See you this evening

Permanent Style drinks this evening will be at the Rook & Raven gallery, just by Tottenham Court Road tube, from 6:30. Already spoken to a few of you who will be there - looking forward to meeting more.

No need to RSVP, just turn up.

How to pack a suit jacket: Reader question

Hi Simon,

First of all let me say I'm a massive fan of your blog. In fact I've even cancelled my GQ subscription because of your blog. Doesn't mean you should start charging us though! I was wondering if you could do a post on how to carry your suit while travelling? My Samsonite has a 'suit compartment' which is pretty much a zipped closure on the lid of the suitcase but the suit always come out crushed at the end of the journey. Look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Joe

-

Hi Joe,

In the same way as previous reader questions asking for practical advice on such things, I’m not going to describe in detail how to pack, but rather give my experience of different techniques.

My first point would be that if you can avoid packing a jacket, do so. If I’m just travelling for a night or two and don’t need to many changes of formal clothing, I will usually take my travel blazer or a suit and not pack it up. No matter what technique you use, there will be some small creases. Wear your jacket to the airport and take it off when you’re on the plane, either hanging it on the hook on the seat back or putting it in the overhead compartment.

If you do pack a jacket, make sure to fold it carefully whatever technique you use. Don’t get it trapped when you close the lid; take things out of the pockets; pack it at the top of the suitcase; and smooth it out as you do.

You can use a suit carrier, either a small one or a big one that also allows you to pack shirts and shoes etc in it. While this will cut down on the creasing a lot, it is one extra thing to carry and I usually can’t be bothered.

If using a suitcase, the basic method is to just lay the jacket on its back, making sure the collar and shoulders are far enough from the sides, and fold up the bottom half. You need a case that is as wide as the jacket.

Louis Vuitton, in its Art of Packing series, recommends folding like this but putting things like socks in the tops of the sleeves, and a sweater and trousers from the suit inside the jacket, before folding it over. This makes sense as it reduces hard creases and also works well if you fold shirts around each other. I can never be bothered to be this intricate, however.

The main alternative technique is to fold the jacket lengthways, but turn it inside out first. This is illustrated quite well on a video here. The biggest advantage of this method is that it protects the material of the jacket from nicks or pulls. I haven’t found it has many benefits in terms of creasing, but it is the technique I normally use. Again, it helps if your case is as long as the jacket, so you don’t need to fold up the bottom at all.

Some tailors when making visits overseas even use this inside-out technique and then roll the jacket up. In my experience this only works on softer jackets, in terms of both cloth and construction. Don’t do it with worsted, but with a cashmere jacket for a weekend away, this can even be ok in a holdall.

Finally, hanging the jacket in a steamy bathroom does have some benefits. But it’s only marginally better than hanging the thing up in a wardrobe overnight. Look after your jacket, don’t leave it on the floor and brush it down.

Warsaw glove maker: Czeslaw Jamrozinski

Of all the places I visited in Warsaw, the one that excited me most was a very small, very unglamorous glove shop. It is run by Czeslaw Jamrozinski. Or rather it is him, for the shop isn’t big enough to hold more than one person, and neither is the workshop behind it.

He comes from a family of glovemakers, as you would expect. No one enters this trade on a whim. His grandfather worked for a big glovemaker and it was his father who struck out on his own, opening up a shop in Kalisz and then, after World War Two, in Warsaw. Like many artisans I met in Poland, including shoemaker Januszkiewicz, he had trouble with the authorities after the War for his role in that conflict, and was in prison from 1945 to 1948. One of the certificates that sits on the wall of the shop is for Czeslaw’s father, congratulating him on 70 years of craftwork.

None of this, of course, was the reason I was excited to meet him. Although it’s always nice to have a good story. Rather, the reason was that he found gloves that almost fit me, and then showed me how he could make some that would be perfect.

