Search Results for: winter

The explosion of sportswear and designer clothing after the Second World War shattered dress norms. Whereas men in the pre-war era were united by their allegiance to the coat and tie, fashion became a lot more diverse and divergent after the 1950s. Prole gear such as chambray shirts, five-pocket jeans, and white tees became popular off the worksite precisely because they represented something different – something more rebellious – to the more formal buttoned-down and strait-laced look of the establishment. Bruce Boyer has a nice essay about it in his book Rebel Style. 

To the degree there’s still a male uniform in the United States, it’s the dress shirt with dark jeans and a smooth merino knit. It’s the final outfit for men who don’t wear tailored jackets – the thing they can use to go to churches, offices, and other conservative settings without fear of drawing unwanted attention. It’s the thing your mother wanted you to wear when it came time to have your yearbook portrait taken. And likely what most men will be wearing next month at holiday parties.

The uniform persists for a reason. Shallow v-necks with dress collars underneath frame the face in a way that t-shirts can’t, and the combination gives a vague sense of formality without actually being formal. The look is nearly failsafe, but it’s also devoid of personality. A finely knit sweater in plain navy or gray is about as good of a candidate as any for a menswear staple, but I find I rarely wear mine. 

If there was ever a reason to care about global warming – aside from total death of all living things on this planet – our ability to wear cool jackets should be it. As each year gets warmer and warmer, it feels like the opportunity to wear our favorite fall and winter clothes is getting shorter and shorter. It’s been unseasonably warm these past few months, but luckily the temperatures just dropped low enough to break out our favorite outerwear. And let’s be honest. Men’s style revolves around outerwear. 

Menswear blogs this time of year are often filled with lists about seasonal essentials – the perfect pea coat, the ideal trench. All of which can be great, but also feel a bit too generic to be personal. So while this isn’t a list of  menswear essentials, here’s a list of eight outerwear styles that have me excited this year. Hopefully you can find something here that also works for you. 

I suppose one of the advantages of fall weather coming late is you get to take advantage of sales right when you actually want to wear heavy coats and knitwear. Today, Unionmade started their mid-season promotion. You can take 20% off almost anything with the checkout code FINALLYFALL. The only exclusions I see are Aldens, Il Bisonte, Birkenstock, and already marked-down items. 

The discount isn’t that deep, but it looks like the store has loosened their return policy. Mid-season sale purchases can now be returned, whereas Unionmade typically runs their end-of-season promotions on a final sale basis. That makes it a bit safer to take a chance on something. Some notable items I found:

• Levi’s Vintage Clothing: Levi’s Vintage Clothing recycles designs from the company’s expansive archive. I particularly like this hardy, loosely woven, red plaid shirt, which looks like it would layer well under rugged jackets. Their straight-legged 1947 501s are also great. The cut is slim, but forgiving, with a mid-rise that works with everything from sport coats to casualwear. 
  
• Kapital: This Japanese brand reworks folk clothing from around the world, producing things in odd fits and heavily patched up materials. I love their Ring Coat, for example, which is something like a love child between a Japanese kimono and an American army jacket. It’s oversized and enveloping, and will make you feel a bit cozier on a cold winter day. 
  
• Chimala: Subtler than Kapital, but more detailed than LVC, Chimala makes vintage-inspired workwear that looks like it’s been pulled out of the best thrift stores. Their chambray is one of my favorite casual button-ups. I also like this season’s canvas hunting coat, even if it’s clearly designed to only help you hunt for compliments. 
  

• Eidos: One of the easiest casualwear brands to wear. The designer behind the label, Antonio, is particularly good at making overcoats and knitwear, which can be paired with anything from jeans to tailored trousers. This season, they also have an indigo-dyed double rider, which was manufactured for them by leather jacket specialist Vanson. 
  
• Studio Nicholson: Maybe the most contemporary brand at Unionmade, this one veers towards minimalism and modernism, rather than workwear. Studio Nicholson is a celebrated womenswear brand that recently started making men’s clothing. I particularly like their oversized topcoats.  
• Knitwear, Knitwear, Knitwear: Finally, there are a ton of great sweaters on discount. See Howlin’ by Morrison’s Donegal crewnecks, Tomorrowland’s zig-zag alpacas, and John Sterner’s turtlenecks. The last one is a new brand by the man who founded Sutterheim. Some of the knits in there are insanely priced, but the simpler Lithuanian-made sweaters are more affordable. Well, at least with this mid-season promotion. 

