Bring on the Goat Hair

Black tie season is upon us next week, with the San Francisco symphony's opening night kicking things off. The weather of course is still warm in most parts of the northern hemisphere, which means the usual heavy barathea dinner jacket is likely to be uncomfortable even though evenings are generally cooler. And that is when a ten ounce mohair version, like a wider lapelled relation of the one Frank Sinatra is wearing to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, comes into its own.

Those few men who who attend black tie events monthly or even more often are likely to want more than one set of evening clothes. Four of them probably suffice for anyone other than a professional entertainer, and the first two are more for fun than necessity:

• a smoking jacket, in velvet or tartan, to wear for evenings at home
• a shawl collared ivory silk or gabardine, for cruises and outdoor summer dances
• a heavier midnight blue barathea
• and a black mohair mid-weight

The mixture of mohair and wool is particularly nice in a mid-weight cloth because it breathes, so it wears cooler than its weight. And, it has a bit of sheen to complement the silk of the facings after dark, which is why I conclude that Ol' Blue Eyes is wearing the stuff.

Bring on the goat hair!

The Blazer Shoe

The strap and buckle shoe is the perfect footwear for the navy blazer, in my opinion. If the blazer and gray flannels are not quite a suit, what could be more appropriate than a great looking shoe that is not quite suitable for wear with a suit?

More commonly known as the monk strap, the chestnut strap and buckle makes a good sixth pair of dress shoes in a wardrobe. Like the blazer, it will do for the office when it must, but it is more comfortable dressed up on the weekend.

And there it shines. Give me a mottled brown monk strap toe under my flannels and I am a happy man.

Photo: Edward Green

The Fall Pocket Square

Autumn is the time for new textures to grace suits and odd jackets, like these bird and foliage patterned pocket squares. At 16 ½” (42 cm) in each direction they are large enough to stand up without being too bulky, so their hand rolled edges display properly in the pocket. A mixture of 70% wool with 30% silk added to the weave to catch the light, they would usually be paired with flannels and tweeds though some men might use them to add a touch of sprezzatura to worsteds.


Choose tans, brown and light blues on a navy ground with a dark green border for gray or brown suits and odd jackets, or blues, greens and brown on a rust ground with a leaf green border for navy jackets and suits.

And that is the fall pocket square.

Patched Shoes

Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images Europe

Reader Eric called this photo to my attention a few days ago. HRH Prince Charles is wearing a pair of (presumeably) older bespoke shoes, and the shoes have been patched.

Well, if I had ever seen patched shoes before they definitely were not on the feet of a prince. So I wrote Tony Gaziano of Gaziano & Girling to ask if this is a common sight among England's bespoke set.

Tony replied that patches are not an uncommon practice for older bespoke shoes. When the leather eventually rots and splits around the vamp it leaves a hole or tear. As Tony put it, "When the customer is so in love with the shoe that he does not want to throw it away, or even if he is try to save a few pounds by giving the shoe longer life, then we stitch a leather patch on the uppers, looking almost like a band aid/plaster. To be honest it looks better on black which is ok because most of the guys that would have this done come from an era where only black shoes were worn."

I learn something new every day.

Fear Not the Boutonniere

Some men fear the pocket square as well as the boutonniere, and this post is not for them. Others will dare to wear a square and find the flower a step too far. A third group likes either, but not together. But the usual list of great dressers wore them simultaneously.

If fear can be overcome, the principal obstacle to wearing a boutonniere is finding a fresh bloom in the mornings. Carnations are best. Choose red ones for day wear, or pink on sunny days, and ideally miniatures as the full-sized variety adds a non-trivial load to a light-weight summer lapel.

When there is a florist convenient to the morning's walk, the price of a single flower should be no more than a dollar (or some fraction of a euro). Often, in my experience, the person behind the counter will be so pleased to see the custom resurrected that she will make it a gift the first time or two.

Men in temperate climates will find that half a dozen plants in the garden or on the balcony will provide blooms most days year-round. And where the climate is not temperate, the serious hobbyist can glass in a small space for a surprisingly modest sum.

Fear not the boutonniere.

A Striped Grenadine Necktie

Silk grenadines are, with knits, my favorite neckties. I like the way the weave adds surface interest to the vee of jacket, shirt and necktie, and over the years I have accumulated nearly a dozen solids in colors ranging from silver to mid-blue.

