The Uniform

Some men thrive on variety in their dress. Others are content to wear the basics over and over and look good doing it.

Style icon Diego della Valle of Tod's regular uniform consists of a pin-striped Caraceni suit, solid colored shirt and classic necktie. Out of sight in the photo will be a white linen handkerchief in his breast pocket and a pair of his company's shoes on his feet (can't blame him for that but they are not up to the level of the rest of his wardrobe).

What to Do?

Butterflies are on my mind these days, the slipon shoes with crossed straps above the apron like the bespoke pair by the Parisian maker Antony Delos in the photograph. W.S. Foster is in town today, hopefully carrying the re-made pair of dark brown casuals that have been in the works for going on two years. If the new slipon last they made for me seems to be doing its job, well I might be able to use one more pair of shoes to replace some monks that Edward Green never managed to make fit. In chestnut, if they have the leather.

On the other hand, butterflies are not formal enough to wear with suits, nor are slipons constructed to stand up to any kind of weather. And Foster's casual design is to my mind one of the best looking shoes of its type on the planet. It is too formal for moleskins and cords but would be fine with the odd jacklets and suits that I wear most of the time anyway. A second pair with more brogueing might do an equally good job of replacing those monks.

With any luck I will not be able to reach a decision.

Layer Your Knitwear

The weather is finally getting cool enough in many places for one of the season's best casual looks, that being layered knitwear. Layering is a favorite not only because it looks great but because it is not seen all that often, the usual combination being sweater/jumper over a shirt.

Layering starts with the garment closest to the skin, and that ought to be relatively light, no more than two ply if cashmere and still lighter single ply can be better if the layers will be worn primarily indoors. A rollneck like the one in the photo works well, as do polos and other designs with a relatively high neckline and a simple pattern that brings depth and complexity to the combination.

Atop the under-garment goes a cardigan or knitted jacket that contrasts so the layering is evident. A knit vest adds to the effect. And a scarf of course. But the outer garment should have a visible weave, like the Aran pattern in the photo. 

Now brightly colored pieces can certainly be layered but in my opinion the most effective combinations simply add a knitted twist to traditional menswear coloring. That means grays and blues for urban wear, and browns and greens in the country. Brighter colors are best used as accents - in the scarf, or neckerchief or ascot for example - if they are used at all.

Layer your knitwear.

Say Thank You With Your Dress

When colleagues and friends go to the trouble to entertain this holiday season, take care to show them you are grateful for their efforts. Arrive with a small gift in hand and dress for the occasion. Whatever that dress might be, it did the trick if your hostess greets you with a "don't you look good" gleam in her eye.

Think of it as saying thank you with your dress.

Holiday Blues

Apologies for the dearth of posts but there has been a problem with Google's Blogger software that prevents me from loading photographs. Publishing will resume as soon as possible.

The Suit Jacket Worn Separately

There are never enough clothes in a suitcase in my opinion, but one way to add flexibility to a travel wardrobe is to include a suit that can do double duty as an odd jacket. I am aware of two ways to do this without it being obvious in a not-good way that one is wearing a suit as a separate.

The first route to travel flexibility is to commission a suit or two with buttons that can be changed out to match the occasion (you knew a tailor would be required for this somewhere did you not?). Called the Blazer Suit on the men's clothing forums, the switchable button approach is usually applied to navy suits with jacket buttons that can literally button in and out of the coat (the sleeve buttons are sewn onto a strip and buttoned into the buttonholes). Replace them with a set of brass and voila, a blazer to pair with gray trousers. The most useful Blazer Suits tend to be made from heavy, wrinkle-resistant fresco or mohair blends.

Equally amenable to wear as a separate is the patterned suit of flannel or tweed, with a jacket like the one in the photograph where the cloth might as easily have been made into an odd jacket in the first place. The bolder pattern of course makes the suit itself more useful in transit and in less formal settings than in urban conference rooms.

Either way, the suit jacket worn separately can add variety to a travel wardrobe with none but the wearer knowing the secret.

