Search Results for: spring

Despite that old line attributed to Mark Twain – “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” – it actually doesn’t get that cold here. In the dead of winter, temperatures can drop into the low 40s, but that’s basically springtime in Moscow, when street performers come out to Stary Arbat to busk for tourists. 

Still, that doesn’t make me want dress coats any less. And by dress coats I mean the kind of topcoats and overcoats that have mostly disappeared from modern wardrobes. With fewer men wearing suits and sport coats nowadays, fewer still need the kind of outerwear that traditionally accompanied them. So, today, we have hundreds of casual outerwear styles, but only a handful of options for something dressier than a parka. 

My own wardrobe has two dress coats, and despite the weather being less-than-frigid, I find them surprisingly useful. They’re too warm for the afternoon, but great for keeping out that biting chill in the morning and night – which are basically the only times I’m outside of work.

If you live in North America and love Saint Crispin’s as much as I do, there’s some good news this month. The company just started their “Saint Crispin’s of the Americas” operation, headed by former Armoury employee Zachary Jobe. This means three things. 

First, there will be many more trunk shows. Phillip used to visit the US twice a year, hitting only the largest cities. With Zachary’s help, they’ll now be touring the US on a quarterly basis, visiting everywhere from Miami to Washington DC to Atlanta to Denver to San Diego to Los Angeles (in addition to the usual rounds through NYC, Honolulu, San Francisco, etc). You can see their full tour schedule here. 

This is useful since, more than any other shoe company, it can be important to try Saint Crispin’s on in-person before buying. They make their shoes with a lot of shape – cutting things a bit closer to the foot – and use harder stiffeners. That means there’s less room for error when it comes to fit, and the break-in period can be more punishing if you get things wrong. More trunk shows means more opportunities for men to try on their shoes in-person and get professional advice. 

Some people lose their careers because of alcohol; others find new ones. Ian Segal, a former poetry editor at The New Yorker, was drinking late one night with friends in Tokyo. They talked about how cool it would be to start a new clothing label that combined all the things they loved – workwear and various cultural scenes. The next day, after sobering up a bit, Ian received a phone call from his buddy, who said they needed to meet for production samples. “I was like, ‘oh, this is actually happening.’”

For a brand that was born out of a drunk, late-night discussion, Nine Lives is quite coherent. It’s reimagined workwear, but in a way that’s never been done before – taking mid-century American work clothes and cutting them with a sort of dark, Japanese mod and punk edge. “We wanted to approach this as though heritage- and contemporary-wear are in the same boat,” says Ian. “As in, what if sashiko were invented today?”

The brand is a combination of a few people’s efforts. There’s Ian, the former New Yorker editor, and then Kotaro Sato, a Japanese clothing designer who used to work as a tattoo artist on LA’s Sunset strip. The third person in this trio is Masa Takayanagi, one of Yohji Yamamoto’s pattern makers, who gives Nine Lives its unique silhouettes. 

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. 

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. 

Mr. Porter’s end-of-season sale is always one of the most exciting sales events. Where else can you find marked-down Drake’s ties and John Lobb shoes being sold alongside discounted casualwear items from Aspesi, Camoshita, and Kapital? 

This morning, they dropped prices on their spring/ summer inventory by 30% to 50%. For a thorough browse, go to their sale page and filter by sizes. That won’t capture some of the Japanese brands – where you sometimes have to size up – but it’s a nice way to serendipitously find things you may not have considered otherwise. I’ve also rounded up some of my favorite items below:

This is the face I imagine Franco Sozzi makes when he hears you only wear crunchy silk knit ties. He’s the president of Sozzi Calze – a century-old Italian manufacturer of high-end dress socks and knitted neckwear. Crunchy silk knits, such as those from Drake’s, are often favored by men’s style enthusiasts for their unique texture and weave. As Franco shows, however, other things can look good as well. 