I should have known better, but just when I thought I had acquired all the grenadine a man could desire, I found that grenadines do not have to be solids. There are two striped versions in my wardrobe now, and I am sporting one of them today.

This is of course a pre-opening tease for the ASW online store where the striped grenadine in the photo (55" long and 3 1/2" wide) will be offered for $130 a necktie.

Wanted: A Tailor's Dummy

A reader wrote last week asking for an illustrated series showing how to accessorize navy and gray suits to provide a variety of looks. That sounds like an excellent idea, if I can work out the details of how to do it in less than a month without hiring three photographic assistants. And one conclusion I reached quickly is that I need to locate a tailor's dummy for the clothes.

Now in addition to the inevitable comments relating tailor's dummies to yours truly, I am hoping to get a bit of help here. You see, I have not been able to find a proper one so far and I anticipate that a reader can point me to something more classic looking than the ladies sewing dummies available on eBay. Said form will be installed in the small photo studio I am setting up North of the City. With luck, the process of usefully illustrating ASW will become quite a bit easier, and that will be better for all of us.

Assuming, of course, that a reader can point me to a tailor's dummy.

Knocking About Suits

Every man needs clothes for just knocking about, and in the realm of tailored clothing perhaps nothing better fits that bill than a cotton suit. Whether poplin, seersucker or corduroy like Wes Anderson's jacket and trousers in the photo, the advantage of cotton is that it combines form with a casual air. It is also as inexpensive as these things ever get, which of course is not really inexpensive at all.

The disadvantage of cotton is that it does not wear as long as wool, and the tailoring costs the same whether the cloth is cheap or dear. But where there is a will there is a way, and cloth merchants like Scabal have found that by weaving some cashmere into their cotton they can collect almost as much as they do for good wool. That takes care of the cost side but, sadly, does nothing for longevity.

Still and all, when a man wants to look approachable without giving up his matching jacket and trousers the cotton suit is probably his best choice.

A Glen Check DB

The glen check pattern lends itself a bit better to the single breasted jacket than it does to a DB, in my opinion, but in the photo its done about as well as can be by our usual subject, Luca di Montezemolo, who has paired it with a blue shirt and dark knit necktie.

The 20th century kings of England wore a lot of glen check, always flannel (like Montezemolo's suit), and always single breasted. The pattern is a lovely intermediate, falling as it does between cloths meant exclusively for city streets and those meant only for country hillsides. It's not worn for business in England, though it is in the US. But it's just about perfect for a trip to the Ferrari pits on race day.

A Yellow Knit Necktie

In the photograph, Nicholas Antongiavanni, author of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style, on holiday in the Bay area this week. He is wearing a yellow knit tie with his blue and yellow checked linen shirt as well as a navy linen jacket, white bucks, and white flannel trousers.

To the best of my knowledge, cloth for white flannel trousers in anything less than a too-warm-for-summer 17 ounce/500 gram weight can be obtained only from Dormeuil (not Harrison's, as I wrote in the initial version of this post).

The yellow knit necktie, on the other hand, is fairly widely available and one of the classics of summer. It adds a bit of sunshine to a blue blazer, and we are all the better for it.

Cloth Cutting Clothes

Got a yardstick, tailor's chalk and shears at hand, and I am dressed to cut cloth in the photo.

In this ensemble, light gray socks pick up secondary colors in the jacket, contributing to a more eclectic look than would a pair of tan. The combination of brown herringbone coat, light blue shirt, dark red necktie with white micro-dots, cream pocket square, cream trousers, and tan shoes has a properly careless look to it in my opinion.

Glad to be Back

In the photograph, the late Duke of Windsor is in Nassua, capital of the Bahamas, at what I will guess by his dress is a golf course.

The Duke's chinos, bluchers and a Shetland odd jacket have been tasteful casual dress in the civilized world for three or four generations but as we all know the places where style hangs on are fewer every month. During the two days I spent in and around Reno, Nevada, the normal dress of the inhabitants was a tee shirt and denim, with the few souls in collared shirts outnumbered by the winners of the race to the bottom in their polyester track suits. And that was in the casino.

Now I do recognize that men are unlikely to wear odd jackets when no-one around them is doing so. And the problem is compounded by the probable lack of a place offering them for sale locally.