It Is Good to Have Options

It is odd, I think, that it should be relatively easy to find beautiful cloth for summer or winter odd jackets in appropriate patterns and weights but significantly more difficult to locate comparable stuff for spring and fall days with in-between temperatures. That is of course principally because the staples of cool weather, woolen flannels and tweeds, can't be made lighter than 12-14 ounces (360-420 grams), leaving us only worsteds to choose from.

The ingenuity of man being what it is, mills have for years offered lighter weight worsted flannels and several books of worsted tweeds. Ignoring worsted flannels for today, as I try to do most of the time given that they tend to have none of the desireable characteristics of woolen flannels while still managing to wear hot, Harrison's Glorious Twelfth and John Hardy's Worsted Alsport are two of the better-known worsted tweed offerings, with the Harrison's being a cut above in my opinion.

There is in addition the 10/11 ounce Breanish tweed which can be quite good looking, however Breanish achieves its lower weight with a 2x1 weave rather than the sturdier 2x2 and that makes for relatively fragile cloth that is prone to pilling. It is fine for one change of pace jacket in a wardrobe but in my opinion should not be relied upon exclusively.

All that said, I was pleased to stumble upon W. Bill's Balmoral Shetlands, another selection of 11 ounce faux tweed odd jacketings from London's peerless tweed merchant. The swatches have the apparently inevitable smooth, machine-woven feel of worsteds but there are some interesting checks. I liked the 82237 in the top photo and the 82210 whose underside is shown in the second shot may be my favorite.

It is good to have options.

Thank You George Jessel

The odd jacket may be most at home on a Sunday afternoon in the country. It is certainly well paired with one of George Jessel's original Bloody Marys, made with equal amounts of vodka and tomato juice.

Try it with a light blue oxford shirt, a navy cashmere necktie, gray flannel trousers and a pair of rubber soled bluchers. The odd jacket that is.

And thank you George Jessel.

Cordovan Weather

Every shoemaker I know dislikes shell cordovan for one or more perfectly understandable reasons (it should be obvious from that statement that I know no-one at Alden, which sells so many shell cordovan shoes that it might well perish without the stuff). Shell is very hard to sew by hand (hand-sewing being a significant part of the bespoke shoemaking value proposition), hard to color, warm to wear and does not look all that good because it does not really take a shine. By that set of criteria, the concept of a shell cordovan slipon seems silly, given that slipons are principally warm weather or indoor shoes. There is one application where the stuff shines however, dull though it may be otherwise, and that is for boots to be worn in the wet.

Shell cordovan's usefulness in the wet stems from the same characteristic that makes it warm wearing, that being that it resists moisture to a much greater extent than other leathers. Indeed, if a foot gets wet while encased in shell, it is almost certainly the fault of the shoemaker's seams rather than that of the material itself.

Which leads us to the one, now obvious, application for cordovan in shoes, that being not a shoe at all but a boot or two to wear during the rainy season and even light snow (heavy snows warrant overshoes, snow shoes, skis or, best of all in my opinion, a trip to a place with better weather). One pair on a town last and a less formal pair for slopping around is about right.

In the photo, Gaziano & Girling cordovan-colored shell cordovan boots posing as ordinary oxfords beneath a brown glen check tweed suit by Peter Harvey.

Pictures From An Exhibition

With thanks to the fine people at Wingtip, the first ASW store trunk show was a lot of fun. A couple dozen men and more than one woman stopped by to see and touch the clothes in person and, not incidentally, get a Saphir shoe shine.

The venue being San Francisco, some visitors inevitably wore denim.

Stanley's bespoke Cleverleys warrant special mention.

And at 7PM I was able to trade in my ice water for a single malt.

There are, by the way, some extraordinary new semi-formal bow ties on the store this week as well as new supplies of Mahogany Shoe Care boxes and Simonnot-Godard shirting. Check them out.

Slow Progress

Henry Poole visited San Francisco this week, bringing with them the latest version of a blazer that has been in the works for some time. That has been entirely my fault.  It needed different fronts last Spring you see, and I missed not one one but two appointments in London so this was the first time we had to look at it. And it needed adjustment of course. At this rate it will be ready just in time for weather that is too warm for it, as seems to be the usual course of events.

