How to salvage your clothes

This is advice that was given to me on when you can save clothes that are ripped, stained or holed, and what to do about it.

The situation: A sweater with a hole in it
Can it be salvaged? The more unravelled the fabric and the finer the knit, the more difficult it is to mend without being too obvious.
What to do: Find a seamstress who can reattach the loose knitted ends. Whatever you do, don’t wear a sweater with a hole in it if you plan on saving it.

The situation: A sock with a hole in it
Can it be salvaged? No point. The same goes for t-shirts.
What to do: Buy a new one and move on.

The situation: A small, clean cut through a suit
Can it be salvaged? Yes, provided it’s a cut rather than a rip and that the weave does not have a complicated pattern.
What to do: The services of a good reweaver, also known as an invisible mender. Trouble is, invisible menders are very hard to spot. Alice Zotta at 2 West 45th St (Room 1701) is recommended in New York.

The situation: A suit jacket with bubbly lapels
Can it be saved? No. The bubbles happen when a cheap suit – the kind that has a fused construction, made with glue rather than stitched – is caught in the rain. The glue dissolves. To tell if your jacket is fused or canvassed, pinch the material around a buttonhole with both hands, one on the inside and one on the outside. See if there is any material floating between the outside and inside when you separate them.
What to do: Buy a more expensive suit.

The situation: Salt-stained shoes
Can they be saved? Yes, provided they aren’t also dried out (see below).
What to do: Take a 50-50 solution of water and vinegar and wipe it sparingly over the shoes. Wipe off the excess. Once the salt stains have disappeared, treat your shoes to a loving, liberal repolish at the cobblers.

The situation: Shoes whose leather has become cracked by too-rapid drying after a downpour. Or, indeed, a lack of shoe cream for a good few years.
Can they be saved? Sorry. Consider this a cautionary tale. Leather is organic, and if you dry it out too quickly, it’ll go stiff and the fibers will break at the stress points.
What to do: Next time, wipe down your wet shoes and then dry them slowly, away from direct heat. Put newspaper inside to absorb the moisture.

Reader question: Tips on the Go

Nick, London: Do you have any practical tips for dealing with stains on clothing and other practical tips?

Sure. First, some practical tips to deal with problems if you are on the road and not within reach of a good haberdasher.

Situation: Unshined shoes.
What to do: First, try rubbing them lightly with a cloth or towel. Much of what appears to be a dullness in the leather is often accumulated dust. In fact, this should generally be done every morning before putting on your shoes. The old rubbing-the-toes-on-the-back-of-your-trouser-leg trick also works, though it doesn’t deal with much other than the toes.

If you’re desperate, eat a banana. Then use the banana peel to give a temporary shine to your shoes. It’s not ideal, but it won’t damage the leather, being natural. Avoid any “quick shine” products as they normally contain silicone, which is effectively giving your shoes a plastic coating.

Situation: Popped a shirt button
What to do: Use a safety pin. What do you mean you don’t carry a safety pin? Well find one and use it to fasten the shirt, making sure that both ends of the pin lie flat against the shirt.

Situation: Spilled wine on yourself
What to do: Using a dry white napkin, soak up as much liquid as possible from the surface before it’s absorbed, then dab on cold water so the stain stays damp and doesn’t set. Never rub. If the stain is on a suit or tie, ask someone to recommend a good dry cleaner and go immediately. If it is on a shirt, put straight in the wash.

Situation: Your zipper is stuck
What to do: Check to make sure no fabric is caught; if it is, try pulling the zipper up and then down again. Finally, rub the tip of a graphite pencil along the zipper. Graphite powder is a great dry lubricant.

Situation: Static cling
What to do: Find a wire hanger in a nearby coat closet and rub it along the clingy area; the metal will remove the charge.

And one more non-clothing tip…

Situation: Bad breath in the middle of a party
What to do: Find a glass of water and a lemon. Squeeze as much of the lemon into the water as you can. Either drink it or, if you’re hidden away in a corner somewhere, gargle it.
Next week, some general maintenance tips for your suits…

The Allure of Corthay Shoes

Pierre Corthay is one of the best shoemakers around, but is not well-known outside France. Trained at both John Lobb and Berluti, he has a pedigree from possibly the two most respected shoemakers in the world, for quality and design respectively.

