Reader question: Summer shoes

Edward Green Pimlico, unlined

Hi Simon,

I have been searching the internet but not really found anything that

really helps, unless I have been asking Google the wrong questions.

Anyway, with the weather finally being that of the south of France, going to work is even more of a pain than usual. Of course dressing correctly is easy with the help of a few different clothing choices and cloths, but my main issue is with the lowest part of the body, the feet. What appropriate footwear can a man wear in the office, without feeling like his feet are in a microwave?

Many thanks

Tom

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Hi Tom,

First off, thank you for cursing the good weather. It will now rain constantly until October.  

On the off chance that it doesn’t, my best advice on shoes is to try trainer socks – the type that sit just below the level of your shoes and are virtually hidden. Don’t stress too much about them not showing – some sartorialists would say a thin band of sock is actually more stylish – but do make sure they are not the type made for women, which usually finish just above the toes. That will make the vamp of the shoe rather painful. Trunk in London does some good branded ones, as does the ASW store in the US.

Personally, I find that these socks are actually too cold for me in an air-conditioned office. But if your office is as hot as you say, these could be a good solution. Like your wrists, a lot of veins run close to the surface of the skin around your ankles, and so exposing them is disproportionately cooling. Unlike your wrists, it’s not a good idea to run water over them in the sink. Colleagues might complain.

The shoes themselves depend very much on the dress code of your office. Where I work, many men wear trainers or plimsols, which will often be cooler by having various synthetic membranes (with the former) or being made of a cotton canvas (with the latter).

With more formal shoes, the best thing is go for slip-ons over lace-ups, and get them unlined if possible. Edward Green has a really nice line of unlined shoes at the moment, in either suede or nubuck (suede Pimlico pictured top). Having them unlined means there is one less layer of leather between your skin and the outside. And leather, being a natural skin, breathes well. Some people say they find suede and suede-type leathers to be cooler on any structure of shoe, but I can’t say I’ve noticed.

The other advantage of a slip-on or suede shoe is that it will look much more appropriate with the aforementioned trainer socks. Black wing tips without socks don’t really work.

If your office is smart enough that bare ankles are not appropriate, try the slip-ons and wear lightweight cotton socks or even linen. Again, ASW has a very good range.

I hope that helps

Simon

Zilli, Phineas Cole and Paul Stuart custom

If you like Permanent Style, don't forget to check out my latest articles on The Rake online. In the past week we have learnt why peccary is so hard to make into a leather jacket (at Zilli) and the inside line on both Ralph Auriemma and Mark Rykken at Paul Stuart.

Ralph Lauren: The enduring appeal

This has been said many times before in more abstract ways, but it deserves to be stated distinctly. It is astounding how effective Ralph Lauren has been at selling a very particular dream over the past 45 years.

This was my dominant thought during a tour last week of the Rhinelander Mansion in New York – Ralph Lauren’s beautiful flagship store. The tour, by the store director (a friend of a friend), was an opportunity for the two of us to analyse this perennial appeal, and in particular to consider how it has been retained despite the launch of several different brands in the past few years.

I imagine that my emotional relationship with Ralph Lauren is rather like that of a reformed addict. I think I’m over it, that pulsating, acquisitive desire I had as a teenager, but as soon as I wander back into a store it hits me again: the wood panelling, the preppy brights and the worn leathers; that warm, spiced fragrance that always reminds me of shopping at Christmas. Suddenly I really want a cashmere sweater. Even though I know it will be reduced by 60% or 70% in the sales. Even though I know the designer outlets have them at that reduction all year round.

It’s quite an achievement, overriding all my value-seeking instincts so utterly. But then this is a dream. One I deeply want to buy into.

So many other brands do ‘prep’, but fail to turn that into the evocation of a dream. Tommy Hilfiger in New York works well, but doesn’t come across anywhere near as well in other stores. Abercrombie and Hollister are not selling anything like a dream, merely a fleeting, effervescent ‘cool’ that can evaporate as soon as you leave the store, and will certainly be gone faster any new Ralph Lauren brand.

During a recent screening at RRL in London I didn’t get much chance to talk to the staff, but I noticed one was an old friend from Albam, which boded well. In New York this was confirmed, with a long conversation with one sales assistant considerably increasing my knowledge of raw denim, and a lot of the old construction details RRL includes in its jeans, despite them lacking any modern application. For example, the hidden rivets in the top corners of the rear pockets. Useful if you’re a worker using them to store tools, but not really required for modern man’s billfold.

Black Label gets a far greater expression at the Rhinelander than in London. Its suiting room has very different colour palette to Polo or Purple – all blacks and pinks, sharp lines and Deco-era patterns. The casual wear is even starker and brighter. Not what you think of as Ralph Lauren at all. Yet the sense of the dream remains.

