Mr. Porter just started their end-of-season sale, with discounts of up to 50% on select items. Lots of familiar labels, such as Drake’s, Common Projects, and Red Wing, as well as a number of not-often-discounted brands such as William Lockie and George Cleverley. Some notables that I found last night:
End is probably the only online retailer that rivals Mr. Porter in scope and quality. Today, they start their end-of-season sale. Take 25% off across the board with the checkout code SALEPREVIEW. Some notables:
If you’ve ever enjoyed rummaging through a box of old photos at a flea market, then you’ll probably enjoy this fantastic photo archive over at Flickr. Put together by The Boston Public Library, it has hundreds of albums centered on themes such as anti-war riots, aviation, and baseball. There are even collections for Victorian-era trade cards (advertising shoes and accessories) and war posters, for those who like vintage artwork.
Shown here are some beautiful images from the set titled “Boston in Winter,” which documents how the New England city looked during the first half of the 20th century. There are lots of charming pictures of kids sledding down hills, families celebrating Christmas at home, postal workers sorting through holiday mail, men and women pushing their way through blizzards, and landscapes of the city covered in snow. Should your town be cold this month, may these images warm your heart as they did mine.
Happy holidays, everyone.
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End started their fall/ winter sale last night, with 40% taken almost across the board. There’s a ton of great casualwear from a number of brands. Here are some notables:
You can also go through their sale section, which is organized by types of clothing (shirts, jackets, shoes, etc). Possibly easier if you’re shopping for something specific.
I’m heading off to Canada for the holidays, where there are real winters. San Francisco has been rather mild this season, save for one bitter cold spell, but in Canada, it starts to snow in December. It doesn’t get as bad as Russia, but it gets bad enough to need real winter boots.
Two that I’m bringing are these by James Purdey & Sons and Edward Green. The Purdeys are field sport boots originally meant for hunting, but I think they make for excellent general-purpose boots when the weather turns foul. The bottoms have studded Dainite rubber soles for extra gripping, and the bellow tongues help prevent water from leaking around the laces. The only problem is that they take a while to put on. The speed hooks are a great help, but you still have to explain to any company you’re with why you have to buckle down four straps when you’re both just going out to grab some quick lunch. Luckily, that extended shaft, which comes about mid-calf, gives some excellent added protection should you have to face cold shoulders.
The other pair of boots is Edward Green’s Galway made from the company’s walnut country calf (the rustic version of their dark oak leather) and built on their 64 last, which they originally developed for Holland & Holland’s shooting boots. The insides have been specially lined with shearling so that, when you have thick socks on, your feet never have to know what season it is. Pete, my e-friend and co-writer at Put This On, recently called them “Eddy Green Uggs.”
What I like most about these boots is that all their special detailing - the buckle straps, bellow tongues, and shearling linings - are hidden when you actually have the shoes on. When worn, they look like any other suitable winter boots from a Northampton maker. They’re unique without having to scream so. Plus, they just feel incredibly sturdy and tough, making you feel ready for any Canadian weather.
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Drake’s released their fall/ winter 2013 collection yesterday. It hasn’t received that much fanfare on blogs yet (even in the ever-quick Tumblr-sphere), which is surprising given how many fantastic things there are.
Like last season, this collection seems to have a nice focus on textured neckwear. There are the traditional things, such as raw silks and tussahs in both solid and patterned designs, as well as plays on standards, such as variations on the traditional grenadine. In addition, there are some nice designs with a 1950s/ 1960s sensibility, such a fuzzy mohair blend and a range of boucles. The word boucle comes from the French word boucler, which means “to curl,” and it refers to how the yarns are formed. The fabric is made with a series of looped threads, typically with one being a bit looser than the others. This looser thread forms a small curled loop in the fabric, while the others form the anchors. The effect is a fabric that looks very textured and interesting, and feels slightly rough to the touch. I think of it as a fall/ winter version of raw silk and like to wear mine with tweeds.
Alongside their neckwear is Drake’s usual mix of other men’s accessories, such as their beautiful, finely woven scarves, which this season comes in a range of tartan, Fair Isle, Navajo, and Kelim patterns. I also lusted over their knitwear. Some of their Guernsey and Aran sweaters looked very much like those sold by Inis Meain, which makes me wonder if that’s not who manufactured them. There are also some Shaggy Dogs, cabled lambswools, and Shetland knits in birdseye and Fair Isle patterns. Oh, and the four-ply cashmere shawl collar cardigan pictured above, which is not new, but so great that I’ll use any excuse to use the photo.
Two big highlights for me include their sport coats and pocket squares. I believe this is their first season offering tailored jackets online, and I suspect if it goes well, we’ll see an expansion of offerings in the future (previously, the only way to really buy their sport coats is to go to their London store). This season’s selection of pocket squares is also quite exciting. I think it may be their best yet since their medieval prints many years ago.
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Every year, I round up the best Black Friday sales over at Put This On and also highlight my favorites here, along with choice selections from each shop. The goal is to help readers find quality items without making them wade through what feels like an impossibly vast selection. Earlier this week, I listed seven great Black Friday promotions — here are six more.