Like Berluti, he has used some innovative marketing and eye-catching designs to gain attention across France. And he has gradually acquired stockists in Japan, Germany and the USA (Leffot and Bergdorf Goodman). If he were owned by the giant LVMH, he’d probably be as big as Berluti already.

I like Corthay shoes because they are sleek without being pointy (cf. Artioli), have a lovely patina without being over the top (cf. Berluti), and are universally renowned to have great construction (again, cf. Berluti).

I wore my pair, probably inadvisably, in torrential rain in London recently. They coped very well, without a stain on them and no signs of damage. In fact, come to think of it, they had had a few spots of rain on a previous occasion and there were no marks that time either.

I hasten to add that on neither occasion did I submit the shoes to this treatment on purpose. But as an assistant in the Gaziano & Girling showroom told me that day, “you wouldn’t want to be wearing a pair of Berlutis on a day like this.”

A look at the website (www.corthay.fr) illustrates the Corthay taste for the extreme. Neon-orange leathers and turquoise two-tones are always going to stand out from the crowd. But I am informed that 90% of the shoes they sell are still black or brown.

What blacks and browns though. Highlights are the two-holed derbies with elongated tongue, which look great in smart and clean shades, and the suede-and-calf combinations – a modern take on the traditional business model. I opted for a brown version of the black two-tones illustrated (colour shown in the magnified image).

Having trained at Lobb in 1984 and become the senior craftsman at Berluti in 1985, Corthay opened his own store in 1990. Five years later a contract for 150 bespoke pairs from the Sultan of Brunei kick-started the business, which added a ready-to-wear in 2001. A tricky experience with a subcontractor led the company to start doing its own ready-to-wear and opening its own factory in 2003.

Today, Corthay probably competes with Aubercy for the reputation of the best-respected shoemaker in France. I highly recommend a look next time you are in New York (Leffot, Bergdorf Goodman) or, indeed, are strolling down Rue Volney in Paris.

Make Berluti Your Fifth Pair. Part 2: Design

This is the continuation of a debate begun in a previous posting.

There are two important points to note about these commentators, though. The first concedes that he wears his Berluti shoes relatively rarely, as shoes for a special occasion and generally for evening wear. They are therefore not on a heavy rotation and rarely receive a full day’s use. He admits they are a little delicate, as many fine things are, and should be treated as such.

This suggests to me that while Berluti makes a fine pair of shoes, they should not be the second or third pair you buy. Get the basics first, your essential black oxfords and chocolate derbys – the shoes you will wear to work, the shoes you will wear more than once a week.

Then consider Berluti as something special. For you this may mean they are your fifth pair of high-end shoes. For these commentators I rather suspect they are their ninth or twelfth.

The second point is that the more critical Berluti customer still owns a pair, and without regret. Despite his reservations about the quality of the construction, he is happy he bought a pair and would do so again. This is true of almost all detractors of Berluti that I have seen: they still love the pair they own.

This reinforces the impression of Berluti as an exception, a treat. No matter how many great pairs of solidly-built English shoes you own, a little bit of moon-painted frippery will get you eventually (Berluti famously claims that the patinas on some of its shoes are painted by the light of the moon, enhancing their effect. Rubbish, of course, but it all adds to their frankly very successful PR mythology.)

The second point also shows that there is more than one way to judge a pair of shoes. Edward Green and John Lobb are generally considered to be among the best-constructed shoes available. But some of the designs leave me a little cold. I own a pair of Oundle monk-fronts on the 888 last from Edward Green – a long look with a chiselled toe. But the more conservative lasts, such as 202, just seem stumpy to my eye. The same comment has been made about some Vass shoes – they are wonderfully made but you’d never want to put them on your feet.