The visit was worthwhile on another front however as Simon Cundey mentioned that they make an embroidered smoking jacket from silk velvet, a fabric I had thought no longer made. Turns out they keep the stuff on hand for court dress (there is a photo of the smoking on the ASW FaceBook page). In retrospect, I suppose I should have asked the price but I saw no reason to ruin my morning as the jacket I already own is worn during just a couple of the coldest months of our year.

Poole's visit is one of the last of the season, though it will be followed by Fosters later this month. That firm tells me they are bringing the re-make of a pair of slip-on shoes that have also been underway for well over a year.

Slow progress.

Video: The Beauty of Berluti

Berluti from Art of Craftsmanship on Vimeo.


Of the shoes themselves I like only the Warhol slip-on but Berluti's finishes are marvels indeed. The video is almost as nice.

I Learned About Nailheads from the Duke of Windsor

Sometimes we learn from unexpected places. In the photo of the late Duke of Windsor's shirt storage (from the Sotheby's catalog for the auction of some of his personal posessions), five of the shirts in the left hand drawers appear to be nailheads or puppytooth patterns of one color or another. That is a subtle shirting that left to my own devices I might never have considered, and quite an oversight it would have been for the white in these patterns helps them blend nicely with jackets that also have some white in the weave. Since that is a significant fraction of all the coats in my wardrobe, nailheads are a most useful shirting.

Regular readers will remember that a bit of white in each fabric in jacket, shirt and necktie helps the three elements blend together and that is most useful for putting large patterns into context. Unblended, a big check stands out. But when everything works together, the eye keeps moving and the pattern is tamed.

Fortunately, I learned about nailhead shirtings from the Duke of Windsor.

Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Deer Bones

My understanding of the matter is that before there was boxed calf, the leather used for most high grade shoes today, there was waxed calf. Waxed calf has wax applied to the reverse (suede) side of the leather during the tanning process and this side becomes the outer surface of the shoe or more likely, as nearly the only remaining footwear application for it since sometime after the Second World War has been for riding boots, boots.

The process of obtaining a gleaming shine from waxed calf is an arduous one and the men who could afford shoes made from the stuff would literally (have someone else) shine their new shoes daily for some months before wearing them for the first time (and if you did not already you now understand why boxed calf has taken over the market). That polishing process included boning, which is the vigorous application of a deer bone to the surface of the boot or shoe after polish is applied to give said polish a gleam. Deer bone you see has the appropriate density and the natural oils to smooth the rough surface of waxed calf without damaging it.

Now if the good firm of Horween had not convinced so many of us to like shoes made of cordovan, deer bones and the process of boning would probably have vanished into the mists of time by now, preserved only by those few who still get their riding boots made the old fashioned way. But cordovan you see is also a somewhat difficult surface on which to raise a shine and a deer bone works its magic there as well, which is why I mentioned deer bones the other day. And that raised enough puzzled looks so as to warrant an explanation.

And so, cordovan shoe-wearing readers of ASW no longer have an excuse for the dull surface of their shoes. All it takes is a generous coat of Saphir, a deer bone and vigorous rubbing.

Proof, If Such Was Needed

If proof were necessary that a man can have too many shoes it was obvious when I took delivery of the most recent pair of slipons. The shoes in the photo, samples by SW1 for A Suitable Wardrobe, arrived last week (see Goodyear Lasted in Florence). They looked awfully familiar, as they should since they turn out to be nearly identical externally to a bespoke pair that George Cleverley made for me earlier this year.

That is mixed news as I have been wearing the Cleverleys to the suburbs once or twice a week lately, and the Vendomes will take up half of that duty. The two are remarkably similar.The color is a few shades darker, and the strap across the apron shaped a little differently, but the only real way to tell them apart is that the Vendomes have a machine-lasted welt which is not cut as close as is the welt on their hand-lasted relations. Nonetheless, with their hand-stitched apron the Vendomes look at least as good as Northampton shoes from the likes of Edward Green and the price is somewhat better.

