Suitsupply Summer Sale
A nice last-chance blowout on some stunning spring/summer items from one of the best resources for style-conscious men on a budget.
The Political, Comedic and Sartorial Stealth of Seth Meyers
The "boring" suit is the uniform of some of the smartest, funniest and most interesting guys in the room, like Seth Meyers.
Funeral Blues
Funerals call for appropriate and respectful dress. For me, that means a dark blue suit.
Classic Tailoring: A Sartorial Hill I Will Die On
The cooler and edgier bros of the moment have been embracing all kinds of remixes and twists with classic tailoring. The suit has moved on, yo. It’s all about being short, brief, casual. A hyper-softening and casualization of the suit is in full swing, moving it closer to comfy and approachable athleisure. Slouchy, even.
According to the so-very-right-now, the classic tailored suit as you’ve known it is dead, bro. Or at least that’s the vibration on the street and the interwebs.
The Absence of Mastery in the Era of the “Instabrand”
Over the past decade, the internet and social media have enabled many entrepreneurs to start new businesses very quickly and relatively cheaply. Ventures like this used to require much more time and money than they do now, where we have a saturated market of young clothing, grooming and accessory brands. These young companies, however, often sell a product with a very shallow breadth of understanding, knowledge and appreciation of history and how/why things work the way they work.
The Sartorial Illiteracy of the American Television Host
It’s a good bet that a lot of American men get their cues about wearing suits from television. Unfortunately, most TV personalities wear their suits poorly, spreading bad information to the masses.
Left to their own devices, male on-camera personalities would likely make even bigger sartorial mistakes than they already do. It’s not totally their fault. Their main job is to be informed, intelligent, engaging and entertaining, which is a genuinely difficult full-time job. Other than a few hosts who actually have a sense of style and a knowledge of what to wear and how to wear it, these men need help. To get dressed appropriately and look right, they retain the services of a stylist, designer or dresser whose job can range from advising and consulting to an all-out dictation of what otherwise clueless talent should wear. This is where the problem lives.
That Extra Reinforcement Fabric Inside the Rear Hem of My Pants
I don’t know what you call it. I tried Googling things like “reinforcement fabric pants hem,” but no dice. All I know is that there is an extra strip of “reinforcement” fabric inside the rear hem of the pants of one of my custom suits. It’s obviously designed to prevent any destructive scuffing and chafing that can occur from the back of my shoes rubbing up against the inside of my pants. It’s subtle and completely invisible from the outside. Whatever this feature is called, I like it.
The Unfortunate Fear of Being “Too Dressy”
A friend invited me to be his plus-one for a concert of Brahms at Carnegie Hall this past weekend, with a supper in a fancy restaurant immediately following. Though I certainly appreciate classical music and often listen to it while working, the classical music scene is not my world at all. I basically feel like Tom Ripley in these situations. The music, however, is always gorgeous, and my friend is smart, funny and fantastic company.
The combination of classical music and Carnegie Hall says suit and tie to me (and my friend, thankfully). As I looked around the audience before the performance started and at intermission, it was obvious that the combination of fine musical art and an iconic Manhattan venue inspires something quite different in other people’s sartorial inclinations. Of all the men in attendance that evening, I’d say about 40% were in a suit or jacket, with even less wearing a tie. For a classical music performance. At Carnegie Hall.
Kathryn Sargent’s Five Secrets of the Perfect Suit
What Joan Rivers did for comedy Kathryn Sargent seems to be doing for bespoke tailoring in a decidedly male-dominated universe. A few weeks ago, the 41-year-old master tailor became the first woman to open her own eponymous bespoke shop on Savile Row. While women have been behind the scenes for a long time as cutters, finishers, and the like, Sargent is breaking new ground, cracking what she calls the “windowpane check ceiling” of Savile Row’s boys’ club.
A Well-Tailored Suit, the Great Equalizer
A t-shirt is great, but not every man fills one like Marlon Brando or Chris Evans. Jeans are perhaps the most democratic garment in all of menswear, worn by everyone from the 1% to real people, but not every man looks great in them, no matter how expensive they are. But in a well-tailored suit, every man looks his best.