At some point, you pay for design. With Berluti, this is a large portion of what you pay for. Some of the designs are just horrible (Rapieces-Reprises) and some are gorgeous (Piercing). But Olga is famed for pushing the envelope on design, with new shapes, engraving, personalised tattoos and chunky rubber soles. Many of her innovations, like the brogueing on wholecuts, have now been copied by several other designers.

In conclusion, buy Berluti as an extravagance and buy it for its design. They’re well-made (I don’t believe the rumours about basic construction being done in China today) but they won’t hold up too well after several trips to the pub, or after a few English winters of cold slushy rain.

I’m more a fan of Pierre Corthay these days. But more of that in the next posting.

Make Berluti Your Fifth Pair. Part 1: Construction

Many people a sartorial bent idolise Berluti shoes. And well they may. Olga Berluti designs beautiful footwear that stands out for its sleek lines and subtle patinas. But there are many questions over the quality of its construction.

Let’s start with the certainties. Berluti shoes, like many made in Italy (they are constructed in the Stefano Bi factory outside Ferrara, though designed in France), are Blake constructed. This means that the shoe’s upper is folded underneath itself and sewn directly onto the sole of the shoe, unlike Goodyear welts which involve sewing the upper onto a new ridge of leather, before attaching that to the sole.

Most English shoes and their American heirs (Alden, Allen Edmonds) use Goodyear welts. They make the shoe more water resistant and tougher. They also make it easier and quicker to resole the shoe. So Berluti shoes are less likely to stand up to rain and general dampness.

They can be resoled, but it requires a Blake-specific machine. Cobblers that use these can be hard to find, but then if you’re going to pay Berluti prices for shoes you should really send them back to the manufacturer to get resoled and rebuilt to maximise their longevity.

The advantage of Blake construction is that the sole can be cut a lot closer to the upper, leaving less of a lip and making the design sleeker. The width of a sole around the upper varies hugely among Goodyear-welted shoes, but none are quite as thin as Blake-made models.

Blake shoes are not necessarily of inferior quality. Although the technique was originally created to make it easier to produce shoes in a factory, and some very poorly made Blake shoes are churned out in Italy, the top quality lines are expertly made.

But they are more delicate. Quite how delicate Berluti shoes are is a matter of some debate. Some say they have worn them for years without any major problems. Others report that they wrinkled badly and did not hold up well to continued use.

In an online forum intended to discuss such matters, one Berluti enthusiast said “I have been a customer since 1998. I believe their shoes are very well made, there are a couple of pairs I have worn for a long time and they are holding up beautifully.”

A more critical customer pointed out: “One issue with Berluti ready-to-wear is the use of Venezia leather. According to Berluti PR, this leather allows for the beautiful patina available on Berluti shoes. Unfortunately, it is also quite thin and delicate, which means that they can look very wrinkled after some wear.”

The conclusion to this debate will appear here later in the week…

Anyone know a good cobbler?

I was having a set of keys cut in a local cobbler yesterday and couldn’t take my eyes off the guy resoling shoes. He banged in the nails on the new shoe with abandon, filed off the edges of the leather while barely looking at it and then threw (yes, threw) the completed shoe onto the shelf above him.

It landed on a mound of similarly maltreated shoes, a few ladies’ heels sticking out from between a dozen black brogues. It looked like a mound of stricken corpses. You could almost hear the pain inflicted by his whining machinery.

These high-street cobblers barely deserve the name. (They certainly are nothing close to cordwainers – the old English term for makers of shoes.) But then what should you expect from someone who is equally adept at cutting keys, dry cleaning and resoling?

But there aren’t many other options. If you want a good pair of shoes resoling or reconstructing, your only choice is a high-street butcher or the original manufacturer. And the latter is likely to be prohibitively expensive – possibly involving the shipping of the shoes to France or Italy (it’s even worse for US readers, who might have to send them to Northampton as well).

This service is undoubtedly worth it if you want the shoes reconstructing, with new welts and linings etc. But it’s a little excessive just for a new sole.

I asked Steven Taffel of Leffot in New York for advice on this but without any luck. Apparently the problem is similar in the US – nothing in the middle ground.

