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It’s hard to believe that it took until May 1939, the spring before the start of the Second World War, for Vogue to publish its first cover of a fashionable woman in trousers. We know the image still had the power to shock because the editors assuaged anxious readers by saying that, while pants were considered masculine at the time, they can still be worn in conventionally feminine ways. “If people accuse you of aping men, take no notice,” they wrote encouragingly. “Our new slacks are irreproachably masculine in their tailoring, but women have made them entirely their own by the colors in which they order them, and the accessories they add.” In the photo, the woman was shown wearing a pair of ochre-colored sharkskin trousers with delicate jewelry, Moroccan slippers, and a scarlet jersey shirt with a plunging neckline. A silk scarf was wrapped around her head like a turban, with a turquoise encrusted pin holding everything together.

Since that cover was published, women have adopted nearly every masculine symbol into their wardrobe, from blue jeans to bomber jackets. But examples of men imitating women’s dress are rare. When they do, they’ll counter criticism by citing men’s earlier use of the style. A belted robe coat isn’t something your aunt would wear, but rather a reference to the earliest iteration of a polo coat, as seen on the strong-shouldered Richard Gere. Cuban heeled Chelsea boots aren’t so much high-heeled as they are Beatles-esque. And when long-haired youths were criticized for their appearance in the late 1960s, they pointed to how Jesus is often depicted with shoulder-length locks.

Kenji Kaga, the silver fox behind Tie Your Tie, has no problem telling you that he’s inspired by femininity — and he’ll do so without qualification. When I talked to him last month, I didn’t get the impression that he was saying so for political reasons. Instead, as an aesthete, it didn’t occur to him why he should do otherwise. “Most ties today come in stripes or small geometrics, such as the ones you might find at E. Marinella or Drake’s,” Kaga tells me. “Ours are inspired by vintage designs from the turn of the century until about the 1930s. I’m most inspired by French design, which I like for its femininity. The lines are more fluid and romantic; the design less symmetrical. When we color our collections, I also take inspiration from women’s collections, such as Saint Laurent, Celine, and Valentino. Very old designs, but in new colors. This is our style.”

In the early 1980s, when prep and power dressing dominated the American landscape, a few Japanese designers were preparing for a revolution. In the West, many of our trends in literature, architecture, and fashion derive from the Regency era. We wear navy suits because, in the early 19th century, British men of means paired navy coats with cream-colored breeches. About a generation later, Regency blue gave way to Victorian black when Queen Victoria decided everyone should look somber. Nearly 200 years later, these norms remain. Most men today wear navy, black, grey, and white — following in the steps of those early-19th-century traditions — and pair navy coats with lighter colored trousers because of Beau Brummell.

For a select few, this all changed in 1983 when Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto debuted their now-legendary spring/ summer collections in Paris. Thoughtlessly dubbed the “beggar’s look” by critics, these so-called rags were quite calculated in their design. Their asymmetric, deconstructed, and artfully ripped clothes enshrouded their wearers in mystery. As Yves Saint Laurent noted, fashion in the early 1980s was all about color and lots of it. These Japanese artists, on the other hand, deliberately avoided vivid color and made heavy use of a monochromatic palette, from “strong and varied hues of black to the simplicity and crispness of shades of white.”

“Kawakubo’s and Yamotmo’s black was often an unassuming, harmonious shade, reminiscent of Japanese ink painting,” wrote the authors of Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion. “Their expressive use of a black palette also partook of the qualities celebrated in Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s book In Praise of Shadows (1933), which finds in shadow the essence of the Japanese aesthetic and speaks of the Japanese skill with light and shade. The designers’ choice of color, unfettered by any Western paradigm, was perceptively singled out by The Washington Post as the distinguishing feature of their style, along with the purity of their aesthetic. The French newspaper Libération likened Kawakubo’s and Yamamoto’s creations to their intense black-and-white films of Kenji Mizoguchi, while French Vogue compared them to calligraphy scrolls, which symbolize a beauty devoid of color.“

