Ah, the Esquire Big Black Book

Ok, so it’s time to balance things up. In a previous post I reviewed a style programme only available in the UK. Now it’s time for a magazine you can only get in the US.

Last year I chanced across the Esquire Big Black Book while in New York on business. I couldn’t believe my luck – this was actually how a style magazine should look, with analytical features, practical advice and photo shoots where you can actually see the clothes.

This year my luck was even greater. I was only changing planes in New York on my way back from Buenos Aires, and stumbled onto this year’s edition. Note to self: try and be in the US in October. In October. In October.

The BBB is not high fashion. Granted, the watches range from $3,000 to $20,000, but then I was never in the market for that kind of watch anyway. More important is that the ethos of the BBB is value for money. As fashion director Nick Sullivan says: “It is not about how to spend your money. It is about how not to waste it.”

So we have a few good investments, among them a mohair tuxedo, a good umbrella and a three-piece suit. Each is expensive (the silver-handled umbrella costs $2,000) but that is inevitable. The point they make is still valid: with menswear it is simple and rewarding to invest in good pieces, pieces that will stand the test of time and feel better with use.

Then there’s decent interviews with actual designers – Tom Ford, Stefano Pilati and Ferrucio Pozzoni – rather than movie stars or musicians; and well-researched features, again related to style – on how to refurnish old clothes and the return of the briefcase.

(My favourite quote from Pilati: “Let’s not talk about the suit becoming fashionable again. To me, the suit has never been fashionable. A suit is a suit and you need it for certain occasions. If you are a fashionable man and you want to wear your suit with a pair of sneakers and a t-shirt, then that’s a different story.”)

But the best part of the BBB, the reason I will keep each year’s edition alongside the Flusser books, is The Information – the practical guide printed on tinted paper at the back of the magazine. Want to know how to wash cashmere? Or what to do with a leather jacket that gets soaked in the rain? The Information will tell you.

Why aren’t all magazines like this?

British Style Genius: Paul Smith and train sets

Men’s style appears to be a hot topic over at Broadcasting House. The BBC recently showed its second menswear-related series in as many months, with the original series on Savile Row being followed up by one called British Style Genius.

The overlap with the previous series was obvious, with the same narrator and the initial section of the first episode following the same Savile Row exhibition, as it moved from Pitti Uomo to the British embassy in Tokyo.

But gone was the comedy of Henry Poole in China (with its odd reminders of an episode of The Office). Instead, this was a serious look at the history and development of men’s style. According to them, men’s style can be defined by two twin concepts: propriety and eccentricity.

Every man has a sense of what is right for the right occasion, and this has driven much of the sense of buttoned-up formality associated with the British. But on the other hand, every style-conscious British male has an urge to experiment, to undermine tradition with a touch of fun and sarcasm.

Paul Smith sums this up best. Both because his clothes have always been propriety with a twist, mixing great tailoring with different buttons, linings and colours, and because he summed up the British approach in the best quote of the episode:

“People always say ‘why do British men dress so poorly when other nations, like the Italians, dress so well?’ Well, the Italians do dress well. But they also dress identically. They all look stylish but they all look the same. I’d rather have the British eccentricity and humour any day.”

Smith was the epitome of this style as he flounced around in front of an audience of ecstatic Japanese fans. He is the biggest selling European brand in Japan, did you know that? None of your Gucci or Armani; it’s Paul Smith they love.

Smith played with a varied array of props and projections onstage, and told stories of his early career, when he would get out train sets and other toys in meetings, claiming to be bored. “It always broke the ice and make people laugh,” he said.

In a recent post I referred to Paul Smith’s buttons and linings as gimmicks. And this programme didn’t change my mind: I am still more personally interested in tailoring innovation, in how fabrics, linings and padding are manipulated to make subtly different garments. But you can’t help but be impressed by Smith’s energy, inventiveness and business acumen.

This episode (A Cut Above – The Tailored Look) and the second in the series are now available on BBC iPlayer. Unfortunately, I believe this is only accessible to UK residents.

Buenos Aires style

I was fortunate enough to be in Buenos Aires last week for work, and was able to appreciate a city renowned for its style as well as its steak.

Argentine men have much of the casual, easy style of their south European cousins. A photo sent to me of a lawyer I was interviewing showed him leaning against a doorway, a strongly striped suit offset by the classic Italian Background of dark blue tie on pale blue shirt.

