by Mansel Fletcher | May 12, 2014 | Bespoke Suit, Spring/Summer
What do Lapo Elkann, Gianni Agnelli, Matteo Marzotto and Luca di Montezemolo have in common, aside from their incredible wealth and status as style icons? They all wore or wear suits made from Solaro. While a lot of different fabrics are referred to as Solaro only London cloth merchant Smith Woollens, now part of Harrisons, offers the real thing. It’s an olive coloured wool cloth, which comes in a variety of weaves including herringbones and twill. Its defining feature is that it’s woven with red yarns on the underside, which show through the fabric to a greater or lesser extent depending on the angle of the viewer. (more…)
by Mansel Fletcher | Mar 5, 2014 | Bespoke Suit, The History of Bespoke Tailoring
This show is about the revolution that took place in the way people dress during the Thirties. While it’s about the clothes worn by men and women here I’m only concerned with the men’s wear. G. Bruce Boyer, surely the English speaking world’s best style journalist, co-curated the show, which features beautiful period pieces by famous Neapolitan tailoring establishment London House (now better known as Rubinacci), H. Harris and James & James. The latter two are now defunct, but were tailors to the Duke of Windsor. (more…)
by Mansel Fletcher | Jan 17, 2014 | Bespoke Suit
The Italian designer Massimo Piombo has strong and fabulous taste. The look book for his Spring-Summer collection is notable because the model is a Japanese aristocrat, the colours are bold, and because the single-breasted jackets are buttoned on the lower of two buttons. Written down this last detail doesn’t seem like earth-shattering news, but the effect is powerful. Visually it creates a much longer line from the lapels down to the button, which elongates the torso, and psychologically it gives an impression of a particularly Italian strand of sartorial carelessness. (more…)
by Mansel Fletcher | Jan 10, 2014 | Bespoke Suit
I write this in the depths of winter, a day bracketed by frost and chilled by a cold westerly wind. It’s a day when my heaviest tweed jacket is a natural choice, and when it’s hard to imagine the feeling of sunshine on one’s face. Quite naturally the kind of clothes that I want to wear today – thick flannels, substantial tweeds, insulating corduroys – are on my mind, and were I to place an order with Chris they are what I’d go for. (more…)
by Mansel Fletcher | Dec 23, 2013 | Bespoke Suit, The History of Bespoke Tailoring
The recent publication of the book I am Dandy, by Rose Callahan and Nathaniel Adams, has put the idea of dandyism back in the spotlight. While the word is casually thrown around it’s hard to define, especially as it seems to be popularly understood to mean the exact opposite of what it originally intended. Most of the men in the book are, at least in the traditional sense, fops rather than dandies. (more…)
by Mansel Fletcher | Dec 18, 2013 | Bespoke Suit, Film & TV, Style Icons
The fact that the actor George Clooney is widely regarded as one of the best-dressed men in the world is preposterous. There are a variety of reasons why Clooney isn’t well dressed: he invariably wears utterly boring dark ready-to-wear clothes, his suits are usually made from overly-shiny fabrics with little visual interest, he wears black shirts (always a mistake) and tends to wear charmless snow-white ones the rest of the time, he never wears a tie and compounds this by wearing shirts with collars that collapse under his jacket, his dinner jackets have satin lapels, the jackets are often ill-fitting, and he doesn’t bother to get his trousers or sleeves tailored to the correct length. (more…)
