London's Best

It has taken several years to locate suppliers of the quality you expect from the ASW haberdashery but leathergoods have begun to trickle in. The first of them are business card cases, passport covers and a very slim jacket pocket wallet for evening made by R B J Simpson, supplier to London's best names including Foster & Son, G. J. Cleverley and John Lobb.

The best leather is superior to man-made fabrics for abrasion protection and that includes the hostile environment of many pocket interiors. Simpson uses the very best quality English Bridle leather to make strong, durable, scratch resistant and very lightweight products with great depth of color.

Visit New Arrivals.

Summer Shoes In The Country

It has been spring cleaning week on the Sonoma coast, and yours truly has been living in the country to coordinate the various contractors required to get the house through another year (the salt air means things like exterior light fixtures rot away entirely in what seems like the blink of an eye). It is more casual here. In San Francisco some men wear suits. In the town of Sebastopol where I plan to have dinner at K&L Bistro tonight, there will not be so much as a jacket (this should not be too surprising given that the nearest men's clothier is fifty miles away).

Casual clothing to a pedant like myself falls into two classes: odd jackets and casual suits for the office and shirt jackets and odd trousers around and about (OK, on the golf course a shirt jacket is out of place). The only variables are the style of neckwear (which can range from neckerchiefs with the aforementioned shirt jackets, through scarves with shirt or odd jackets to neckties with odd jackets and suits) and the shoes.

City shoes are easy for we rulebound men: oxfords with suits, and bluchers or monks wih odd jackets. It is in the country that summer's options open to include a dizzying array of spectators, saddle shoes, bucks and all kinds of slipons to name just some of the possibilities. Rules go out the window for the most part, and you will not hear that from me often.

In the photograph, a blue cotton suit, paisley necktie and a pair of suede Sloops worn with Not So Basic Cotton Dress Socks in a lighter shade than the trousers a la Grant and Astaire.

Vulgar Has Its Own Reward

We took some well-deserved criticism for the vulgarity of the title of the book we reviewed this past Sunday. I do not think we should be blamed for the publisher's choice of name but we did choose to review the thing and as Editor of course I take full responsibility for giving offense to some readers. That said, it is only fair that Réginald-Jérôme de Mans should metaphorically be scourged for his role in this fiasco. And so dear reader we offer you the Vulgar Has Its Own Reward contest.

Vulgar Has Its Own Reward asks only that you suggest one or more cheeky virtual punishments for M. deMans. For example, our friend Derek thought that RJ should be obliged to clip all his beloved Ballantyne rollnecks into Tiger Woods-esque mock turtlenecks. The Viceroy on the other hand, being apparently a less destructive soul, suggested that he be required to order an unlined yak hair coat from Camps de Luca (though it turns out he already has one from some lesser label).

Thanks to Cordings of Picadilly, who was kind enough to donate suitable rewards, each of up to six lucky contest winners will receive one navy cotton handkerchief beautifully printed with white game birds and a pair of green cotton socks with a snappy shotgun shell motif. As is only appropriate each gift has been carefully selected to be distinctive enough so that, should a winner and he ever occupy the same physical space, RJdM will be certain to know that said winner played a major role in this public thrashing.

You get the drift. Just click on the link to play (comments on the site are not eligible since among other things we will have no way to determine where to send the prize). We will publish the winners next week along with Réginald-Jérôme's response should he be bold enough to come out of hiding to do so.

Linen Shirts

In the photograph, Peter Harvey's fresco jacket is combined with a shirt of Carlo Riva Lino Arsenal, a Simonnot-Godard pocket square and a Drake's London bow tie. Perhaps the least appreciated of those is the linen shirt, which is another of that set of things that deserve to be more common than they are.

Until the rise of cotton, linen was the most common fabric used close to the skin, which explains the name linens for shirts, handkerchiefs and bedding even though few of those are commonly made from linen any longer. Labor intensive to produce, the economics of linen usually require a higher price than cotton and the cost limits its popularity. On the other hand, linen wears cooler and absorbs moisture better than cotton, making the stuff a particularly comfortable choice for hot weather.

