A Small Mystery Solved

Today's illustration is one of the first Fellow's drawings I ever saw, and the caption puzzled me for years. It said the fellow on the right was wearing a "lord's hat," which made no sense because it looked to my eye like a homburg.

When I saw another reference to the lord's hat recently I was driven to research it. Lo and behold, a lord's hat turns out to be a more casual version of the homburg. Where the homburg's edge is bound with silk, the lord's hat brim is left raw. The brim is still turned up but the unconstrained edge looks more casual. The lord's is also worn pinched, adding to the less formal air.

I'm thinking about midnight blue beaver...

Car Watching Clothes

Yesterday's post about the Concours d’Elegance triggered an email exchange with a reader who mentioned wearing raspberry linen trousers with his white summer dinner jacket, and I was contrasting that preppy vignette with my mental picture of how most of the attendees at the Concours will be dressed. Not that shorts, sandals and a tee shirt aren't practical (though they will be very impractical at Pebble Beach if the fog comes in), but they are definitely light in the elegance department.

Which brought my mind to this Leslie Saalburg illustration that's about as elegant as a man sitting on sand can be on a summer's day. I think Bentley (one of the Concours partners) should strike a blow for elegance and give an ensemble like this to every Continental GTC purchaser. I know some Bentley buyers could use it because I saw a guy wearing a really bad pair of jeans pumping gas into his GTC last week. As the saying goes, there oughta be a law.

Have a great weekend.

A Tweed Coat Story

Many of my favorite articles of clothing have histories attached to them. This is the story of a tweed topcoat that took about two years from thought to realization.

The best source I've found for ideas on classic men's clothing are drawings of what men were wearing in the 1930's. Most of those are found in back issues of the late and lamented Apparel Arts magazine.

The drawing to the left of a topcoat for country wear struck a cord with me. I needed a light coat to wear over a jacket in the Northern California countryside and this design seemed just right. Unfortunately, I didn't see a cloth that I liked in the swatches that were available to me at the time. So, like many other of my clothing ideas, it went in a drawer and stayed there for a while.

Months later, I stumbled upon Magee in Dublin. The parent company of Magee is the largest weaver of Donegal tweed and Magee Shops in Ireland and the UK offer lengths of it that have been hand woven by artisans using traditional manual looms. Magee showed me swatches of a blue 15 ounce cloth that was a blend of mohair and wool, with nubs of maroon and other colors, and I ordered a length. It was out of stock but arrived eventually. When it did I sent it to my tailor.

When the coat finally arrived it was Spring, and the coat sat in my closet for most of a year before I got a chance to wear it. But when the weather finally turned cold it was perfect. It looks comfortable with tweed caps and over tweed suits. The cloth repels moderate amounts of rain, and the weight is just about right for the Northern California winter. Best of all, I get more wear from it than I do from a covert coat made from 18 ounce wool because, unlike the covert, the sun can come out and the temperature rise without my starting to perspire.

A Plea for Striped Socks

Whenever I've noticed socks in a particularly stylish Apparel Arts drawing, they've tended to be versions with horizontal stripes, worn with suits. And since I first noticed them, I've been searching for over the calf versions with little success. You'd think someone would recognize opportunity knocking.

Granted, Edward Green's London store had several colorways about five years ago but they've stopped offering them. Mine are worn out. And since, whenever I've heard of some they've turned out to be sport socks. Or atrocities.

I've come across several sources for interesting socks along the way.

A source for polka dots in a cotton sport version is Buffalo's O'Connell's Clothing. You can view the merchandise but need to call to place an order.

Another is the Kabbaz Kelly online haberdashery. In addition to being the leading source for Pantherella hose on the planet, Kabbaz offers some wonderful wool OTC Marcolianis in a variety of restrained and not so restrained polka dots.

But stripes are nowhere to be found.