I have embarrassingly slim wrists and long fingers. Artistic, my mother would say. Feminine, retort others. Whichever adjective you prefer, the fact remains that gloves are hard to find. Anything that is long enough on the fingers will be far too big on the palm and the wrist. Anyone that likes well-fitting clothes will know there is a particular pleasure in tight gloves. It may even be a little kinky. This pleasure has been denied to me.

Anyway. Czeslaw tried a couple of sizes on me, resting my elbow on a green felt pad on his desk and then pulling the glove on, finger by finger. He would loosen the leather a little before doing this, using the wooden “baguettes” you can see pictured above, pushing them up the fingers a couple of times. Apparently it’s just needed on new leather; this is not technique to stretch them permanently.

By trying various models he got a good fit, particularly in some beautiful chamois leather versions. Indeed, the leather was important, because this was the only craft I saw in Poland where access to good raw material was not a problem. Chamois, by the way, was originally the skin of a mountain goat but is also used to refer to skins treated with oil or whale blubber. Makes it all soft. Czeslaw works almost entirely in deer, doe or lambskin.

With all the gloves, the fit around the wrist was not quite right. So we decided to make some: they only cost £35, after all. Czeslaw measured two points on the palm, the wrist, the distance from thumb to index finger and then the length of each finger (interestingly, only in relation to the finger next to it, rather than the total length). He used an old French ruler that he said you only found in the glove trade. It was made in Grenoble, apparently, in 1934. He must be the only man in Poland still working in inches.

Czeslaw explained how he cuts the leather with his shears, having marked the right places on the hide, and we discussed a few points of style. The ‘points’ for example, the lines on the back, were created to make the hand look longer and so more elegant. Not really a problem I have. So we went without those. It will be a nice unbroken piece of brown lambskin.

The making will take two weeks. I’ll post pictures when they’re ready.

Warsaw shoemakers: Kielman and Januszkiewicz

There is a far stronger tradition of shoemaking in Warsaw than of tailoring. One manifestation of that tradition is that all the shoemakers – of which there are about five good ones left – make all their shoes by hand. There is no machine work involved, no tradition of benchmade shoes, and therefore both ready-to-wear and bespoke shoes are hand sewn. There is nothing between these are cheap, glued models.

Unlike tailoring, bespoke shoemaking here also means something slightly different. There are no fittings. Measurements are taken and the leather, style and last are selected, and then the shoes are made. Some adjustments can be made after the fact, including adjusting the last and putting them back onto it, or shrinking them slightly, but there is no braced fitting.

I’m sceptical of the system, having gone through English bespoke with two makers and discovered how hard it is to get it right even with a fitting. But I haven’t tried it, and none of the Polish writers I visited had tried both types of bespoke either, so no real judgment can be made.

Kielman shoes

It does perhaps explain, though, why Kielman – by far the biggest of the remaining shoemakers – is happy to take so many orders over the internet. Although Maciej Kielman, who took me round the shop and rooms, travels extensively to meet clients and take measurements, around 15% of Kielman’s business is conducted online. Customers send in pictures of their bare feet; they take their own measurements; they send long emails detailing everything that is right or wrong with the fit of a delivered shoe. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese are the most obsessive, specifying everything from the width of the welt to the length of the toe cap. It sounds like rather too much to me.

Polish shoemakers also don’t have much of a house style. The traditional shoe is round toed, thickly made and square waisted: in the same vein as the Austro-Hungarian makers readers may be familiar with. But there are also very finely made versions, ‘dress shoes’ in their eyes, with thin welts and bevelled waists. Although I disliked many of the Kielman styles, there were also half a dozen I would gladly have worn.

The range of Kielman black shoes

Kielman has been around since 1883 and at one time occupied almost half a block. Today it is a single store front, and the back room is taken up with a Barbour/Belstaff concession. Behind that is the workroom, where the recent lasts are stacked – number 600 onwards – and the lastmaking and finishing are done. The rest of the lasts and the work are offsite. They charge €625 for a readymade shoe and €700 for bespoke.