Indeed, I like them so much that I am inclined to order a pair of the Vendome Demi-Brogue, which is the same shoe with a row of punches on each side of the strap, in either chestnut or dark brown. And then there is the monkstrap... 

Perhaps there are never too many shoes.

Video: How I Get Dressed

With special thanks to Luciano Barbera, from whose video came the inspiration for this one.

Suitable Stocking Stuffers

We have collected a couple of very suitable stocking stuffers for men at the ASW store. Our over the calf socks, in silk as well as wool, are of course perfectly stuffable and make a very nice gift in their own right once emptied of their holiday cargo. New-to-us combs and shoe horns hand-crafted from real oxhorn (there is a reason they are called shoe horns, after all) fit nicely (I forgot to order hairbrushes but they will be along in a few weeks).

There were also deer polishing bones for that 'boned' shoe shine but they sold out in a couple of hours and will not be back in stock until mid-December. However, should you need something equally memorable for a man that is hard to shop for, we offer a relatively handsome gift certificate that will let him order a bone or some equally rare and interesting item for himself.

Whether gift or everyday fare, we were re-supplied with Saphir products this week, including the new bordo cream and wax. Everything is currently in stock save for the Mahogany Shoe Care kits however those are expected next week as well as we have purchased the few units remaining in the United States.

Have a Hat for a Drizzle

Its time in the sun may have passed for the most part but the hat still has a role in fog or light rain. A fedora sheds enough water to act as a better looking umbrella on days when a little precipitation is expected and it is frankly less trouble to carry than an umbrella (both are a nuisance to set down but at least the hat doesn't occupy a hand or an arm).

Nothing short of a full-blown canopy will do in a downpour of course, so a man needs to pick his spots for the felt, which can complement his shoes like Matteo Marzatto's brim in the photograph. Complementary is certainly not required though; he could as easily be wearing dark green or navy.

Have a hat for a drizzle.

Dressing Down a Worsted

Worsted suits will adapt to the occasion with a simple change of accessories. In the photo, a mid-gray worsted suit is worn to the suburbs with dark brown shoes, a white on blue striped shirt, brown grenadine necktie and a silk pocket square.

The same suit could be paired with black oxfords, a pink striped shirt, a black necktie with white micro-dots and a white linen pocket square for a day in the city.

Goodyear Lasted in Florence

Shoes are not made the same way in Italy and England. The way I heard it, Goodyear welting never took off in Italy for the simple reason that Goodyear never had a salesperson assigned there. But however it may have happened, the English, and the Americans for that matter, usually attach sole to upper using the aforementioned Goodyear welt and the Italians use either Blake or Blake/Rapid construction most of the time.

Now, as one might expect, the two methods are reasonably well aligned with the countries themselves. Goodyear construction is heavier, which is good for the cold, and water resistant, which is good for the wet. Blake is lighter, which is good for the heat, and considerably less expensive, which lends itself to fashionable, short lived shoes (Blake/Rapid is actually closer to Goodyear in terms of its characteristics but let us not let facts get in the way of an otherwise perfectly clear comparison).

Now, like almost everyone who was raised to the Northwest of Milan, I am prejudiced towards Goodyear construction. Blake/Rapid definitely has its place for summer shoes and a couple other applications but there is no better shoe than one that is side channeled and Goodyear welted by hand.

Sole attachment techniques aside, the best Italian shoes may be a bit better made and certainly are a bit better finished than English shoes at roughly the same price point. And that is why I have been looking forward to my first pair of Goodyear welted but Italian-made shoes, sourced in Florence by my friend Francesco. Slipons with hand-stitched aprons they are, and I may need to add a brogued pair of the same design. And some more hand-stitched aprons, monkstraps this time, in some sort of textured calf.

Goodyear lasted in Florence. It is a whole new world.

Unstructured Experimentation

Regular readers already know that I like shirt jackets for casual wear. Unstructured coats in tweed, flannel, moleskin, drill or linen are comfortable, cover the waist and add the necessary pockets to an ensemble.