A second negative to linen besides price has been that in shirting weights the stuff creases when it is so much as looked at. Pure linen shirts are one of those things that should be changed at least once a day, which is hardly practical for men who need to be out and about for most of the time. And that is where another one of those blended fabric miracles of modern weaving technology comes into play, for Carlo Riva and David & John Anderson, the two best shirting makers of the world, each offer 50-50ish linen and cotton blends with a finer hand and a reduced propensity to crease than pure linen. Better still, in the somewhat rarified air in which these fabrics play their price is no more than the best pure cottons.

The usual knock on summer shirtings is that they can be sheer. Neither Lino Arsenal or DJAs Zephir 170 have this trait and that makes them perhaps the best choice for hot weather dress shirts.

It Takes Five Tailors

With apologies to the biography of the late Adolphe Menjou, I have the less than ordinary habit of using several tailors each year. Each does some things better than the others which is the point of this post. So, for the gentleman who asked, here they are.

Double breasted fully lined city suits: Thomas Mahon of English Cut has his workshop in Cumbria and travels to the United States semi-annually, visiting New York and San Francisco. Thomas is uncomfortable with out of the mainstream requests but the best at what he does, which is a soft and unstructured suit in the Anderson & Sheppard style that works beautifully for double breasteds (the button point for single breasteds is too low in my opinion). From £2420.00 for a two piece suit from standard cloth that typically takes a year.

Single breasted city suits: Peter Harvey of Savile Row's Davies & Son travels to New York three times a year and visits other cities on two of those trips. The wonderfully accomodating Mr. Harvey cuts a somewhat-less-than-Huntsman-but-still-very-structured suit whose only negative is its price (more than $10,000 USD for a cashmere jacket and a Golden Bale two piece suit last year). Orders take about twelve months but the time can be shortened significantly if you visit them for a fitting between their visits.

Country clothing: Hong Kong's W. W. Chan cuts clothing that is a bit below Savile Row quality for about half of the Row's prices. They visit the USA three times a year, delivering what they call a finished jacket without a fitting in about four months. Most of the time however the garment is really at a final fitting stage and the customer needs to send his marked up pieces back to Hong Kong for adjustment. This practice is mildly deceptive in my opinion as new clients think they are getting something finished that no Row tailor would let out of the shop and that same customer is usually not qualified to tell that something is wrong. But though the service may be less than ordinary the price is extraordinary.

Summer clothing: Napolisumisura of Naples is new to me this year and I admire them not only for delivering great work but for scaling their business to accommodate growth without losing control over quality or deliveries. They are comfortable making an unlined jacket, and their pieces have much more hand sewing than anyone on the Row is economically able to provide. Semi-annual visits to the United States and an order takes about a year unless the customer visits them for a fitting in which case the time is cut in half. 2,400 euro plus cloth for jacket and trousers.

And occasionally: I use Henry Poole once in a while, most recently for a blazer and I intend to get another dinner jacket from them next year (they were after all the first to sew the things). Middle of the road style and middle of the road pricing; they are very accomodating of abnormal requests and Simon Cundey knows as much about cloth as anyone in the business. Poole travels the world, including two extensive trips to destinations in the United States. A typical order takes a year.

Timeless

Browsing through my collection of Apparel Arts and Esquire illustrations, I revisited one of my favorite looks the other day. Though some of what was promoted as stylish in the 1930s, such as the loud seersucker suits and red dress shirts, looks dated or simply too deliberately conspicuous to me now another part of it will look good for so long as the English style of dress is still worn. The jacket style, suede shoes, striped socks, panama hat, shirt with white collar, white linen pocket square and bow tie add character and interest to an otherwise ordinary combination of tan and gray. I might not wear it to take the sun on the beach these days but a man should be perfectly happy with it for a museum visit, Saturday lunch or for that matter almost anywhere in Italy.

This is not to say that the ensemble in the illustration would not stand out during lunch at the Four Seasons. It will be noticed amidst the mundane clothing of the other diners, but then a well dressed man inevitably is.

Book Review: Fuck Yeah Menswear

A crop of surprisingly non-terrible new clothing-related books has given the lie to my earlier direness about style writing. Foremost among these pop rocks for the jaded palate is Fuck Yeah Menswear: Bespoke Knowledge for the Crispy Gentleman, the book version of the notorious tumblr site fuckyeahmenswear, edited by Kevin Burrows and Lawrence Schlossman. To change analogies in mid-stream, this book is, as Pauline Kael wrote of the first Star Wars in 1977, “like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes.”