Kielman last making

The other shoemaker I visited was Tadeusz Januszkiewicz, an old maker with a reputation for the best fitting shoes in Warsaw. His career was almost cut short by the Communist party after World War Two, when they tried to hunt him down for working with the resistance during the War. Tadeusz and his master decided the only solution was to become the official bootmaker to the Communists. As a Polish saying goes, “sometimes the darkest place is in the spotlight”.

Tadeusz Januszkiewicz

Tadeusz’s reputation for fit comes from several years studying orthopaedics. As with Kielman, there is a big range of styles and some of the shoes – such as those pictured below – are very nicely made. He says that getting good leather is still a problem, even 23 years after the lifting of the Iron Curtain. Back then it was impossible to get anything other than Polish calf, a very small animal with a soft hide. Today he can order more, but it takes a while. He shows me a cordovan hide from Horween, the last of an order that has been used up very quickly. “Then again, only the bloggers or men who read the blogs know what cordovan is,” he says.

For more on the bloggers in Warsaw, and on tailoring in the city, see previous post here.

Thanks in particular to Wojtek and Roman for their help during this trip.

Warsaw tailors: Zaremba, Kierepka and Gest Moda

I was in Warsaw for a couple of days last week, a city with a strong shoemaking tradition, a smaller group of tailors and a couple of great glovemakers.

It was particularly interesting to learn about how tailoring fared in this area under Communist rule, and how it has developed since. The craft suffered a big blow after World War Two, as many of the local tailors were Jewish and didn’t survive. However, being behind the iron curtain for the next 40 years had its advantages, as Poland wasn’t as exposed to the explosion of readymade clothing.

The biggest problem tailors had under Communist rule was a lack of good cloth. Poland used to be a big weaving centre, around Lodz. But that shrunk in the 50s and 60s, and tailors usually charged just ‘for the needle’, for the making of a suit. Customers were expected to bring their own cloth.

Tadeusz Kierepka, an old establishment tailor that I met, used to make for a lot of the diplomats in the city. Brazilian clients, in particular, pushed him towards making entirely unlined jackets, which he said were very similar to the Caliendo jacket from Naples I was wearing.

When the Iron Curtain fell and Poland became independent, the demand for tailoring plummeted as consumers scrambled for western, high-fashion clothing. “Those were the truly bad years,” says Tadeusz. Most tailors survived by making adjustments only, and today one of the problems bespoke tailors struggle with is shaking off that association, convincing people they are a luxury service.

Because there was no demand for bespoke in the 90s, quality fell, and another problem today is that tailors are used to taking shortcuts – fusing some areas (though thankfully not the chest) and skipping the basted fitting. What was the point, when customers didn’t appreciate a superior fit?

There is a bit of renaissance of bespoke in Warsaw, as in many parts of the world. Bloggers have been central to this, with Wojtek ‘Macaroni’ Szarski the first and others such as Roman Zaczkiewicz an enthusiastic following. The bespoke tailors I visited said they see a much larger number of young people, particularly lawyers, who have (or think they have) a much better understanding of bespoke.

I visited three tailors in Warsaw, of about 10 operating in the city on some scale, however small.

Tadeusz, pictured above, is a lovely man and a pillar of tailoring community. The suit he is wearing is 20 years old – as you can see by the position and shape of the lapel notch. He apologises that he has lost weight and so it doesn’t fit as well as it used to. He uses some small amount of fusing, around edges and cuffs for example, and has two people working for him – one a young Italian called Alessandro who is extremely keen.

Mazurczak and Trzaska of Gest Moda during a fitting

Mazurczak and Trzaska of Gest Moda are also establishment tailors. They used to run Moda Polska, the state tailoring service during Communist times. There are just two of them, doing all the cutting and making, in a little room divided in half by a curtain.

I saw a fitting taking place and Wojtek wearing two of their jackets, both of which fitted beautifully. Some of the finishing, such as buttonholes, may not be the finest but they certainly know their trade. In common with most tailors still, they charge separately for the tailoring (around £600) and for the cloth. So great value if you have cloth and want a well-fitting jacket.