Steven suggested I try Dean Girling (of Gaziano & Girling) to ask his advice. Dean’s best suggestion was to send them to his team, one of whom would be happy to reconstruct a shoe. This is useful and more local, but doesn’t really solve the problem.

“The problem is there just aren’t any high-quality cobblers out there any more,” said Dean. “My father still does a lot of that work but he’s in his sixties now and has more work than he can handle. It seems there isn’t the volume of retail demand for high-quality work.”

So this is a request for recommendations from the readership. There must be some good cobblers out there that I can feel confident giving my JM Westons to for a new heel. It doesn’t matter where you live, any recommendations would be gladly received.

[I also need to find somewhere that sells tongue pads that you stick to the bottom of the shoe’s tongue – it helps tighten the top of the shoe when the leather has expanded over time.]

The split yoke

There is almost no good journalism about men’s style these days. Outside of this and a few other websites, no-one produces objective, informed and above all critical writing about clothes, brands and products.

I flicked through a magazine called Man About Town last week (a recent launch in the high-end fashion sector, only on its second issue) and found 20 pages about the business of fashion. Should be interesting, except that it comprised several double-page spreads on brands including Dunhill and Church’s, merely describing their luscious interiors, history of craftsmanship and key pieces.

Not one critical or substantive word about what differentiated this business, about how it communicates its value for money, or about different times and designers have changed what it does. Nothing on what its detractors say about it; or on how much water those detractions hold.

Each piece read like an advert. It could be anything from reputable name brands to wholesale clothing. Which perhaps isn’t surprising, given that those companies advertise in the magazine. But this is what journalism is built on – the integrity that allows you to write fairly and objectively, if critically, about those that fund the magazine itself.

Another example this week piled ignorance onto paucity of journalism. The column Brummell in UK newspaper Financial News recommended a bespoke shirt service called Brass Bones, where you can get shirts made to your size by filling in a form online. Nothing wrong with that; it’s a good idea.

But there’s no journalism here. They haven’t tried the service or cast anything like a critical eye over it. There are several online shirt services that have been around for months, even years, yet they don’t get a mention – let alone a comparison. This service is presented as a one-off.

Such is the presentation of the piece, just like the examples in Man About Town, that it could be mistaken for an advert.

But the worst thing is ignorance about the product they are describing. Aside from a rather casual use of the word ‘bespoke’ (see previous post on Sartoriani), the boys at Brummell insightfully point out that the shirts have desirable details such as mother-of-pearl buttons, gussets and split yokes.

Mother-of-pearl is standard. If they didn’t have that you should send them back. The value of gussets is debateable. And split yokes rarely have their original use. 

The value of a split yoke is that it enables the shirtmaker to cut the front panel of the shirt and the shoulders at a different angle in the weave. The front of a shirt will always be cut on the bias, to give it greater flexibility and fit. If the shoulder is also cut on the bias, both will be aligned and the shoulder seam, connecting the two, will be weaker, leading to stretching in the material and possible breaking. If the yoke is split, it can be cut at a different angle, reinforcing that seam. 

But today the split yoke is rarely cut in this way, and the reason people give for its value is either aesthetics (a nice matching of stripes) or measurements (the tailor has measured each side differently).

I’d bet a decent sum of money the writers of that piece just copied the list from a Brass Bones press release, with little thought for what it meant. Oh well.

Whether you suit pink, white or blue

Tradition has it that when British men came back from the war they only had two ties they felt they could legitimately wear – that of the military regiment they belonged to and that of the club they were a member of. Both were relatively plain, either a series of crests on a dark ground or a club stripe in two colours.

Eager to partake in the new openness in men’s clothing, these men wanted to dress up their ties. So they turned to more colourful shirts. Jermyn Street sprang up to service them.

This is the reason that, to this day, a pink shirt and most forms of stripe are perfectly acceptable as business attire in London. Even lawyers who rarely stray from a navy suit, black shoes and black socks (sad but true) will happily wear a pink or striped shirt and not consider themselves any less formal.