I confess that, not having read fuckyeahmenswear’s tumblr, I may be lacking in crispiness, whatever that is. But unlike the publication of the I Can Has Cheezburger book, this book does not inspire the reader with embarrassment for its source. Reading Fuck Yeah Menswear the book mixes the flush of self-recognition with the novelty of seeing various internet tropes and memes committed to print.

Interest in men’s fashion has become mainstream enough and widespread enough that the rise of a blog satirizing the assorted Internet-sanctified themes and brands making up what’s now known as “#menswear” was inevitable. I for one feel lucky that fuckyeahmenswear does it so sharply and well, though. Still, one needn’t be familiar with the #menswear world to recognize, laugh or cringe with each new page of this book.

Fuck Yeah Menswear includes essays on men’s fashion touchstones such as the importance of denim or the rise of the heritage brand, along with sections on Internet men’s style archetypes, and guides to the preferred #menswear brands, supposed essential men’s garments and the hierarchy of labels for each article of a man’s wardrobe. Each of these has its epic moments: the archetype section skewers each subculture, from the preps and their joyless cousins the trads (who I had still held out hope might turn out to be someone’s elaborate online joke) to the goth ninja (I laughed out loud, one of my best e-friends is a goth ninja of the Fūma clan). The guide to essentials lands a masterful strike of literary dim mak in hitting each of the essential items of clothing with a tongue-in-cheek preciosity that’ll make your toes curl; and I had to retrain my facial muscles to get the smirk off my face after learning that the hierarchy guide (from “wealth” to “baller” to “poor”) dismisses Brooks Brothers (for shirts), J. Crew (trousers) and Allen Edmonds (shoes) as “poor.” For in the solipsistic, echoing virtual world of today’s postmodern Walter Mittys these classifications take on extra relevance and resonance as some of the most frequently mentioned, coveted and most of all, derided brands.

Derision is one of the low-denomination currencies of Internet forums: easy to acquire and to wield based on hearsay, received wisdom, or a simple willingness to outspend one’s virtual peers for more aspirational, more exclusive, labels. And in capturing that derision, Fuck Yeah Menswear shines most of all outside these organized sections, in the interspersed photos of #menswear preciosity with accompanying poetic, creatively imagined inner monologues, soliloquies or dialogues glistening with put-downs, name-checking and nicknaming celebrities and status brands that are generally meaningless to people outside the #menswear community (Boglioli, Nick Wooster, Brunello Cucinelli, the Sartorialist…).

Elaborately lauded though they are, there’s no point in or need for quibbling with the particular brands Fuck Yeah Menswear ranks and celebrates. Whether, for instance, the “wealth” suit should be “Savile Row Bespoke” and not a maker prized by the Internet for being even rarer and more expensive like Liverano or Rubinacci bespoke is beside the point. Fuck Yeah Menswear records that certain fanatic, thoughtless received wisdom known as groupthink, presumptions and prejudices that accrete based on thirdhand repetition and that lack of empiricism that means that all experience, now, is becoming virtual. So Fuck Yeah Menswear’s rogues gallery of favorite shops will ring true with many readers even if we have never been to Atlanta and Sid Mashburn or to New Haven and J. Press: punters have already visited all of these new opium dens in the pipe dreams of forum threads, magazine articles and blog reviews.

Carefully contrived for an imagined and virtual public of potential fashion bloggers and forum participants and throwing out intentionally obscurantist keywords like “sprezz” and “trad,” Fuck Yeah Menswear brings out the self-involved, incestuous cultishness of internet men’s clothing subcultures despite their uneasy balkanization of the past decade, Fuck Yeah Menswear is at its best arrested on these images, their subjects apparently unaware of the evanescence of their own interest (surely interest men’s clothing will become uncool again soon now that everyone is talking about it and I can go back to being mildly eccentric again), unpacking superficiality for the yearning that we all seek for the acceptance of a broader community that understands and shares our tastes, along with the status cravings most of us won’t admit to.

Words by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.