Silk is nice for knit ties because it’s versatile. Particularly in a color such as black, you can wear one year-round with almost anything – brown tweeds, cotton sport coats, grey wool suits, etc. It’s the one tie you can rely on when you don’t want to put too much thought into your clothes, but also need something to dress down a tailored jacket. The style has been made famous by everyone from mid-century jazz musicians to the literary version of James Bond (who Ian Fleming often described as wearing a dark suit, clean white shirt, and “thin, black silk knitted tie.”)

In the last year or so, however, I’ve started to appreciate more seasonal knits. Ones made from wool or cashmere have fuzzier textures, which makes them pair well with tweeds and flannels during the winter months. I also recently picked up a cotton knit tie to go with a linen suit. Cotton tends to produce a flatter weave than silk, but sometimes you want that bit of understatement. See above, for example, where Franco is pictured wearing a patch pocketed, tan suit with a fancy shirting (monogrammed, no less) and soft, beige cotton knit. The whole ensemble just has a nice spring/ summer feel to it – more so, I think than, if he went with a crunchier silk. 

For clients of custom tailors, finding a good spring/ summer fabric can be tough. Once you get past your basic linens, cottons, and tropical wools, you’ll notice that warm-weather fabrics don’t have the same textures and patterns that make fall/ winter clothes so appealing. Gone are your prickly tweeds and district checks. Instead, you’re left with solid-colored fabrics on the one hand, and patterns that look like they can only be worn at Pitti Uomo on the other. 

After last year’s successful tobacco Fresco run, I decided to put together a couple more custom fabrics. Like last time, I’ve found that it can take a lot of work to get the color and general design just right – a little too much of something this way or that way, and the swatches just look off. After a bit of work, however, I think I have what are two very special spring/ summer jacketings. 

I didn’t have plans to get anything from Nicholas Templeman when I first wrote about him last year, but it was hard to resist after I saw his samples. A former lastmaker at John Lobb of St. James, Nicholas has a keen eye for design and over seven years of bespoke shoemaking experience. His work as an independent shoemaker demonstrates this wonderful balance between conservative English taste and the kind of creativity that makes commissioning a pair of bespoke shoes seem worthwhile. 

So I met with Nicholas last October when he visited San Francisco as part of his US tour. The first meeting with a bespoke shoemaker isn’t too different from what happens with a bespoke tailor. You flip through dozens of swatch samples – many more than what would be available through a ready-to-wear label – and then discuss the particulars of your order. If you’ve ever wanted to be overwhelmed with options, commission a pair of bespoke shoes. Suit jackets and sport coats differ mainly by pocket, button, and lapel design, but shoes can take any number of forms. I avoided the problem by telling Nicholas I would settle on a design later. After all, the lasts come first, so there would be plenty of time to decide on the particulars. 

A lot of men’s fashion today can be broken into two camps. On the one end, you have heritage (and heritage-inspired) brands that rely on the classics. On the other end, there are avant garde labels creating conceptually interesting – even if hard to wear – designs that break from the past. Ten C is a relatively new Italian outerwear company that sits between these two worlds – perfectly blending techwear with heritage, innovative fabrics with classic military design. Think of them as: Stone Island meets Nigel Cabourn. 

Which makes sense, I suppose, given that the two founders, Paul Harvey and Alessandro Pungetti, are Stone Island and CP Company designers. The two are known for making very innovative, but also highly-wearable, contemporary Italian sportswear. Ten C is similar, but is a bit more approachable for the kind of guy who buys his casualwear from shops such as Unionmade and The Bureau Belfast. 

The original concept for Ten C was simple: create a “forever collection,” which would be comprised of seven fall/ winter outerwear designs, made from the same fabric, but offered in four colors. And never do anything else – don’t change the collection, don’t introduce anything new. Just make things that will last and people can keep forever. In that collection was a belted snow smock, an M-65 jacket, and a fishtail parka (among some other things). You can hear Paul Harvey describe them here.