An Unexpected Blend

I have written before that in my opinion pink combines best with gray suits (this despite the British predilection for wearing that color with navy).

Pink in turn combines well with lilac, particularly a subtle shade that is almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from gray. And when jacket, shirt, necktie and square each have white in the pattern, the elements blend together.

The Delayed Return of the DB Vest

The film "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps" was originally supposed to be released in April but has now been moved back to October. And that undoubtedly means that the return of the double breasted vest, worn by Michael Douglas with his single breasted suits, will also be delayed.

Douglas' clothing in the original "Wall Street" created ready to wear demand for suits with braced trousers as well as shirts with white collars and cuffs. It seems only logical that suit manufacturers will be eyeing his new wardobe for style ideas and those vests are by far the obvious choice.

The problem of course is that if a vest is the trickest element in a suit to fit, a double breasted vest has that challenge in spades. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Always Be Specific

I was was a Brooks Brother customer for decades and that firm trained me to be fairly casual when ordering clothes. They had their own way of doing things and one need only choose a cloth, specify single or double breasted and wait until the garment was complete.

That casualness ended on Savile Row. My first tailor there was another of those institutions that had own their way of doing things, accompanied by an unfortunate tendency to make single breasted suits when they had been asked for double. And the reverse. Needless to say, their casual approach brought my casual approach to a quick end.

And though considerable time has passed the need for specificity is still with us. Take covert coats, for example. Coverts have been around for a century or more and most men would assume that that their design is standardized. Just specify the collar and be done with it would seem reasonable, but that is so untrue. For example, the rows of stitching along the hem and sleeve ends that were designed to keep the coat from fraying when riding through brush. Order a covert expecting authenticity and one is likely to find that the stitching has become purely decorative, and invisible from a few feet away.

Coverts are also known for their interior game pocket, a space inside the left side lining that is perfect for storing a scarf (who among us has not lost scarves that were stuffed into a sleeve at a coat check?). But leave the pocket unsaid and it is likely to be left unmade. There may be more, but two complaints should suffice.

Now one cannot blame one's tailor for a failure to read the customer's mind. And the cost of imperfect communication is only the couple of months that it takes to return a garment to the shop for changes. But that delay does mean that an item is likely to be delivered at the end of its intended season, relegating it to storage for half a year before it can be enjoyed.

And that is a very good reason to always be specific.

Always Have a Fitting

It is travelling tailor season again and Peter Harvey and Graham Lawless of Davies & Son were in San Francisco last week. They arrived with a work in progress - a city suit in a 15 ounce worsted from Smith's Whole Fleece bunch. The cloth has substance between the fingers but it feels significantly lighter on the body than either a flannel or a tweed of the same weight, and should be wearable much of the year.


It is always good to see friends but our visit demonstrated once again the benefit of a forward fitting for bespoke clothing. This piece is the sixth or seventh item Peter has made for me and the pattern is close to perfected by now. Nonetheless, his well cut left sleeve has been attached incorrectly and needs to be rotated. The creases at the back of the shoulder and at the back will go away once it has been removed and re-attached. It needs to be shortened as well.

When a tailor simply sews a suit and sends it on, as the otherwise very competent Hong Kong boys do unless instructed otherwise, problems like this must be noticed by the often inexperienced customer, who must then wait until the tailor's next visit before returning his suit to Hong Kong. What is on the surface a faster process - as little as three months - ends up taking at least as long as the Savile Row firms require, and is considerably more stressful. Assuming of course that the customer has noticed the ripples behind his shoulder in the first place.

Always have a fitting.

Spring is Coming to ASW

Spring is in the air, and with it come lighter colors like the ones worn by the gentlemen in Esquire's illustration of visitors to the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Lighter colors and other accoutrements of Spring will be arriving at the ASW Online Haberdashery beginning next week. The United States Customs Service is hopefully busy clearing shipments of neckties, pocket squares and handkerchiefs, to be followed over the coming weeks by scarves, what may be the world's finest linen caps and a surprise or two.

Look for new items beginning next week and continuing throughout the remainder of March and April, or as near as we can manage it.

Of Trousers and Cuffs

In the late 19th century, men's trousers were worn at the natural waist, unpleated and uncuffed. Cuffs, or in England turnups, originated on a certain Prince's country clothes at the beginning of the twentieth to keep his trouser bottoms out of the mud. Their popularity was assured by the natural inclination of the English aristocrat to emulate the smallest details of the royal family's clothing (another being the now unused bottom button on men's waistcoats).

Somewhat later, around the 1920s, an enterprising Savile Row tailor first conceived trouser pleats. Pleats, which are relevant to cuffs only for a rule that will be promulgated later in this essay, give trousers better shape as they fall over the hip bones and are principally associated with high waisted trousers that will be worn with braces (in America, suspenders). They quickly spread to essentially all Savile Row trousers, becoming the lounge suit environment in which cuffs did or, less often, did not exist.

Of course, since the Second World War the majority of men in North America as well as much of Italy wear belted trousers sitting on their hips and that makes pleats technically unnecessary. Cloth shortages during that same war caused the U.S. government to ban pleats as well as trouser cuffs, returning American trousers to a nineteenth century state where, assisted by the trouser manufacturers who are always ready to save a bit of cloth here and there, they have remained ever since.

Now that bit of background is relevent only for the way that I think about trouser cuffs, which is that they are worn with pleated trousers except that they are never seen on semi-formal and formal versions. Remember that cuffs began on country clothes and though they became accepted for lounge suits they have never progressed further up the formality tree. For some reason they are always associated with double breasted jackets but are optional with single breasteds (this may be a holdover from their failure to become accepted with formal wear).

Personally, I think flat fronted American style trousers should always be worn uncuffed, but if one is going to wear flat fronted trousers on the hips to begin with the addition of cuffs surely does not make the situation worse.

Out of the mud, cuffs do perform some useful work in that their weight helps maintain a straight fall of the trousers (uncuffed trousers benefit from a bit of heavy tape sewn inside the trouser bottoms but this is less effective than a cuff). Aside from that they exist principally for aesthetic reasons, which is to say that properly sized cuffs look better.

Visually, cuffs should be relatively proportionate to the length of the leg wearing them. The cuff for a man of average height should usually be one and three-quarter inches high and may be as large as two inches. Tall men benefit from a full two inches, and shorter men look better with a cuff of one and a quarter to one and a half inches. My own cuffs run run 1 3/4" to 1 7/8," depending on the tailor and general randomness.

In summary, each of the three schools of thought about cuffs has some basis in history however transient that basis may be. My own religion is high waisted trousers with pleats and cuffs. Except that my formal and semi-formal wear is cuffless. And that is probably enough about that.

Back to the Drawing Board

I had been looking for some cloth for a light weight odd jacket and settled on a swatch of black and white seersucker that looked as though it would make up well for summer evenings in the city. Then this photo of it came along.

It may only be that slanted pockets on city clothes are not to my taste and a slouchier look suits me better. It may be that for me the coat should be paired with dark gray trousers rather than black. But on second thought that swatch is crossed off the list.

So it is back to the drawing board.

Photo: Scabal