Finally, Zaremba, the biggest and certainly most modern of the tailors. Maciej Zaremba inherited the business from his father three years ago. Both are salesmen, not tailors, but Maciej certainly knows his style (apparently it has come a long way from his previous life as a DJ). He makes both a clean, softly structured jacket for local lawyers and businessmen and a much softer, Neapolitan jacket (in blue, below). This features inset sleeves, pick stitching and Milanese buttonholes – all things he has seen for himself and helped his tailors to carry out.

Maciej has three tailors and one trouser maker working for him, though at the moment his biggest problem is too much demand and not enough tailors. It is extremely hard to find anyone in Poland who wants to enter the tailoring trade, and bespoke is not big enough or glamorous enough yet to attract them.

One other piece of good news though – Macaroni has just opened his own shop, called Macaroni Tomato. It is a beautifully appointed place, stocking Italian chinos, cashmere handkerchiefs and unstructured jackets. He has real taste, and this comes across strongly. Interestingly, he has opted to stock a huge number of readymade suit sizes, including both six and seven-inch drops, longs and regulars, from which customers find the best fit and then select the cloth they want it made in. Comprehensive adjustments are also made afterwards. It sounds like a good alternative to MTM.

Next, shoemakers.

Permanent Style drinks

Several readers in the past few weeks have expressed a wish to meet up somewhere, to swap tailoring anecdotes and get some of those damned reader questions answered a little quicker.

As a first, tentative step towards such a gathering, Permanent Style will be hijacking the Armoury trunk show next Friday evening, the 28th. The Hong Kong store will be in town showcasing the work of Florentine tailor Liverano & Liverano and Austrian shoemaker Saint Crispin's. I've written about both craftspeople on The Rake recently - see links here and here - and they are definitely worth a look. I'm particularly interested in Saint Crispin's unique approach to fitting.

The gathering will start at 6:30pm and last until 8:30pm, at which point we may disperse or find a suitable pub nearby. The venue will be The Rook & Raven gallery, where the Armoury trunk shows are held, which is on Rathbone Place, a stone's throw from Tottenham Court Road tube. The Armoury will very kindly be providing some drinks.

I look forward to seeing a few of you there.

Menswear: Vintage postcards from Tom Phillips

A beautiful Norfolk jacket

When Tom Phillips, the author of Menswear: Vintage People on Photo Postcards, first put together this collection, he expected to see conformity across menswear in the roughly 40 pre-WW2 years it covered. What he got was a cornucopia of quirks and affectations.

The image below demonstrates this particularly well. Seven young lads are on a day out at the seaside. All are overdressed by today's standards, but they are also dressed in variety of different cloths, colours and cuts. A three-piece suit or an open-necked sports shirt; cream flannels or voluminous knickerbockers: there are relatively few 'rules' on display here. Such it always was, with casualwear in particular. The other seven images continue that theme, in different ways.

Most of these shots were taken in one of the new studios that sprung up at the turn of the century, taking advantage of the Post Office's new service that allowed both a message and an address to be printed on the back of a card. Men popped into such a studio - carefully arranging a particular image of themselves - examined the image after a short delay and had as many cards printed as they wished.

The book, including 200 such images, is available from October 3 and features a nice introduction from Eric Musgrave. It is published by the Bodleian Library, Oxford and priced at £15, $25.

What sportswear should be like

All formal, but in different permutations

The volume and the thickness. The presentation suggests a boy trying to look older than his years

Love the waistcoat and collar

Interesting spacing and height of the jacket buttons

My favourite ensemble, from the jacket pockets to the shiny boots to the winsome grin

Savile Row: A Glimpse into the World of English Tailoring

 

Yoshimi Hasegawa recently sent me her beautiful book Savile Row: A Glimpse into the World of English Tailoring. It is largely in Japanese, but each tailor’s chapter includes a section in English and there is also a short English introduction.

