My reaction to the news that yet another person is about to start pontificating on mens style on the internet ranges from *facepalm* to *foreheaddesk*. This one, however, may be different. In what I believe to be one of his first posts on Slate, Troy Patterson addresses one of the questions that we hear the most in these circles, namely, “Can I get away with this?”. To which he provides one of the most reasonable,Read More
Getting festive at HMX Group!
Shameless plug. This month’s issue of The Rake has an article I wrote on the “Boutonnière Milanaise”, or the Asola Lucida. Just a heads-up for those among us who can’t get enough buttonhole porn.
OK let’s get to it. This is going to be a long one. And while most of this is specific to my experience with Indochino, a lot of the pointers could apply to any kind of MTM experience so may be worth a read to anybody who is thinking about getting a suit made. I’ll address some of the construction details in another post. There have been a number of questions and comments here andRead More
The suit and shirt came earlier than promised but I was busy so I let it hang for a few days. Since I know how to press a suit, it was conceivable that I might have improved it a bit by giving it a good press so I shot it as it came out of the box. If I have time, I’ll give it a press and reshoot, to see if that makes much ofRead More
I was shopping one day with a friend who had come in from Milan for a visit. He is also in the trade so we enjoy “doing the stores” together, to check out what everybody else is doing. We stopped into L’Uomo, in Montreal, which Alan Flusser called Canada’s finest menswear store. The salespeople there love their product, are incredibly knowledgeable about it, and love to talk about it, especially with those who exhibit anRead More
They promised delivery for September the 8th- it actually arrived September the 4th. Anyone who has had items shipped from abroad knows about nasty surprise brokerage fees and duties and stuff. There’s none of that- they deliver the box and that’s it. So far, so good. I’m going out of town for the weekend so I don’t know if I’ll be able to shoot anything useful before then, but I will try. Meanwhile, if BradRead More
I am occasionally contacted about my services as a bespoke tailor and I have to try to explain that, while it is something I very much enjoy doing, I only do it for the fun of it, and not as a business. Why? You just can’t make decent money doing it. The NY times ran a short piece about tailoring and economies of scale. Which is a better explanation of why the RTW industry isRead More
This blog has been, first and foremost, about studying tailored clothing, often analyzing other people’s methods so that readers and I can learn something. Up until now the focus has been solely on the construction of tailored garments; for the first time, I wanted to study somebody else’s method of selling tailored garments. The ready-made tailored clothing industry is almost 150 years old; many of the companies still producing in the United States themselves areRead More
I just got back from my weekend in Spain and it was a real eye-opener. The men’s tailored clothing industry had better wake up fast and see that the rest of the industry is adapting to a different consumer, one that was being called “generation smartphone” and if we keep on just doing things “the way we have always done them” we will get our butts kicked. Some of the highlights of the trip, otherRead More