RALPH LAUREN: UP TO 30% OFF
If fashion is a cultural language, then Brooks Brothers gave American men their ABCs, as they drafted the foundational grammar of the sack suit and the oxford button-down. But it’s Ralph Lauren who wrote the most compelling stories. No other brand has rendered such a persuasive mythos of American style — from the fine tailoring teamed with rep striped ties and penny loafers to the Southwestern cardigans and wabash striped workwear. Plus, the company’s size, institutional memory, and deep relationships allow them to create collections unmatched in the industry. Once you learn what “quality” really means — fabric development, unique design details, quality control — you understand that Ralph Lauren makes some of the best clothes around.
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Every year, I round up the best Black Friday sales over at Put This On and also highlight my favorites here, along with choice selections from each shop. The goal is to help readers find quality items without making them wade through what feels like an impossibly vast selection. As usual, some stores have started their Black Friday promotions early this year, hoping to get a jump ahead of other retailers. So I’ll be breaking this into two parts — pre- and post-Thanksgiving. Here are six sales that I think are worth your attention. Come back Friday for more.
MR PORTER: UP TO 50% OFF
Since their launch in 2011, Mr. Porter’s Black Friday sale has become one of the most anticipated menswear events of the year, mainly because they have everything. Men have so many options nowadays — prep, workwear, gorpcore, streetwear, and avant-garde — but no matter your aesthetic, it’s likely that Mr. Porter carries some of your favorite brands. Plus, free shipping and easy returns make it easier to take a chance on things.
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It is a grim feature of modern life that we treat downtime as a pit stop between bursts of usefulness. In the United States, where the Protestant work ethic took the deepest root, even Sabbath observance was shaped by the belief that unproductive time required moral justification. Writing in the early 1930s, Bertrand Russell warned that “immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.” By 1948, the German philosopher Josef Pieper offered a more forceful philosophical defense of leisure. His book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, published in the wake of one of the largest labor strike waves in US history, pushed back against what he called the tyranny of “total work,” a condition in which the modern human is reduced to their measurable productivity.
If leisure needs any justification at all, it can be found in the breakthroughs it enables: Darwin doing his deepest thinking during long walks at Down House, Beethoven composing "Symphony No. 6" in the countryside, Newton developing the foundations of calculus while on a two-year leave from Cambridge. But framing leisure in terms of output, or even as a way to rejuvenate us for labor, still reduces it to an instrument of the state or market. Instead, Pieper argues that leisure is a necessary condition for the soul. The Greek word for leisure, scholē, is the root of our word school—not a site of vocational training, but a space for contemplative stillness. Leisure ensures that “the human being does not disappear into the parceled-out world of his limited work-a-day function, but instead remains capable of taking in the world as a whole, and thereby to realize himself as a being who is oriented toward the whole of existence.”
In the last few years, I’ve been doing a series called “Excited to Wear.” It’s my way of sidestepping the pointless exercise of defining menswear “essentials,” a concept that flattens the richness of style into generic shopping lists. Instead, I prefer to discuss clothes that excite me as the seasons shift. This spring, I’m drawn to clothes that reflect work and leisure—not as polar opposites but as parallel expressions of human wholeness. After all, spring and summer are the seasons for idleness, marked by bikes that creak out of garages and folding chairs that live in trunks. This list is about the clothes I like to wear for light work on warm afternoons and dawdling on cool evenings. It’s clothes for gardening, brunch, and listening to rediscovered LPs. Hopefully, you can find something here that inspires you for your wardrobe.
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In 2008, a StyleForum member shared photos of a bespoke shirt they had made by the renowned Neapolitan shirtmaker Anna Matuozzo. Though the images have since been lost to time, they showed a blue-and-white Bengal-striped dress shirt made from Carlo Riva cotton, featuring a semi-spread collar and some extraordinary details. The buttons were firmly shanked, the sleevehead and yoke showcased delicate shirring, and fine, nubby topstitching traced the seam running along the shoulder—all hallmarks of careful hand tailoring. At the time, the price for such a shirt—bespoke, cut from an adjusted block pattern, and crafted with the highest degree of handwork—was 350 Euros. The price was considered so stratospheric at the time that it sent several forum members reeling. One distinguished member with decades of bespoke experience questioned the rationale behind spending so much on a dress shirt. "If an errant meatball rolls down your body, it's done," he cautioned.
I was reminded of this painful lesson last year while getting dressed. A decade of dipped garlic naan and Vietnamese spring rolls rolling down my gullet has nudged me up a size. Unlike jackets, shirts don't have seam allowances, so I've had to rebuild my shirt wardrobe. A few weeks ago, I published a post about which shirts I find useful in a tailored wardrobe; this one is about casualwear.
Like my "Excited to Wear" posts, this series is full of personal prejudice. Over the years, I've found that dry, generic lists of "wardrobe essentials" are rarely useful or interesting. What I enjoy reading most are people's unapologetic opinions on clothing. That said, casualwear presents a unique challenge. Unlike traditional men's tailoring, which follows a relatively narrow set of conventions, casual dress is vast and varied. Much of what I'll cover here will only resonate if you, like me, enjoy dressing like Bob the Builder. Still, I hope you find one or two things worth considering.
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