Not so the Americans, for whom the white shirt is the business staple, blue or stripes a little casual, and pink ever so slightly effeminate. Loosened from the formalities of London’s business regime, Americans are more likely to wear patterned suits or brown shoes (particularly in Boston). But not pink shirts.

Which is a shame, as pink shirts suit many people. Smarter and cleaner than blue or a stripe, they add a little frisson of colour while remaining very formal.

I was reminded of this the other day by a colleague who was wearing a pink shirt for the first time. In fact, he admitted it was probably the first time in his life he had ever worn anything pink.

Which was a particular shame, because pink suited him. Anyone with slightly ruddier features or more than average pink in their skin will suit a pink shirt, perhaps more than any other colour.

The great Alan Flusser tells us that a blue shirt goes with more people’s skin tones than white. And he’s right. While white may be cleaner and smarter, it tends to wash out people with paler skin, leaving them looking even whiter than they are. It looks best on high-contrast complexions – broadly speaking, those with darker skin.

Blue, on the other hand, is more forgiving on all types of skin tone. That is one of the reasons it is universally the most popular colour for casual shirts.

Pink, logically, tends to suit those with a little red or pink in their skin. Contrary to what you might expect, it will look more manly the paler the colour, as Hardy Amies informs us. Nothing will look worse than a strong, deep pink.

Know your trouser width

I like narrow trousers. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a fashion thing – they are trendy and have been for a good year or two, but I think it has influenced my choice in tailoring for longer than that.

(Side note on very narrow trousers: They only ever look good on thin people. Do not wear them if you have any softness around the middle. They will make you look immeasurably fatter. Like a blancmange on matchsticks in fact. I’m consistently amazed at exactly how fat they can make men look that I would otherwise have considered slim.)

I like narrow trousers because they suit, to my eye, my other clothing choices – slim shoes and tailored jackets. Having a rather large number of shoes I would like to display, it also helps having slimmer trousers that will rest on to of the shoe and not envelop it.

I know it was considered stylish for a long time to pair fuller, wider trousers with short, nipped jackets (Cary Grant, Oxford Bags) but I prefer to put together items that balance rather than contrast. As Coco Chanel said: “Fashion is architecture; it’s a matter of proportions.”

However, I have a problem: perhaps due to several years of cycling, I have larger than average thighs and bottom. So trousers that are too narrow or too low-waisted get as far as my thighs and stop. This is particularly a problem with contemporary jeans, though less so with formal trousers.

For jeans, I end up going for more traditional cuts – Levi’s 501s are pretty good, as are the Kilgour range of jeans, which are purposefully cut higher and use a clean, dark indigo in order to be smarter.

As a result of this, it is always worth me keeping in mind how narrow I like trousers to be, in precise measurements, when trying trousers on. Without a ready comparison, it can be surprisingly hard to try on a new pair of trousers and get an idea of how narrow they are compared to your optimum width. You can, of course, compare them to the trousers you were wearing that day, but if these are very different in style or material they won’t help much.

It also helps to get an assistant to pin the trousers at the length you would have them hemmed to – width can vary surprisingly along the trouser leg, and it is easier to see the width when the ends are not crumpled up on top of your shoe.

All of which is a long way of saying that I now make a point of knowing the widths I prefer, in inches. I recommend doing something similar.

My preferences are (measured as the circumference of the leg at the bottom – just measure the width when flat and double it):

Suit trousers – 16 inches. (Anything less than this I would class as very narrow).

Jeans or more casual trousers – 17 inches.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s preferences.

A loss to (sartorial) language

Recently the UK Advertising Standards Authority took a rather ignorant decision to declare that there is no difference between bespoke and made-to-measure. It is a loss to menswear and to language.

Sartoriani, a suit maker that recently set up on Bond Street with all manner of promotional offers and advertising, proclaimed that it made bespoke suits. It does not. It makes made-to-measure suits, with customers being measured on site and their details used to amend a standard block in a factory.

The advertising claim was challenged by the Savile Row Bespoke Association, an industry group of Savile Row tailors headed by Mark Henderson of Anderson & Sheppard.