Fortunately there are a few square blocks in San Francisco where a jacket wearer still fits in. I am glad to be back.

Keep Them Buttoned

One of the more persistent clothing myths is that double breasted jackets constantly require buttoning and unbuttoning. The truth is that a properly fitted jacket never needs to be unbuttoned during wear, as the late William Powell demonstrates to Jean Harlow, film's first platinum-haired bombshell.

Keep them buttoned.

Time to Think About Overcoats

The last two weeks of August are the time to think about overcoats. There is just time to have one made if that is called for, and the coming month is when the current crop should visit the tailor to have buttons replaced, the lining repaired and other maintenance performed that may have been neglacted when winter ended months ago.

Participants in the ASW overcoating project will be happy to know that the cloth is woven and ready for dispatch. Delayed when the first batch of thread was deemed unsatisfactory by the mill, it is, as promised, a 22 ounce/700 gram black and white herringbone flannel executed in a mixture of cashmere and lambswool.

Mine will be double breasted, with sleeve cuffs like the coat on the man to the right of the Esquire illustration.

Smart Packing

Knit neckties, like the one worn by the Marquis Luca Cordero di Montezemolo on the left in the photo, make the best neckties for travel. Roll them up in a shoe and they emerge unscathed, unlike most conventional silks of my acquaintance. Black and navy blue versions, with and without dots, should be in every serious dresser's wardrobe.

Perfectly acceptable during the day, knits have the additional advantage of being slightly unexpected. The Italians call it sprezzatura. I call it smart packing.

Dress Shirt Informality

The most formal dress shirts are of course white, french cuffed, spread collared and made from a smooth fabric. But when a man wants to dress more casually there are ways to reduce the formality without the usual practice of using more color or a larger pattern. For example, the cotton Chambray shirt in the photo is meant to be worn under a sweater or an odd jacket, with or without a necktie, and has a hidden buttondown collar that adds a touch of carelessness to its look.

Chambray, also called cotton batiste, is a lightweight, tightly woven cloth with a slightly glossy surface due to reflection from white threads in the warp. Neither the cloth nor the color draw any notice.


The shirt's casualness comes from its straight point collar that is worn without collar stays. The points are attached by buttoning tabs under the collar that permit movement while holding it roughly in place. With a necktie, the points are always just slightly askew, without the fussiness of an unbuttoned buttondown.

And that is dress shirt informality.

Maple Mitchells

Arriving just before the end of summer gun is this pair of Gaziano & Girling Mitchells in vintage maple calf on the MH71 last. The Mitchell is a relatively modern form of brogue where, instead of the traditional method of punching holes into strips of leather that are attached to the shoe, smaller punches are made directly into the body. The result is a cleaner looking design that goes well with lighter tones.

Sadly, these are specialty shoes for many men as their color is likely inappropriate for conservative settings. For the rest of us, they slide nicely into the summer rotation. In my opinion, maple shoes look their best next to the equally pale trousers of summer, particularly light gray and light blue. Men more influenced by the South of Italy may wear them with navy, but I think that a shade too far.

Wardrobe Building: Year Two

Photo: Gaziano & Girling

A reader asked me to write the follow-up to last year's piece on how a man might put together a professional wardrobe on a budget of $5-7,000 annually. In the first year, I recommended purchasing a medium-weight suit, a blazer, and an odd jacket with accessories, and then planning to focus on lighter weight clothing the second year.

Again budgeting about $1,000 for a suit or a jacket and trousers combination, in the second year acquire a navy blue suit in a ten month cloth, a light gray tropical weight suit and a discreetly patterned lightweight odd jacket with a tan ground as well as a pair of light gray tropical wool trousers. This provides a total of three suits for warm weather wear, as well as a blazer and two odd jackets for less formal occasions.

It is a little harder to be specific about accessories in this and future years since it is difficult to predict the rate at which things wear out and need to be replaced, but, barring disaster, all of last year's clothing should still be serviceable. Add a pair of cordovan colored monkstrap shoes with matching belt to the purchase list and take last year's shoes to a cobbler for new heels. The repairs will extend their life.

Next, re-visit a shirtmaker for another half dozen button cuff dress shirts, half of them for year-round wear and half in lighter weight cloth. Pick up a couple pair of wool and a couple pair of cotton dress socks to extend that part of your wardrobe. Ditto for underwear.