The tie was undone, but kept neat by the buttoned jacket – a touch that is all too frequently forgotten by men elsewhere in the world, but was reflected in a recent interview with Tom Ford. “Always keep your jacket buttoned,” he said. “If I have one rule for men, it’s that. It instantly makes your silhouette. It’ll take pounds off you, just in terms of your shape. Especially if you are being photographed, you really should have the jacket buttoned.”

He puts it almost better than I could. If you don’t button your jacket, the tailoring is simply thrown away.

Elsewhere in the city, this simple style was reflected in other south European staples: brown leather shoes, simple white pocket-handkerchiefs and a taste for pale, unusual tie colours (lime green was a favourite). There was also a surprising prevalence of brown suede shoes: almost as much as there was leather.

This seemed like an inspired choice, and one I could emulate, until I considered the weather. It’s either raining or it’s sunny in Buenos Aires. The rain is heavy, even tropical, but it’s certainly not drizzle. And when it’s sunny there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

Wearing suede shoes is therefore an easy choice to make. Not so in the UK, where clouds day after day can threaten rain without ever falling, and it’s rarely guaranteed to be a drizzle-free day.

The biggest difference between Buenos Aires and Italy, however, was the consistency of this style. As one local resident confessed to me, Argentina is not yet rich enough to have a large middle class that can afford high-quality or tailored clothes. This means that the threads, many of them of European origin, are limited to a rich, professional class. It is their scarcity, in fact, that contributes to their price – a smaller market means higher margins.

So appreciate the office-bound workers that still require suits on a regular basis. As the suit and other more formal attire become less required and (probably) less popular as a result, the margins and prices on those clothes we love will rise.

Kilgour special: Permanent Style in Spice

On the strength of last month's article on Leffot, Permanent Style has now been afforded a regular menswear slot in Spice, India's leading luxury magazine.

This month's edition features an interview with Carlo Bradelli, creative director of Kilgour, who explains why there's just no one out there that innovates in quite the same way he does.

The colours of autumn

Summer was heralded for me in a subtle, sophisticated way by the palate of Paul Stuart, as reported in previous post A Fresher Take on Summer. In that article I compared the subtlty and still unusual colour combinations of Paul Stuart with the bolder, and certainly no less inspiring Ralph Lauren approach.

Fortunately for me and the style world at large, Paul Stuart’s autumnal suggestions are just as sophisticated and ennervating as those for summer.

Take the checked three-piece suit shown as an illuminating illustration on using red consistently. Though no one would say this gentleman is wearing a red outift, that colour pulls the combination together. The shirt has a red tattersall check, that’s obvious; and the red-and-gold handkerchief is also plain to see. But those pieces drag up subtler tones in the tie, suit and even buttons. All have a ruddy feel – the suit has a subtle overcheck of rust and navy, and the tie uses secondary colours linked to red (purple, orange).

The handkerchief, though by far the least subtle item, pulls it all together for me. Because without it the outift could slide into acamedic/hunting costume – lovely, yes, but not necessarily that original. The bold pop of red-and-gold handkerchief, somewhat recalling a club tie, sharpens everything behind it and demands that notice be paid.

So autumn reds and their associates, combined with originality.

The second suit is brigher and busier, yet no less subtle. Pushing together orange, gold, green, red, blue and purple is no easy task and yet it works because each is built off a secondary version of a central trio – green, orange and blue. The gold is a brigher version of orange, red a shadow to that same orange, and purple an accent and partner to blue.

To illustrate how these work in pairs, consider if the purple was used as a pocket handkerchief (or glove in the illustration). It would be lost amidst the red and green of the jacket, and struggle to be an accent to the gold sweater. As an ascot, the purple exists purely as another take on the pattern of the blue shirt. It is too subtle to be anywhere else – unlike the orange and gold, which are strong enough to hold their own surrounded by colours that are unrelated tonally.

A similar option for the pocket handkerchief would be a bright or strong green. This would accent the jacket, rather than picking up the gold as the orange gloves in the illustration do.

Last but certainly not least is the grey, green and olive combination. This is both simpler than the first example and subtler than the second. Yet it draws you in through the handkerchief’s echo of the sweater’s green in its grey tones, and the highlight that the yellow portions of the handkerchief pattern provide.