Our emotional associations with texture are arguably innate and perhaps even universal. In an article published in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Hilary Davidson examined the fabrics people are buried in. What is the last thing someone ever wears, and who decides what emotions those garments embody? Davidson analyzed excavation findings from British cemetery sites, where the bodies of poor mid-19th century Londoners were often laid to rest. “The choice of interred textiles and garments — such as a satin baby’s bonnet, pinned silk ribbons, and a false waistcoat— their qualities and construction all bespeak emotions around pride, dignity, religious feeling, tenderness, and socially codified grief,” she writes. “Clothing fragments become a substitute fleshliness as the bodily tissue they cover wears away, the last traces of the invested, materialized emotions surrounding death.” The softness of some of those garments was also presumably meant to bring the dead some eternal comfort.

Such associations between texture and emotion mostly follow a predictable pattern. We like things that are soft, silky, and smooth; we dislike things that are sharp, cold, and jagged. There’s a reason why challenging days are described as “hard” and “rough,” while sweet moments make you feel “warm and fuzzy.” One study published in Acta Psychologica found a relationship between body temperature and feelings of exclusion. When people feel socially excluded, the mere act of holding a warm beverage can make them feel better. 

Similarly, in a series of psychological experiments, University of Michigan professor Joshua Ackerman found our thinking can be affected by the physical things we handle. “These influences are not trivial – they can sway how people react in important ways, including how much money they part with, how cooperative they are with strangers, or how they judge an interview candidate,” Ed Yong wrote of the study in Discover. “Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances, but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.”

In academia, and particularly social science, research methods have become more rigorous, but the field has produced fewer big thinkers. Take David Ricardo, for instance, the British political economist who transformed the world at age 37 after reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Having already made a fortune as a stockbroker and loan broker, Richardo published his first political economy paper on the “bullion controversy” in 1809. He posited that the Bank of England’s propensity to issue excess banknotes was causing inflation, an early theory in what is today known as monetarism. A few years later, in his “Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock,” he articulated the law of diminishing marginal returns.

His most significant contribution, however, came when he studied Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws. Using the simple, yet profound example of how Britain could trade cloth for Portuguese wine, he formulated the idea of comparative advantage — the basis for much of free trade thinking today. Like other great political economy theorists before him, such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Ricardo had the uncanny ability to arrive at complex conclusions without the mathematical tools deemed essential in today’s academic research. In his book Price Theory, David Friedman wrote of the man: “The modern economist reading Ricardo’s Principles feels rather as a member of one of the Mount Everest expeditions would feel if, arriving at the top of the mountain, he encountered a hiker clad in T-shirt and tennis shoes.”

Ricardo’s examples, however, were not arbitrary. Portugal at the time was renowned for its sweet port wine, and Britain excelled at producing woolens, linens, cottons, silks, and all things textile related. In the Scottish Border towns, tweeds and cashmere were woven and knitted from local and native wools. Further south, Manchester’s steam-driven textile mills produced almost a third of the world’s cotton, thus giving the city its nickname, Cottonpolis. Spitalfields, similarly, was known for its exquisite and lustrous silk. French Protestant refugees (Huguenots) in the 17th century established the silk trade in this East London district after fleeing from religious persecution. The tradition was later taken up by Irish immigrants who arrived with little more than their weaving skills. It was a simple example involving Britain’s textile industries that helped to set up the following 200+ years of economic theory.

When I lived in Moscow, Russia many years ago, I relied on my gray flannel trousers, tweed sport coat, and waxed cotton jacket to get me through fall. Superficially, the primary function of an autumn wardrobe is to protect you from cold, wind, and rain. But in a faraway, foreign land, cocooning myself in layers also brought some psychological comfort. The renowned Russian playwright Anton Chekhov – whose haunting and lyrical prose helped define the modern form of short storytelling – wrote about this feeling over 120 years ago in his story, “The Man in the Case.”