Finally, pick out another half dozen neckties if you are wearing them at least two days a week. And that will take care of the budget for dressy clothing.

Looking ahead to year three, the focus should be adding three more mid-weight suits so a different one is available for each day of the week.

The Winged Collar Shirt Again

Well, the winged collared shirt from Mel Gambert Custom Shirts arrived at Gene Hiller's Sausalito store last week and off we (myself and von Span) went to try it on. Store Manager Peter Domenici met us, and was kind enough to have my jacket pressed while I donned the shirt (these things take time, which is one of the reasons to-attach collars are not seen very often any longer).

The fit seemed spot on, or as close to it as one can tell before the shirt is washed a couple of times, and the construction is nicely done (the collar stud and the buttoned front will be considerably different when the shirt is actually worn with evening dress).


Since I am a novice to this type of shirt, I do have a couple of questions about the collar construction that will hopefully be answered in a day or two.


The combination of heavy pique and light weight voile is exactly what I had hoped for. The shirt wears much lighter than it would had it been made entirely of heavier cotton, but the light weight parts will be hidden under my jacket.

I think I will wear it to the Symphony's Opening Night Gala in September.

Photos: von Span

Very Nice

Too warm wearing for the hottest days, the brown gabardine odd jacket really comes into its own when temperatures are in the 60s and 70s f (16 to 26c). And that is why, when it is seen at all, it is usually as a double breasted.

What double breasted jackets may add in style they take away in temperature control. That extra flap of cloth across the front will never make the coat wear cooler, relegating it to a milder range of temperatures than its single breasted brothers.

The white contrast collar shirt on our gabardine wearer may be a little formal for the occasion, but such shirts may be worn with navy blazers so perhaps the bounds of propriety have been stretched but not crossed completely. The remainder of the ensemble is timelsss.

Very nice.

Summer Again

An unplanned overflow of house guests means a young man is sleeping in the study. So today's post is short of necessity.

But the sun is shining after a week of cool weather.

Watch This Space

Most readers will have forgotton that I planned to open an online haberdashery this year, and the project has taken so long that even I nearly forgot about it. But what was originally intended to be special order shoes and cloth has taken a different turn, and interested people will see a growing selection of world class pocket squares, neckties and scarves available from stock over the course of August, to be followed by shoe inventory in several months.


The store will be adding items this month bit by bit until it has a couple dozen necktie designs, silk scarves and squares for early autumn. Many of the items are resurrected designs from the archives that will be available only from ASW. Orders will be accepted online, and shipped without taxes or shipping charges from Nevada.

I look forward to your feedback after the project is live. Please watch this space.

A High Contrast Combination

A very well dressed gentleman wrote the other day asking for more details on an ASW post on the combination of a green necktie and a gray flannel suit (Gray and Green).

A few days later he illustrated his own essay on the London Lounge with a gray pin striped suit, a horizontally striped shirt and a high contrast orange necktie.

High contrast is best on sunny days of course, in keeping with the general surroundings. Here is a version of that sunny day combination.

Lifestyle: Better than Books

I never thought I would see the day, but I am a believer. Amazon's Kindle book reader, or amazonkindle as it says on the device, is better than books. The form factor and light weight are better and the reading experience is better. If only the store experience was better.

Not that the store experience is bad because it is is not. But Amazon chose to make a separate Kindle store instead of making Kindle editions part of the principal Amazon bookstore and the Kindle store has but a pale shadow of Amazon's regular search and recommendations capabilities.

That separation from Amazon's regular inventory may have something to do with the relatively limited availability of Kindle editions. Relative in this case means 300,000 books instead of millions, but that is still a significant deficit for a multiple books each week reader like myself who is generally seeking things from the intermediate space between expired copyright and current bestsellers. Which is of course precisely the area where the Kindle inventory is understandably the weakest.

That said, I was able to find four books of interest in my first day in Kindle's kingdom and I have gone on from there. Multiple books in a single device - the new generation of Kindle holds about 1500 of them at a time - was the reason I began thinking about acquiring a book reader. The $299 (about 210 Euros) price is the tradeoff for a ten ounce book reader that replaces five or ten pounds of carry-on reading material on a long distance flight.

