wear Daily, Kawakubo said she dislikes being pegged as a “Japanese designer,” while Miyake has noted that he’s trying to create “a new fashion genre that’s neither Japanese nor Western.”

If we don’t call their work Japanese, then it’s at least avant-garde. Their collections heavily rely on varying shades of black, but what feels like a restraint in color is offset by freer interpretations on the modern silhouette. Their asymmetric, deconstructed, and artfully ripped clothes often use holes and other forms of empty space as decoration. This departs from traditional Western modes of patternmaking, which tends to emphasize the human form. For women, that means accentuating a curvaceous bust and hips, but also narrowing the waist. These Japanese designers, on the other hand, seem to shroud the body rather than reveal it. Their work refuses to sexualize the female body, thus challenging conventional notions of gender in dress. 

In Future Beauty, Akiko Fukai et al. wrote of these collections:

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A friend of mine recently scanned these wonderful images from the early days of Esquire. These were originally published in 1934 and ‘35, just a year or two after the magazine’s first issue debuted. You might not be able to tell from the illustrations, but Esquire in those days was a bastion of chest thumping masculinity. They featured a mustachioed cartoon character named “Esky” on their covers, who was often drawn doing macho things such as sailing yachts or diving off cliffs. In the 1940s, they also published pin-ups by Alberto Vargas. Those illustrations were quite scandalous for their time – so scandalous, in fact, that the FDR administration took Esquire to court for distributing “lewd images.” (As you can probably guess, Esquire won on the grounds of free speech). 

What’s funny is that – while Esquire has always been a men’s fashion publication – they’ve also always tried to bill themselves as much more. Their initial subtitle was “The Magazine for Men,” and the editors reserved a third of each issue for big name fiction writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway. As Esquire’s co-founder Arnold Gingrich put it, this was to “sugarcoat the fashion pill.“ “Men,” he said, “would feel a bit sissyish carrying away from a store a magazine that had in it no content whatever than, let us say, a foppish devotion to the subject of clothes.”

Despite not wanting to seem like a sissy clothing magazine, Esquire for many decades was the last word on menswear. They told men what to wear and when to wear it through illustrations such as these. Covert coats with silk foulard mufflers, we’re told, are good for wear in the country, while dark navy double-breasted suits made from hard finished worsteds are perfect for drinking in town clubhouses. 

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Southern Italy is famous for its soft tailoring, but you don’t have to go all the way to Naples to get a soft shoulder. One of my tailors, Steed, is famous for their natural shoulder line. When they were in town this weekend as part of their US tour, I stopped by to chat about my next commission. During our conversation, they were nice enough to show me what goes into their shoulder construction. 

As many readers know, Edwin DeBoise worked for Edward Sexton (of Tommy Nutter fame) and Anderson & Sheppard before starting his own tailoring house. His current style is quite close to the Anderson & Sheppard drape cut — a bit of fullness in the chest with a nipped waist, close skirt, and soft shoulder. Despite all the shaping, there’s actually very little padding inside their coats, as you can see above.

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We’re still solidly in winter, but Drake’s new spring/ summer arrivals remind us that warmer days are just around the corner. The popular English label continues to design some of the best men’s accessories I’ve seen anywhere. Michael Hill, the company’s Creative Director, tells me that they’ve relied a lot on interesting and subtle weaves this season. “We have a linen chambray from Solbiati,” he says. “It has a nice texture and a bit more color than plain weave linens. There will also be some semi-warp faced cloths, which have a nice, antique hand, as well as a lot of slubby silks." 

My favorites so far are the grenadines and pocket squares. Drake’s grenadines now come in two weaves – larger and smaller versions known as garza grossa and garza fina, respectively. They also have grenadines with striped, dotted, and jacquard patterns, for those who want something a little more distinctive (these look particularly good). For pocket squares, there are cotton bandana prints, as well as a number of interesting designs on silk habotai – an exceptionally lightweight, slightly sheer, plain weave silk that has a bit of sheen. I find it goes well with cotton and linen jacketings. 

Michael also tells me they have some sport coats, shirts, and chinos coming. "We’ve never thought about design in terms of a product alone,” he says. “It’s always been about a look as a whole, so in some ways, this is a natural extension for us. It’s taken a bit of work to learn how to construct these other things, but I feel we’ve done a good job." 

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