The same colours are present (and by this time I shouldn’t have to tell you that they are the colours to bring into your wardrobe this autumn) but they are minimised, focused and drawn in to the breast pocket rather than throwing the eye about.

How to assess the quality of a shirt, part 2

In the previous posting on this topic, I explained that most ways to assess the quality of a dress shirt revolve around working out how many time-consuming details have been included. Each detail adds a few more precious seconds to the manufacturing time; fewer shirts can be made every day, and each therefore costs a little bit more to make.

The first to consider was whether the side seam has two lines of stitching or one – one line taking twice as long as the sewing machine has to double-back over the same place.

The second detail to watch out for is the direction of the buttonhole on the sleeve’s placket. Most shirts will have a button here connecting up the open sleeve a second time, below the cuff and higher up the arm. A buttonhole that is perpendicular to the arm, across the sleeve, is harder to do as the button has to be in precisely the right place. However, if the buttonhole is parallel to the sleeve, there is much more room for error in the positioning of the button – its centre can be anywhere along the length of the hole.

As with the lines of stitching on the side seam, the direction of the buttonhole here shows that a more time-consuming method has been used. The shirt is therefore more expensive to make and will probably cost you more. But I have yet to hear a reason why a horizontal buttonhole on the placket is actually better.

It is harder, sure, but what practical purpose does it serve? Perhaps it prevents the button from sliding up and down, but only by a matter of millimetres. At least the single-stitched seam has a benefit in being more elegant – if not, as explained in my last post, more reliable. The horizontal buttonhole seems to have little practical purpose.

Fortunately, many other signs of quality do have a purpose. Hand-sewn buttonholes, for example, are revealed by the irregularities of stitching around the hole and the different finishes on either side of the shirt. Although less uniform, hand-sewn holes will be more reliable and stronger (another tell-tale sign is three-hole buttons – which cannot be sewn on by machine).

Other things to watch out for are:
- The fineness of stitching on the collar and cuffs. It should be nearly invisible.
- Whether the stripes on a shirt match exactly where the yoke meets the sleeve, and on either side of the cuff.
- Any other details that take extra effort. Turnbull & Asser and Thomas Pink shirts, for example, have a gusset at the bottom of the side seam. Kilgour and Charvet shirts have a squared-off tail with a vent on either side. The first is intended to strengthen that join; the second to prevent bunching under the trouser. Both take more time.

How to assess the quality of a shirt

Much is made of assessing the quality of a suit – its fineness of wool, cut and construction. But it is far easier to tell the quality of a shirt, largely because all its stitching and manufacture is open for all to see. You could also argue that, given you can buy a shirt for £4 in Primark, the price differential in shirts is greater than that in suits. After all, some designer shirts cost over £300 – 75-times the Primark option. It is therefore worth knowing why some cost so much more than others.

So here are some tips on how to assess the quality of a dress shirt. They are drawn from my own experience, a few conversations with the best sales assistants and a liberal scattering of Alan Flusser books.

The reason a shirt is so easy to assess is its stitching. As all of it is on display, it is both simpler to inspect and more important to the overall look of the garment. It is the only texture and, therefore, the place where clumsy, cheap or expeditious work becomes obvious.

Look at the side seam of the shirt, that which connects the front panel to the back. Here is the longest line of exposed stitching. The first thing to note is whether there are two lines here or one. Single-needle stitching involves sewing in one direction and then doubling back over the same line. It produces just the one line but takes twice as long as double-needle stitching, where the sewing machine is fitted with two needles, both sewing in parallel, simultaneously.

Neither is necessarily stronger than the other, but single-needle stitching is sleeker. Flusser recalls seeing men in their shirt sleeves on his first trip to Italy, and admiring the feint lines of their side seams, which seemed to disappear away into nothing. Italian men have always been obsessive about the cut and line of their shirts, but the same single-needle stitching is found in many upscale shirts in the US and UK. It is one definite sign that more time has been committed to the shirt.

This is, however, all it shows. The Ralph Lauren Purple Label shirts I own have single-needle stitching. But then so does a cheap shirt I had made in a substandard Hong Kong tailor. I suspect that the latter simply did not have machines that could double-stitch. The seams certainly fared badly over time, becoming puckered or loose.

But single-needle stitching is still a good sign of quality in modern retail shirts. This is because the management at Zara, Gap, or Armani will have analysed everything that goes into making a shirt and decided which to spend money on. These signs that time, and therefore money, has been invested reveal the brand’s priorities.