For more discounts, you can check out Unionmade’s sale section. Just note those are final sale and the code doesn’t stack. 

No one in the fashion industry ever admits to being in the fashion industry. For all the designers and tailors I’ve spoken to over the years, I’ve found they all say the same thing – they’re not interested in fashion, they don’t follow trends, and they’re about making things that last. That’s true whether they’re hand tailoring three-piece suits or slapping together the cheapest possible black double rider. 

No brand, however, embodies the anti-fashion ethos more than S.E.H. Kelly, a micro-sized brand run by just two people – Sara E. H. Kelly, after which the company is named, and her partner Paul Vincent. Their collections are small, albeit growing, with just a few designs and some basics to accompany them. There are some mid-weight, medium-wale corduroy shirts, including some pullovers with unusual collars, as well as subtly pleated trousers with buckle-back and side-tab details. The stars of the collection tend to be in outerwear, where you’ll find trench coats made from stealth-quality Ventile cotton, as well as raglan-sleeved Balmacaans constructed from the loveliest Donegal tweeds. 

Their collection mostly stays the same from year to year, with a new design dropping once in a blue moon. "When Sara and I started the company, we wanted to do this on an ‘as-and-when’ basis,” says Paul. “Meaning, as we develop new patterns and when we find interesting cloths. Five years ago, we only had three jackets, and the following year, we didn’t have anything new, so we reintroduced the old designs in new fabrics. Now the collection is growing, so we occasionally rotate things in and out, but we still mostly make things with slight updates.”

Back in the early 1940s, Leon Leonwood Bean – founder of L.L. Bean – wrote a practical guide on living in the great outdoors. The point of the book, he wrote, is not to “bore readers with personal yarns and experiences, but to give definite information in the fewest words possible on how to hunt, fish, and camp.” The book, while not that well edited, is tightly packaged into 104 pages. It also covers everything from building beds to cooking outdoors to finding lost hunters. You can find it these days through Amazon (it makes for a nice gift for outdoor enthusiasts), although it’s also available for a free read through Google Books. 

Naturally, for the purposes of this blog, the most interesting section is chapter twelve, which covers what to wear when you’re out in the hills. Leon Bean suggests taking along a pair of 12″ leather top rubbers (what I assume are his Bean boots) and shorter 6.5″ moccasins for dry days, when you’re out on the ridge before it starts snowing. Pants should be medium-weight wools built with knitted or zippered bottoms; outerwear ought to include a medium-weight, all wool coat with a game pocket at the back; shirts should likewise be made from wool, with at least one being a red paid in case “you go out to drag a deer without a coat” (that way, you won’t be shot by other hunters.) A sign of his times, Bean suggests leaving the house with your heaviest business suit. And for handkerchiefs, he says to take along six red bandanas (never anything white). “I also recommend colored toilet paper,” he writes. 

The excerpt is charming, and even if it’s a bit antiquated, it nicely describes a sort of autumn style that still feels relevant today. To be sure, outdoor clothing has always defined fall wardrobes, whether that’s tweed sport coats worn out in English countrysides or the sort of workwear Bean favored. For me, a big inspiration at the moment is Japanese hiking gear – a little more casual than traditional tailoring, a touch less rugged than shooting apparel. No less outdoorsy. 

So, I’ve been working on a two-part series for Put This On (for those who don’t know, most of my writing is there). The posts were inspired by an online Vogue article I read earlier this year. Apparently, fashion editors are just like the rest of us. Despite having closets overflowing with options, they mostly rely on the same things for their day-to-day routines. An excerpt:

Like an exploding volcano of denim and satin, a tidal wave of cashmere and cotton, our clothes threaten to overtake our tiny apartments, to bury us alive under tees and trousers. This wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, if we actually wore all this stuff, if 365 days meant 365 different outfits—730 if we changed for evening! But nooo. In fact, most of us rely on a few favorites in serious rotation, leaving the rest of the orphans in the closet begging for crumbs.