Indeed, the Military Tailoring section of the introduction is the most interesting thing in the book. Although short, it includes three examples of military jackets – a patrol jacket, a khaki drill jacket and a mess jacket – demonstrating the range of such apparel any military man required. As Edward Lakeman, who writes this section, says, in this age reputations could be worn or lost on the strength of your tailor.

The photography throughout is gorgeous, black and white and in high contrast, with a particular penchant for close-ups of buttons, sheers and cloth. There are, however, a few things I would quibble with. Spencer Hart is included among an otherwise standard list of bespoke tailors. The directory at the end includes Scabal, Dormeuil and Ozwald Boateng in a slightly more expanded list. And the address of Timothy Everest is the west end branch on Bruton Street, which does not of course handle the bespoke.

The book is wonderful compliment to the Row. Although it adds little to James Sherwood’s larger volume, it is apparently the first such work created for the Japanese market and as such will I’m sure be enthusiastically received.

It is currently available through Amazon Japan, priced ¥3,570 (£28).

Paul Stuart's wondrous Autumn colours

Colour and texture: brown, green and tan; suede, wool and fur

I love Paul Stuart. Part of it is, as expressed recently in my Arnys interview, the joy of having a shop you travel to see. You can’t get Paul Stuart here. But you do have to love what that shop carries, and Paul Stuart always manages to create things that surprise and delight me.

It’s not bespoke (although see my interview with Mark Rykken) and so I won’t be buying the jackets. But there are always wonderful colours and textures in the socks, the ties, the gloves. Indeed the ground floor in New York is probably the best men’s accessories range in the world.

Although the Phineas Cole line is particularly good at innovation (see my interview with Ralph Auriemma of Phineas Cole), it is usually the main line that takes my fancy. The colours are classic, preppy, English country combinations but done better than pretty much anyone. It’s amazing how bad some English brands are at combining the bright cords, heavy tweeds and cashmere knits they stock.

Paul Stuart, for me, is inspiration, and always more for Autumn/Winter than Spring/Summer. The colours and textures are so much richer. And so, here are my favourites from this season, with a little commentary on each. 

Wear bright red and mustard; bring them down to earth with brown 

The green tweed of an overcoat is the perfect canvas for autumnal colours

This is a woman. But you should wear brown leather with grey flannel. And encourage your wife to dress like this

Mossy green for a tie; burnt orange in accessories

The orange of fallen leaves, that green tweed again and the shine of brown shoes

I wouldn't recommend this much grey together, unless you want to make an impact. But the top half works wonderfully 

I have written about this for a few years now. See post here on Paul Stuart A/W from back in 2008, for example.

Barbour video: the factory and the aftercare

I love this video made in the Barbour factory and the homes of some of its long-term customers. Barbours are great for patination - a fancy word for 'dirt' in this case - and I didn't realise how much work they do in terms of alterations and refurbishment. This is the kind of work that sets a great brand apart, particularly in a casual jacket where most areas of craft or handwork make little difference.

Anderson & Sheppard x The Rake

Just a quick note to say thank you to everyone who attended the party with The Rake, Anderson & Sheppard and Mr Bryan Ferry last night. I don't think I've ever had so many people I loved in the industry in one place, and it made the Clifford Street shop look very special.

Interview: Jean Grimbert, Arnys

In June this year, the LVMH group announced that it would be buying the Arnys menswear store on Rue de Sevres in Paris, and converting it into a branch of Berluti, which it has recently expanded into a full menswear brand. This was a crying shame.

Arnys was one of the few truly original menswear stores left in the world – somewhere you would travel to visit and could find nowhere else. Of all the craft-based brands I explore on this site, the vast majority are stocked in the world’s biggest cities, and are usually available to buy online. Arnys was small, unique and beautiful.

Although some of the clothing tended towards parody, the Arnys aesthetic was successfully reapplied to new colours and materials every season. My favourite purchase from there was a pair of high-waisted linen trousers – I have never seen such a design or the wondrous linen anywhere else, in cloth books or off the peg. On the other hand, they were selling a €2000 jumpsuit in the same cloth, which was ridiculous.