Most signs of quality in a shirt are similar. More of them next time.

Ralph Lauren service: The tailor’s tips

As a final instalment to my report on after-sales service at Ralph Lauren, I thought it would be useful to recount some of the tips and lessons that Jan Ellul, the in-house tailor at the flagship store, had to offer.

I had written in a previous posting that shoulders are the hardest thing to alter on the suit. This is partly true, according to Jan. The shoulders are certainly much harder to alter than the jacket waist, sleeves or chest. This is because those alterations usually just involve opening up the seam, taking in or letting out some material and sewing it up again.

To narrow the shoulders, the tailor must detach both arms, shorten the material across the shoulder, cut back the padding and re-attach. “A bit of a major operation,” in Jan’s words, and not something to be given to a novice tailor.

[Note: strictly speaking, altering the arm length can require the arms to be detached, but only if the suit has working buttonholes on the cuffs – one good reason not to have this otherwise pointless feature on your jacket.]

However, even harder than altering the shoulders is altering the top of the back – the material around your neck and the collar of the jacket. To do this, the collar of the jacket must be removed, the back re-cut in one delicate slice, and re-sewn. Costly and risky.

So when you’re trying on that ready-made suit in the mirror, make sure the collar fits well first. It should neither stand away from the collar of your shirt nor hug it so tightly that folds of stress form across the top of the jacket’s back. Then worry about the shoulders, and only later consider everything else.

On the subject of the shoulders, Jaan notes that the way to tell whether they fit right is to find the point where your shoulder muscle is at its widest and make sure the suit’s sleeve material just grazes it. There should be a smooth line between that point and the edge of the shoulder itself.

Often, it can be hard to tell whether a shoulder is too big. It’s easy to tell if it’s too small – the shoulder muscle is bulging against the sleeve. But it can be hard to tell if it’s too small as in any case there is always a clean, straight line down from the shoulder of the suit. Jaan’s tip is the answer – find the muscle and make sure it just touches.

Finally, I asked Jaan’s opinion on Kilgour’s cut-price bespoke – where suits are measured in the UK, put together by Kilgour-trained tailors in China and finished off here. Jan is a Savile Row-trained tailor and I expected him to be conservative about it, but no. “There’s nothing wrong with things made in China, if they’re made well,” he said. 

The struggle to innovate in menswear

It’s rare that traditional menswear retailers are genuinely innovative. A few designers have their odd quirks, and many fluctuate with the (fashion) seasons. But a precious small number actually change the way people look at jackets, shirts and trousers.

Paul Smith has original quirks. His suit linings were the first thing that made him popular in the UK, or at least the first that made him stand out. Bright colours, bright stripes and images of old-time footballs attracted men to suits for the first time in a while. Differently coloured buttons came next, as did one coloured buttonhole on the sleeves. Having fifties pin-ups on the reverse of belts and the inside of wallets was eye-catching.

Some of Smith’s innovations went deeper than that. I was a big fan, for example, of his dip-dye shoes – the technique produced truly deep hues of red and green in the leather that I’d never seen anywhere else. But they were surface changes. Little about design or construction changed in either suits or shoes. A harsher man than me might call them gimmicks.

Equally, many other menswear designers innovate in the seasonal variations of their outfits. Every six months, the usual suspects of Hugo Boss, Dolce & Gabbana and others will have their hot style to tout. This fall/winter, D&G was obsessed with Sicily and the style of its local inhabitants, whether hunters, mariners or just butch-looking guards with dogs. There was shearling in abundance, bulk in the trousers and especially around the neckline, and bulky bags, hats and pets as accessories.

But is this innovative? It may be different to everyone else on the catwalk this year, but has no one had a similar idea previously? Will they not have the same idea again?

More importantly, much of this innovation is merely the accumulation of certain types or shapes of garment into a ‘look’. It is this look that is important, rather than much innovation in the garments themselves. It is innovation in aesthetic idea – the concept of sticking certain things together – but not in tailoring or structure.

The art needed to create an aesthetic vision should not be underestimated. It is, after all, one of the prime aspects that we admire in great artists in any field – whether architecture, painting or sculpture. But it is not what excites someone about picking up a jacket in a shop and discovering a genuinely new idea. That inspiration is very different to just a well-adorned mannequin.