[T]wo months ago a man called Byelikov, a colleague of mine, died in our town. You have heard of him, no doubt. He was remarkable for always wearing galoshes and a warm wadded coat, and carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather. And his umbrella was in a case, and his watch was in a case made of grey chamois leather, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his penknife, too, was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too, because he always hid it in his turned-up collar. He wore dark spectacles and flannel vests, stuffed up his ears with cotton-wool, and when he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences.

There’s something oddly comforting about fall/ winter clothes, not just in terms of how they keep you warm, but also emotionally protected. Encased in woolens, with a Scottish cashmere scarf around your neck and your coat’s collar turned-up, you feel like you can take on the world. At the same time, there’s something genial about autumnal clothing — materials such as soft cashmere, nubby oxford, and suede leather invite a smile and conversation. The other day, a stranger complimented me on my outfit. It felt warm. 

In 1968, Tommy Nutter was exasperated with his sales job at Donaldson, Williamson, and G. Ward, a bespoke tailoring firm based in London’s Burlington Arcade. Nutter derisively described their house style as “little” and wanted to update it with some flair. The traditional-minded tailors in the workroom, however, dismissed his ideas as technically impossible and, in any case, tasteless. “People did not come here to be measured up for tents,” one journalist documented. So Tommy petitioned for a new job at Henry Poole. When the firm’s managing director, Samuel Cundey, saw Tommy’s fashionably long hair, however, he sent him away, horrified.

Tommy would save his ideas for himself. Shortly after quitting his job, he and Edward Sexton went on to form one of the most important tailoring houses of the 20th century, Nutters of Savile Row. If you believe menswear lore, many of the long-standing firms, such as Huntsman, viewed Nutters at first with suspicion. Bespoke tailoring at the time was a hush-hush and stuffy business. Tailoring shops didn’t even have display windows and firms such as Anderson & Sheppard considered publicity vulgar. The expression “it’s not done” not only sums up the hard-edged attitude of many in the solvent class, but also the tailors who served them.

Nutters not only displayed their goods to the public, they also talked to journalists and attracted younger customers into the then-stodgy precincts of Savile Row. They tailored for Elton John, Mick Jagger, and The Beatles, as well as women such as Twiggy and Diana Ross. Men walked out of the Nutters shop clad in box plaid suits, flared pants, and mini-platform shoes. As they strutted down the street, competing tailors stared, mouths agape. Perhaps they were offended by the garish designs. Or maybe they feared Nutters made them look stodgy by comparison.

A friendly reminder: the order window for this year’s summer tweed re-run closes this Friday, August 30th. Since introducing it in 2016, I’ve been happily surprised to see it pop up in some unexpected places. It’s shown up in GQ, The Sartorialist, and Permanent Style. Bespoke shoemaker Nicholas Templeman wore it in a Last Magazine feature. Dionisio D'Alise, the head cutter at Sartoria Formosa, sometimes wears it at fittings. Anderson & Sheppard trained coatmaker Lee Oxley says he loves the cloth. The best response, however – and I mean this genuinely – has come from readers, who email me to say how much they like their resulting suits and sport coats. 

I originally designed the fabric because I was looking for something like the silk jacketing you see on Taka from Liverano & Liverano above (the photo above is from The Armoury, my fabric is pictured below). There was once a time when raw silk jacketing was a bit more commonly available. The material has the same slubby texture you see in raw silk ties, but it comes in a weight that’s suitable for tailoring. Today, however, it’s all but impossible to find outside of vintage fabric vaults. So I designed my own.

This is a mid-brown, 9/10 oz fabric made from a 60/ 40 blend of linen and silk. Despite having a bit of silk, the cloth is matte and breathable. It has a semi-open weave that’s suitable for the heat. It holds a crease and is hard-wearing. Most importantly, it has a bit of irregular texture and slight flecking, which makes it look like your favorite Donegal tweeds. It can be hard to find a good spring/ summer fabric once you get past your basic tropical wools and linens. Most are a bit too flat-looking, or too crisp to hold a pattern (on a clear-finished worsted, sometimes a pattern can look too vivid). This allows you to add a bit of a pattern to a summer outfit while still making it easy to wear.