In this case, unstructured means that shirt jacket construction has no canvas or pads, and just enough lining to hang an interior pocket or two when that is necessary. Otherwise, it is simply a layer of cloth, and that simplicity is what gives an unstructured jacket its lightness and comfort.

Interestingly, the conventional jacket and the shirt jacket show some signs of merging. I saw a Brunello Cucinelli coat yesterday that was an example of where these things are going; a conventionally styled piece but unconstructed, with just a bit of buggy lining and a two piece collar. That is a better make in many ways for warm weather than a conventional odd jacket and of course it is considerably less expensive than an odd jacket to put together.

Now I am too cheap to spend $3,000 on a designer safari jacket that was made to fit someone with a better figure than mine in the first place, so I am approaching this unconstructed jacket thing from two directions. Joe Hemrajani has a new hand tailoring operation in Hong Kong that he says is Oxxford quality, and they are making me a ghillie collared jacket with just a bit of lining from a length of 10 ounce/300 gram Loro Piana cashmere. And the good folks at Inis Meáin are also making me a coat in unlined Irish linen, as worn by the young lady in the photo.

I will report on them when they arrive in February.

More Versatile Than One Might Expect

I wore mine out a year or two ago and I have to admit that I miss it. My stroller, that is. The black jacket and striped or checked trousers that is one form of proper dress for a formal afternoon is actually more useful than one might think.

Now one's traditionally correct opportunities to wear formal daywear are few, being principally limited to afternoon weddings as even the world's diplomatic corps has abandoned it for the most part. And unless one is the father of a family of daughters or a serial husband-to-be, a morning coat could be difficult to justify. The stroller though is a different story.

Simply a conventional jacket rather than a tailcoat, the stroller's color and jetted pockets make it a bit more formal than most odd jackets, but not so much as to draw attention. Cut as a DB, few recognize it as anything other than a black odd jacket (one that fits right into a world so full of black suits). Jacket and trousers serve their traditional functions when worn together. More importantly, they are useful separates as well.

Paired with plain gray flannels and black shoes the black jacket is a slightly more formal version of the navy blazer that can be worn more places than a gold-buttoned coat. Worn separately,  most formal trouser patterns are similar enough to the not-uncommon gray glen check pattern that is often worn under that same navy blazer and are equally at home with a navy cardigan sweater or the in-between knit that is the pub jacket. Indeed, there were so many occasions that lent themselves to jacket, trousers or both, my stroller was the rare item of clothing that I literally wore out.
 
And so I say, consider the stroller. It is considerably more versatile than one might expect.

More Shoes than Clothes?

I admit I was surprised when I read that the great British dandy Neil Bunny Roger (the photo, from the catalog of Sotheby's auction of his things in 1998, shows some of his suits) had more shoes than tailored clothing. Roger was known for commissioning four pair each time he added a suit to his wardrobe - as he did up to fifteen times a year. After all, each pair of a man's shoes works with a variety of tailored clothing. And though that is true I have come to understand that there are reasons to have more shoes.

Now, it is easy to love shoes for themselves. A pair of hand-made shoes may be the most beautiful example of the men's clothing arts, depending on whether one includes cufflinks, dress sets and other jewelry in that category, and hobbyists tend to collect the beautiful.  But that is reasoning independently from the place shoes occupy in the wardrobe, where they can be compared to shirts and neckties as accessories.

Put that way, the concept begins to make sense. Most of us have more than one shirt for each jacket, and, other than a few solid-tie wearing extremists, more than one tie for each shirt. Accessories give variety to tailored clothing and shoes perform the same function. After all, who among us does not do the equivalent of pairing polished calf semi-brogues with gray flannel one day and reversed calf another time?

That said, few men will have Roger's fourteen pair of navy and white spectator shoes but it is not too challenging to see how more than the basic dozen pair can be useful. If I can assume that most men began building their wardrobes as I did, with a few pair of shoes standing next to a larger variety of jackets, it is just not automatic to think that way.