RLX, the sports clothing line, was probably the biggest challenge in terms of brand extension. But there are also technical details here waiting to be discovered: a waterproof jacket, for example, that can withstand 70 pounds per square inch of water pressure. To be called waterproof, it needs to put up with 25. Gore-Tex fabrics are around 40.

In an age when more and more men seek quality and value by buying from the original manufacturer – witness the retail launch of Drake’s and the increasing sale online through blogs or other editorial-driven sites – the only way to survive will be to sell a very powerful dream. Ralph Lauren, from its age-defining menswear shop, is still doing just that.

Barker Black: Derrick Miller, style and a black shop

The money in New York has been spreading south for a while. Soho is now dominated by designer brands. I think I counted at least five Ralph Lauren stores downtown. Below Houston the interesting shops, the boutiques, have been pushed further east and west. And it’s on the east and west sides that you will find two of those shops, run by two brothers: Derrick and Kirk Miller.

Both used to run Barker Black. Kirk now has his own tailor’s shop, Miller’s Oath. More about him another time. For the moment, we’re going to talk about Barker Black.

Derrick’s shoes are made for him by Barker in Northampton, but to a rather higher quality than the standard line found most often in the UK. That quality is evident in points of construction, but also in the small design details that Derrick adds to every pair. The crossed holding stitch at the bottom of the laces. A shortened toe cap. The skull and crossbones nailed into the sole. Derrick talks fondly of visiting the shoemaking museum in Northampton and reading about the competitions for the best nail decoration on a sole. There was more of it about when men wore hobnail hoots.

I like Derrick’s lasts. I also like the fact that the shop is so hard to find – I ended up asking in a barber’s whether they knew where Barker Black was. Turned out it was next door.

Perhaps that isn’t surprising; the outside of the shop is black, after all, just like the inside. Not the easiest place to photograph. Plus it’s so small there are only three real angles: shoes on the wall; shoes in the window; accessories on the table. Hopefully these three shots do justice to them all.

All the accessories bear variations on the skull and crossbones insignia, naturally. Apparently the Japanese love those details, and I can understand why.

I don’t own any Barker Black shoes. I have no personal recommendation to make. But I like Derrick, I like his style and I like his shop.

Over to Kirk next week.

Lord Willy’s: the best of the quirky tailors

To those who prefer their clothing brands to be old and storied, Lord Willy’s may sound like a silly name. It is a silly name, and deliberately so – the downtown New York store was founded by Alex and Betty Wilcox to try and bridge the super-serious tailors and the rock ‘n’ roll hipsters. Sartorial but silly, that was the idea.

It has become more serious since then. The website, for instance, has just been replaced with something that reflects the seriousness of the new shop. That store makes more of tailoring and tuxedos, and carries the Anthony Cleverley line of shoes. The old store, next door, is to be turned into a boy’s clothing shop. It will be very silly. Everyone has to wear glasses with one tinted, star-shaped lens.

So what is there to like in the more serious store? Well, most of the shirts are made to order, in terms of fit. There is a large range of designs, with a distinctive spread collar and trademark coloured buttons, but each order is made to a customer’s specific measurements.

On the tailoring side, Lord Willy’s offers ready to wear, made to measure and bespoke. Mostly the first two, but it’s good to highlight the difference. The trousers to all suits are also custom made – the style is for a narrow pant, and as Alex says, it is incredibly hard to find a well-fitting narrow trouser off the rack.

Don’t let narrow trousers put you off though. The jackets are not super short; the lapels are not skinny. Alex is fully capable of boring you for hours on how these proportions can be messed up – and how so many designers got it wrong when they copied Thom Browne’s shrunken suit.

I’m not a fan of coloured buttons or the larger (blazer-sized) buttons that Lord Willy’s put on its suit jackets. But the quirkiness never goes as far as, say, Paul Smith. The linings are striped, not bright. There are no extra random buttonholes. Elements like grosgrain binding extend all the way round the jacket to the vent: a nice and expensive detail.

New York has seen a plethora of new shops in recent years trying to do quirky tailoring. Lord Willy’s was there before them and continues to thrive. Worth checking out. 

Graham Browne in New York: fittings

Three fittings awaiting a customer

Last week in New York it was a real pleasure to meet the five men who came for appointments with Graham Browne. They varied from the established customer (there to try on a tweed jacket and two suits) to the complete newcomer (who needed to understand how bespoke worked), as well as one who was new to Graham Browne but knew exactly what he wanted in a suit – that’s his list of specifications in the photo below.

Perhaps most satisfying for me was the help that my advice seemed to provide. I answer many questions every week from readers who want practical (and highly specific) advice, but it’s not as pleasing as providing it in person, and flicking through lining books at the same time.

Everyone seemed to agree that there is a gap in the US market for a tailor like Graham Browne that uses some machine work in the making of a suit – certainly more than most Savile Row tailors – but that still cuts the whole thing by hand, to a bespoke pattern. And most importantly, is therefore a lot cheaper. With extra trousers etc, most suits that were ordered were between £1000 and £1500. That’s a reasonable step up from ready-to-wear, but a long way off the bespoke tailors who charge at least $4000 to $5000.