Sartoriani goes for a bigger lie

God, it makes your blood boil. Splashed all over the front of City AM (the free business paper in London), Sartoriani is claiming to be selling “The finest bespoke shirts in the world!”

Where do they get off? Their shirts are not bespoke and I can’t imagine what criteria they have for saying they are the best in the world.

For those who are not familiar with the background to this charade (see previous post), Sartoriani won a case earlier in the year allowing it to use the phrase “bespoke” in its advertising, despite the fact that its suits are made by a machine. That’s right. They are made by a machine, in a factory, on a block altered to a customer’s specifications. That probably sounds like the age-old definition of made-to-measure to you. And it is. Yet they claimed their suits were bespoke because they were “personalised to the customer”.

The association of Savile Row Bespoke, representing tailors on the Row, took Sartoriani to the UK Advertising Standards Authority. It lost. The ASA said it considered bespoke and made-to-measure to be synonymous. It was a loss to menswear everywhere. As I said at the time, “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.”

It’s happening now. Sartoriani apparently has bespoke shirts; there’s a picture of someone in “a bespoke suit”; apparently “it’s now easier than ever to make a bespoke suit.” Bespoke, bespoke, bespoke. It’s an assault on the language, eroding the meaning of words in the pursuit of profit.

Who actually thinks that a bespoke suit can be made, “cut and sewn in London”, for £495? And a shirt for £99?

Sartoriani seems to have decided to adopt the old adage “if you’re going to lie, lie big.” Because it has the cheek to lecture people in its advertisement on what bespoke means, maintaining that it is just something that has been altered to a customer’s specifications, “as opposed to off-the-peg or ready-to-wear”.

Not only that, but it proclaims in its headline that is has “the best bespoke shirts in the world,” as mentioned earlier. Does the ASA have anything to say about this? Has Sartoriani commissioned a piece of thorough, independent research that compared its shirts to Charvet and Turnbull & Asser, which concluded that Sartoriani was the finest? Ridiculous.

And the cherry on the cake: Sartoriani advertises itself as “Savile Row – London”. But look carefully. It has an office at 10 Savile Row, and shares some of the basement. Its shop is actually at 24 Old Bond Street, and now 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf.

It makes your blood boil.

The meaning of harmony

A pocket handkerchief should harmonise with a man’s shirt and general ensemble. But not many men understand what harmony means.

Let me put it like this. It is a similar conundrum to which colour of tie you should wear, but is also a little like the choice of sock colour and of shirt. It encompasses all of these choices, and is broader than all of them as a result. This is the wonder and the joy of selecting a pocket handkerchief. There is such a broad range available; yet it is still possible to get it wrong.

Once you pick the suit you are going to wear for the day, I presume you select a complementary shirt, suitable socks and a pleasing tie. The shirt is probably the most constrictive in terms of colour: there may be many patterns on offer, but the vast majority will be blue, white or pink. Your socks for the day present a greater range of possible colours: beyond the choice of matching with your trouser, maroon or green are staples with a grey suit, purple or red can work well with navy. Your tie is presumably last, and presents the greatest number of options; to an extent this makes it the hardest choice, though, as fewer things are actually wrong.

The handkerchief can be any of these colours. Each of them is harmonious. Say, for example, that we start with a grey suit, grey socks and pink, open-necked shirt. Both shirt colours that you turned down are options for the handkerchief: white and blue. Equally, the potential sock colours of grey, maroon and perhaps green can work. And then the ties you could have worn – navy, for example, or a pale grey.

Indeed, the handkerchief options are broader even than that. I have always felt that a red or purple tie with a pink shirt look a little forced, a little easy and commonplace. It looks as if the best you could think of was a vaguely similar colour – reddish tones with more or less blue or white. Gold ties on yellow shirts have always elicited a similar response. It feels like a cop-out.

These colours are, however, still harmonious. A purple handkerchief with a pink shirt works well, as does gold with a yellow shirt. Where a tie is sometimes forced to play a dark, background role, the handkerchief has no such restrictions. Imagine a dark grey or black tie in the ensemble described above, set off by a purple paisley handkerchief.

Harmony is broad, but you can still get it wrong. I find it hard to picture a yellow handkerchief working well with our example, for example, and orange would be horrible. But then, you would never have worn orange in any other part of that ensemble either.