Last month I interviewed Jean Grimbert, one half of the sibling team that ran Arnys and designed everything in it. He claims that after he retires at the end of the year, LVMH will retain the Arnys aesthetic under Berluti creative director Alessandro Sartori.

-

How will Arnys and Berluti work together?

We will be increasing the size of our bespoke department, which will be branded as ‘Berluti by Arnys’. I am personally in charge of this and our aim is to create the greatest haute-couture bespoke house around. We will also make some of our distinctive Arnys casualwear, such as the Forestière jacket, on a bespoke basis. We will make everything – bespoke ties, shirts or scarves.

But will you stop the Arnys readymade collection?

No. First we will be shutting the shop for a complete refurbishment at the end of the year. Then, when we reopen, we will have two readymade collections: Berluti and Arnys.

Given what Sartori has already designed for Berluti, which was rather dark and classical, are the two aesthetics not too different?

Yes and no. I think the two have the same spirit. You can see from the images from our Winter collection [shown around this post] that there are things in common. This is my last collection, I am 66 and will retire. But I have a lot of confidence in Alessandro Sartori. He is a charming man and we have talked together several times already. He likes what I am doing and vice versa.

The quality of the clothing is similar, in terms of what it aims for, and there are similarities too in the contemporary nature of some of the cuts. The jackets, you can see from the images here, are that little bit shorter, and the designs often have some kind of asymmetry built in.

Sartori has a similar sensibility to me and, I think, actually a similar approach to colour. What he will do, of course, will be his own creation, but he will simply design differently for the two ranges.

 

Will the new store also keep the cufflinks, knives and other accessories that you are know for?

I don’t think so, no. These were very much a personal endeavour for me, to sell these little things made by artisans in France. The little knives, you know, are made by a customer of ours. He is a doctor but has recently taken to making knives. He has set up a little atelier and produces them himself, with precious handles and beaten steel blades. The pen knives we have had for longer and are made in Sauterne, by an atelier with just three people. I’m sure we will find other places to make them available.

What interesting things are in the current clothing collection?

We have handkerchiefs with a different pattern on each side, made of two pieces of silk sewn together by hand. This makes them very versatile and I think we are the only one doing this. We also have a range of jackets made from shirt cloth that are wonderfully light – you could sleep in them if you wanted to.
I’m also excited by the shirts we have made from printed silks and cottons. What looks like a woven houndstooth or other pattern is actually just printed on. This gives me much more control over the colours and more freedom with pattern – rather than having to work with warp and weave. The silks are all machine washable as well.
-

This was the third time I have met Jean and I will miss him. He is wonderfully warm, enthusiastic and a uniquely creative individual.

I remain sceptical about Sartori’s ability to continue the Arnys aesthetic. At the very least, the inventiveness that characterised the Grimbert collections will go: no two minds innovate in the same way. It is also easy to say that these things will carry on being made bespoke – anything can be made bespoke if you have the time and the money. I just hope some vestige of the spirit remains, and I continue to have an excuse to go to Paris. Ubiquity makes us all poorer, for the lack of variety and lost joy of discovery.

Manolo Blahnik in Anderson & Sheppard

I was having a conversation with a couple of tailors and cloth merchants last week about the success of Anderson & Sheppard in recent years. People persist in saying the suits have little distinctive style of their own, but I contest that. In particular, the size of the collar sets any jacket apart and this is particularly noticeable on the double-breasteds, which is one reason I prefer them to the SBs. It does a lot to accentuate the drape in the chest, adding more to impression of volume.

Then are men like Manolo Blahnik, seen here interviewed this week on CNN. The point about the collar remains true, but Manolo adds a pink sparkle of his own, a wonderfully contrasting bow tie and some purple velvet pumps. Beautiful.

You can see one of my DBs in this PEN piece.