To judge just how severe this situation has become, and with spring in full flower and the temptation to buy still more!—more!—beckoning from every shop and laptop, I asked some of my Vogue colleagues to share with me what it is they actually wear from their bursting closets.

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Just as cloudy skies on Groundhog Day predict an early spring, Drake’s autumn lookbooks are a reminder that cooler days lie ahead. This year, the team shot their collection in the Shetland Islands. Which is fitting given how prominently their brushed Shetland cable knits feature in this lookbook. Thick sweaters in sapphire blue, canary yellow, and scarlet red serve as cheerful accents to otherwise drab ensembles made of prickly tweed, napped flannel, and waxed cotton. “We really went in on the knitwear this season,” says Michael Hill, the company’s creative director. “They’re made in the Shetland Isles by people who love what they do.” 

Ever since Drake’s expanded beyond their core line of ties and pocket squares, such collaborations have been an important part of their business. Belvest, where founder Michael Drake once work, makes the company’s sport coats in Italy. Blackhorse Lane Ateliers sews Drake’s jeans in London (those are the best jeans I’ve found to wear with sport coats). Last season, Drake’s also collaborated with the Japanese dyeing house Buaisou to produce a limited range of hand-dyed, indigo, cashmere-and-wool scarves. 

This season, they’re continuing with new collabs. One of my favorites is the viscose-silk blend scarf you see above, which was made in Northern Italy. “It’s our take on the college scarf,” says Michael. “The fabric has a lot of texture, so you don’t have to be too precious with it. The more crumpled and disheveled it looks, the better.” Drake’s also went to India to get these cashmere scarves woven in classic madras patterns. The irregular fibers give the twill weave an unique texture. Michael tells me they’ll continue with that collaboration next spring, but with brighter colors and lighter weight yarns.

A couple of years ago, Wall Street Journal’s style editor Jacob Gallagher described the Italian menswear line Eidos as “something that only looks good on men who are as handsome as the brand’s designer, Antonio Ciongoli.” I admit, up until then, I had been thinking the same thing. And while Antonio always looked good in photos – wearing trim white jeans and citified bomber jackets – I’ve learned my lesson over the years in not modeling my wardrobe too closely after handsome Italian men I see online. 

Last winter, however, while I was around downtown San Francisco, I decided to stop by Bloomingdale’s and check out the line. The clothes, to my surprise, were exceptionally wearable. The knits, based on old Aran classics, were updated with more interesting weaves and details. The polos were trim and cut with unusual collars, but they looked good when layered under a jacket. And then there was the outerwear, which was my favorite part of the collection. Slouchy, knee-length topcoats – one of which I later bought – paired just as easily over sport coats as they did with sneakers and jeans. You can see Mitchell Moss wearing a brown tweed one on his Instagram.

Part of this is about the editing process. In an amusing segment at Blamo! (a menswear podcast you should be following), Antonio said that he’s tried to make the line a lot simpler over the years:

Sale season this year is moving along quickly. Mr. Porter just made their second round of price cuts, putting things at 70% off just two weeks after they started their spring promotion. Given the size of their inventory, your best bet is to filter things by size and see what serendipitously pops up. Also worth checking back once a week or so. As people make returns, you can expect to see some items get restocked. 

Some things I think are notable: brands such as Chimala, Camoshita, Eidos, Kapital, and Drake’s are favorites and they have some surprisingly good things still left. I also like these Margiela leather babouches, Margaret Howell linen-wool blend sweater (lovely color); Our Legacy washed jeans; chunky Nonnative ribbed turtleneck; Orlebar Brown swimwear; Engineered Garments folk print shirt; Viberg work boots (blessed be the men with bigger feet), Gaziano & Girling loafers, and suede Valstarino bombers. For this coming fall/ winter, there are some heavily discounted gloves from Dents, just $50 a pair for leather models lined in cashmere. Lastly, don’t forget to check Mr. Porter’s much slept-on house label, Kingsman. The stuff there is often made in collaboration with top-end companies, such as Mackintosh and Drake’s, but will often get passed over because people forget to look.