Bespoke tailoring requires an individual, specific cut of cloth, by hand. In the eyes of many on Savile Row, it also requires a one-on-one interview with the person who will make your suit for you. So your suit can be (be)spoken for in person. It should also be entirely sewn by hand.

These latter elements are arguable, and have been eroded over the years – the cut-price tailoring offered by Kilgour, for example, which features measurements and fittings in London but sewing in China. But fundamental to bespoke is that the cut of the cloth, the particular pattern, should be yours and yours alone. It should not be an amended block, stitched blindly by a machine.

But the Association lost. Apparently Sartoriani considers bespoke and made-to-measure to be synonymous, and the ASA agrees. This is a loss to menswear everywhere. Once one company can get away with it, everyone will advertise their made-to-measure service as bespoke, and a refined section of tailoring will lose a crucial communication skill.

Consumers already have an increasingly large problem telling the difference between quality and branding (see post on Berluti shoelaces). This decision will only make the situation worse. Even more education will need to be done by an industry that is already pretty poor at it (see post on the BBC Savile Row series).

Almost as importantly, this is a loss to language. The phrases bespoke and made-to-measure are clearly not synonymous. It could be argued that they mean different things to my definitions above. But they are obviously not the same if a whole industry purposefully uses them to separate two processes and products.

Envy and jealousy are not the same thing. One is a desire for somebody else’s possession, the other is a fear of losing your own. The fact that people use them interchangeably is a loss to language – there is now no easy way to express the latter. This ruling deals a similar blow to the language of style.

A fresher take on summer

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a Ralph Lauren summer. The current run of ads featuring bright ties, bright trousers and pops of handkerchief colour were some of the most inspiring of the season. At one point they almost convinced me I would wear bright orange, big-print, flower-patterned tie more than once.

Particularly iconic was the pairing of a summer suit with a canary-yellow Ferrari outside an ivy-covered mansion. A more explicit call to aspirational fashion is hard to imagine.

But Ralph’s bright colours and contrasts can be a little extreme for some days of the year – particularly in England where days, no matter how sunny, rarely escape some cloud cover. A more muted, subtle summer wardrobe is called for.

I found what I was looking for at Paul Stuart in New York. Or, more precisely, in the store’s catalogue.

The cover features a man in white chinos, desert boots, a pale yellow jumper and mint green jacket. Finished off with a lilac handkerchief. It is a sophisticated, individual yet muted combination of colours that says summer just as strongly as the Ralph Lauren ads, but from an entirely different viewpoint. It melts rather than punches.

This model is propping up a picture of the Paul Stuart logo – man sitting on fence with book – in a similarly impressive colour combination. Olive chinos, checked tan jacket, pink-check shirt, orange tie and pale blue cap. Plus chestnut loafers and bright blue socks. I particularly like the socks.

By this point I’m sure you’d love to see the images I’m talking about – the catalogue is available here as a flip-through PDF. Very useful. If you can’t get there through this link, go to www.paulstuart.com and click on Catalog.

Once you’ve got beyond the cover, I recommend going to page five, for the best way to pair summer checks with pink and yellow. Page 21 picks up the same subtle theme with blue and pink checks. And page 30 shows the full range of those socks from the cover. (Page 17 also demonstrates that fascinating effect I mentioned in my posting on window dressing – enhancing the appeal of shoes through rolled-up socks.)

There are some fairly hideous sweaters in there (page 9, page 27) but overall the catalogue achieves that rare thing – inspiring you to try different clothes and colours, while still successfully creating a brand image. Few brands do that well. I believe Ralph Lauren and Etro are two, and Paul Stuart is obviously another. Hackett often does well, but it’s range of casualwear means only a few pages feature jackets and suits. (If anyone knows any others I’d be glad to hear them.)

In fact, the most successful aspect of a recent shopping trip was picking up the autumn/winter 08 Etro catalogue. Few brands publish all their catwalk photos in a catalogue, for free, or have such inspiring catalogues as that produced by Paul Stuart. More should. Perhaps then we would identify something definite and particular with the brand behemoths that Armani, Ferragamo, Zegna etc have become.