Once past the initial pain of the device purchase, Kindle books are about the cost of a paperback, so there is no obvious ongoing economic penalty to digital books. Delightfully, new reading material is downloaded quickly, wirelessly. In fact, my initial orders were in the reader when I opened the box. And did I say that the reading experience is better than books?

Now if only they can do something about that bookstore.

Sunny Day Shetlands

Men who live by the sea, where a coastal day can be surprisingly cool, should feel comfortable donning a Shetland tweed jacket out of season when the temperature calls for it. Indeed, there is ample precedent in old illustrations from Apparel Arts and Esquire for Shetland wearing among the summer cottages of the American elite and there is certainly no shortage of appropriately cool days in the northern latitudes. Shetland, of course, is the lighter tweed, available in weights between 10 and 14 ounces (300 to 400 grams).

Sunny day Shetlands work nicely with cream colored trousers from either hard to find lightweight worsted flannel or the more widely available mid-weight gabardine. Add spectator shoes and a scarf like those worn by the gent in the illustration for his tour around the deck.

The tweed cap is optional.

Better and Better

For those who have yet to notice, the lads at Gaziano & Girling continue to impress with beautifully shaped models in classic designs. Above, the Woburn blucher brogue.


The Burlington (also available with a heel counter as the Kensington) is a new G&G oxford. Customer response, particularly from Japan, has kept the company's order book full despite weak economies in the United States and Western Europe.

And the shoes just keep getting better and better.

Photos: Gaziano & Girling

Sunny But Cool

When the weather is sunny but cool, think of mid-weight clothes in lighter colors. In the photo, gabardine trousers and a linen sweater combine with white bucks and the first Dry Creek white peaches of the season.

Tightly woven, gabardine wears warm in the heat and cold when the temperature is low, but comes into its own on temperate days.

And next time I will try to remember to pull my trousers back up before posing.

The Lifetime Wardrobe

Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS

A couple generations ago the thrifty brahmins of New England had the concept of the lifetime wardrobe. A man came of age, bought his clothes, kept his figure and rarely needed clothing again. He always looked good, while wearing things that were the antithesis of fashionable.

Even Savile Row clothing will not last a lifetime unless a wardrobe is large enough so that it does not get weekly wear, but fashion should continue to be irrelevent. Oh, necktie widths may change a little over twenty years but the rest of the wardrobe is generally frozen in time. Which is how it must be if we are to continue nodding our heads when we hear the argument that bespoke clothing is cost-effective on a per wear basis.

And we do hear it. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard about the age of some item of the late Duke of Windsor's clothing. It was said of him that later in life he rarely bought tailored clothing, though given the number of New York labels in his wardrobe that saying was probably more politically correct than completely truthful (remember, this is a man who wrote in his autobiography that he had only a fraction of the clothing that was auctioned off after his death).

Windsor aside, for now, the longevity of well made tailored clothing is an argument for having a core of relatively neutral items that can be worn for years without eliciting "There's that tweed suit again" whispers. That is not to say that wardrobes should be free of memorable items, only that those should come later.

Early on, eschew the extreme and make do with loud shirts.

Ask to See The Smith's

In our world of instant access to information, Smith and Co (Woollens) barely exists. There is little information about the company or its products available online. It has a London office in a basement near Savile Row, and owns W. Bill's, the fabric house known for its amazing selection of tweed, and which is also located in a (different) basement near the Row.

Now this would hardly be worth mentioning except that Smith's produces some of the most interesting cloth available to the bespoke tailoring trade. I took delivery of a suit in their Solaro mid-weight this spring, have the pictured blue/gray high twist 11 ounce Finmeresco on the way, and the cloth for a third, a mid-gray cut length of their 15 ounce Whole Fleece, is sitting at Davies & Son in London.


That there is something called Whole Fleece says a lot about Smith Woolens. Whole Fleece is a cloth made the way cloth was made before the Supers came along. Instead of removing all the fine wool from a shearing to make a modern light-weight, and I mean that in more than one sense of the word, cloth, Smith wove the entire fleece into something far more beautiful - substantial but soft cloth with a great hand. And instead of producing a book of twenty varieties, Smith offers the four plain weaves in the typical British palette in the second photo: mid gray, dark gray, charcoal and navy solids.

The next time a table laden with fabric books is at hand, ask to see the Smith's.