Textile merchants HMS Gladson kindly hosted the tailors in their lovely offices in the Crown Building, on Fifth Avenue. One advantage of this for US customers is that they can pop in to HMS any time, having made an appointment, and browse through the cloth books. Once a pattern is established, phone up Graham Browne and give them the swatch number. They can then bring over a basted fitting ready to go. This method necessarily limits the cloths to HMS lines, but given that they now own Huddersfield Fine Worsteds (J&J Minnis, John G Hardy, Hunt & Winterbotham) and are the US agent for far more, it’s not much of a limitation. 

Choice of horn buttons for that tweed jacket

Edouard's suit fitting

Russell's rather racy Dashing Tweeds jacket

Alan Flusser

Meeting Alan Flusser last week was something of a moment for me. His 2002 book, Dressing the Man, was, after all, a fundamental part of my education in menswear and the inspiration for years of exploration and expression.

But it seems not much has changed in the past 10 years. Men still need a lot of help in knowing how to dress, and Alan’s books have not educated enough people, despite the thousands sold. In Alan’s opinion, a fundamental problem is the lack of stylish and erudite sales staff.

“Style, clothing is a very visual medium. You need to see something being worn well to be inspired. And most tailors are craftsmen, not stylists. Customers are usually inspired by their cutting, not what they are wearing,” he says.

English tailors snipe about the success of stylish men such as Richard James, Ozwald Boateng and Patrick Grant. But they fail to learn the lesson: that men need style advice as much as they need a great fitting suit.

“One client came to me recently and he said, ‘I’ve been to Savile Row and I’ve had suits made at Poole, Anderson & Sheppard and Huntsman. I have these beautiful things. But when I put them on I don’t think I look any better than I did before’. He needed direction, so we helped put together a little capsule wardrobe,” says Alan.

Sales assistants in department stores should be different – it is their job to sell, and usually on the basis of style, not craft. There are some good stores in New York that have this kind of staff. I met some wonderful examples last week at Paul Stuart, Ralph Lauren and Bergdorf Goodman. But most, particularly in the UK, fail miserably.

“The problem is they never say no,” says Alan. “They will never tell a man that something doesn’t suit him, that two things don’t go together. That’s one of the privileges of custom clothing, such as we operate here: we have no particular prejudice in what we sell.”

Alan Flusser Custom has shrunk to one floor since the departure of Mark Rykken a couple of years ago (now at Paul Stuart custom). But Alan has plans to expand his cheaper, branded line of clothing (currently sold in 300 stores across the US). He shows me a series of mannequins – in suits, gilets, outerwear – each with a label pinned to them reading $170, $220 or similar.

“That’s the price of the whole outfit. In the past two years the range and quality of Chinese manufacturing has improved considerably. It’s now at the point where we can use clothes like this to sell taste to the mass market,” he says. “The current sellers spend no money on design or displaying outfits. And designers have no interest in that market.”

Alan’s taste is sophisticated but eclectic. We talked for a good while about the tracksuit bottoms and trainers he was wearing with his pinstripe jacket and white shirt. It will be interesting to see whether he can have any success dressing the broader American population.

Leffot shoes: New York is hooked

My first visit in New York was, naturally, to the shoe store Leffot. When I was in New York four years ago, I stumbled across Steven Taffel’s new shop the month it opened. At that point you couldn’t get half the brands that he stocked – Corthay, Aubercy and some US producers – in London. I scraped together my pennies (or rather my credit cards) and bought a pair of Corthay Wilfrids – the same ones seen here in a recent post on the new Corthay shop in London.

Steven was a breath of fresh air back in 2008, and he remains unique. The brand range is strong and the service personal. Some brands such as Edward Green are sold in other department stores. Church’s has its own store in Manhattan. But people come to Steven for the service.

During the couple of hours I was there, it seemed like every other person who walked through the door was a friend, greeted by his first name. Steven’s hardest job – explaining to New Yorkers why they should pay more than $1000 for a pair of shoes – appears to have been done.

I also popped in during the semi-annual Edward Green trunk show (above and below). There were some styles on display that I had never seen in London. A lot of them were samples or destined for guys who had ordered particular models. During the trunk show they often sell 30 to 40 pairs.

This is a model that many other stores should emulate. Particularly in London, which has a real dearth of menswear boutiques, stocking a range of sartorial brands. Trunk shows are a way to make these stores into destinations: more personal than a department store and far more satisfying than buying online. And there are plenty of visiting tailors and shoemakers that would gladly be there rather than in a hotel room.

From Ralph Lauren to Attolini to the Miller brothers, everyone knew Steven and referred to the store unprompted. Two separate customers referred to buying shoes there as “like buying crack”. It’s great to see such a great shop doing so well.   

Aubercy boots

Wolverine boots