Of Socks, Ties and Trunks

Two new sock designs arrived at the ASW store from Milan this week, a pin-striped wool in five dressy colorways and a luxurious Super 140s wool in three somewhat more casual colors.

The socks are joined by seven new Cappelli neckties, including four cashmere solids and three stripes. There is also a new shipment of the floral navy silk that sold out quickly when I had it this past Spring. As always, there are only three of each size in a design.

Men in the San Francisco Bay area on November 18 are invited to stop in at the first ASW trunk show, to be held at Wingtip, a private club at 560 Sacramento (at Montgomery) between 11AM and 7PM.

Say hello, check your size, see and touch the knitwear, neckwear, shoes and other items in person, and get a free Saphir shoe shine from A Shine & Co's KeaLani. Dress well because Mabel will taking photos that may end up on ASW.

I look forward to saying hello to old friends and meeting new ones.

Looks Like I Will Be Stuck with a Worsted

I have been thinking about dressing for the suburbs quite a bit lately. Instead of five days a week in the City, I am spending three days at my warehouse cum studio in suburban California these days. Pinstripes are out of place there, and country suits no better. Friday suits are perfect. Of course, I have enough of those for one or two Fridays a week, and need enough for four or five.

I wrote about dressing for the suburbs in 2006, and if I have learned anything from my recent experience, it is something that is already known across the American South. Cotton is a good choice for suburban suits. The look - less formal than wool but more appropriate somehow than linen - seems to fit, as does the typical palette of browns, tans and mid-blues. And olive, of course. Just try to find it.

W. W. Chan made me a brown cashmere and cotton suit last winter that has been my favorite thing to wear on these warm fall days. The trouble is that if I am to get another I want olive to suit the season and there is no more cloth of that color. Nor have I been able to locate any olive gabardine in an 11 or 12 ounce (330 to 360 gram) weight that would suffice for somewhat cooler temperatures.

So here I am. I need a Friday suit that I can wear in the suburbs on temperate Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. It is back to the drawing board for cloth, and the tailor arrives in ten days.

Looks like I will be stuck with a worsted.

Speaking of Bow Ties

Speaking as we were about bow ties earlier this week, Bill Neukom, the San Francisco Giants managing partner, was apparently the inspiration for pitcher Tim Lincecum. Neukom has assembled a collection of them in the Giants' orange and black.

One generation teaches another, as it should be. The photo of Lincecum entering the stadium before his big game, by the way, came in from David from Pennsylvania.

By the way, did I mention that the San Francisco Giants won baseball's World Series Monday evening?

Neukom photo: The New York Times

Video: Daily Care for Tailored Clothing

A Muted Necktie

If there is anyone left on the planet who is not yet aware, San Francisco's Giants won baseball's World Series last night. And the visual I wish I had for today's post is a grab from the few seconds of video I saw of the Giant's winning pitcher, a young man with shoulder-length hair, arriving at the stadium wearing a navy blue suit, white shirt and a nicely knotted bow tie. Any reader who can send ASW a reasonably high-resolution and in-focus photo or video grab of that scene will receive a new Kent of England CC20 clothing brush with a retail value of $80.

Meandering about from alterations tailor to shoeshine stand before the game, I was experimenting with a muted Cappelli necktie in block stripes of dark red and blue gray. It was difficult to photograph alone, and no easier while worn. Some things are simply better experienced in person.

Did I mention that the San Francisco Giants won the baseball World Series yesterday?

Lightweight Breanish herringbone tweed jacket, royal oxford cloth shirt, paisley pocket square and that muted cashmere and wool necktie.

The Clothing of a Scoundrel

An Education is a 2009 British coming-of-age film based on the true story of a bright 16 year old schoolgirl and the thirtyish scoundrel who seduces her in 1960's London. Odile Dicks-Mireaux (A Constant Gardner and Dirty Pretty Things among others) did the men's costumes a la Sean Connery as James Bond.

The men are hatted, narrow tied and tie barred, wearing solids for the most part with lapels that complement the width of the neckties. I am sceptical that British men would have been belted fifty years ago but the palettes would be at home today.

Worth a look for anyone seeking more Mad Men style.