13/11/2015
I’m not quite sure why, but lately I appear to have been veering off the straight and narrow menswear track and more into the undergrowth of vintage and army gear. Thinking back it might have been finding the vintage Harris tweed jacket in Liverpool (the one that became the acclaimed first tweed project), or maybe it was falling for the…
08/11/2015
I’ve been a little lax in my book reviews of late, so I have a nice stack to be looked at over the coming weeks. To get started on the pile, I’ll be taking a look at the recently published “From tip to toe- the essential men’s wardrobe” from Gestalten in Germany. Fear not though, all 256 pages of this…
07/11/2015
Lookbooks are a strange thing. Brands spend time and money producing what amounts to a sort of picture book surrounding their collection, setting the look and mood of how they would like their product to be seen. Not the plain product photos you’ll see in the webshop, with all the details and such shown, but staged photoshoots, with props, weather and lifelike…
25/10/2015
Old army jackets have always been a style icon unto themselves. Through students, anarchists, hobos, de Niro in “Taxi Driver”, through to todays hipsters. The style, the utility and the value for money is quite remarkable. That is, if you like your jacket green, a bit crumpled and of unknown history. Because, let’s face it, that old surplus Army jacket…
02/10/2015
Some guys have a real thing about knitwear. A real thing, as in they will go on and on about all the “knits” they have and the “knits” they need. I’m not there at all. Give me a good sweater and I’ll wear it, a lot, but I don’t obsess about it. That’s not to imply I don’t appreciate a…
26/09/2015
For most people Liverpool means football and the Beatles, and that’s about it. This pretty much rules me out then, as I have no interest at all in either sport or mop-topped musicians. With a long weekend to be spent in Liverpool meant I would have to come up with something more than the obvious stuff. This is my brief notes on…
02/09/2015
This weeks review for Waistcoat Wednesday will be just a little bit different to the usual format, as I will weave in a guest voice in the guise of WDG. She has much experience as a seamstress and gives me valuable insight into fabric choices and construction. As will become clear, this week our differing opinions almost ended in fisticuffs!…
19/08/2015
So, Hansen Garments, tiny Copenhagen-based maker of classic menswear. I would say menswear with a flavour of Nordic Heritage, or perhaps more than a nod to vintage styles, but really Hansen is firmly out there in the left field, doing their own thing. No revolutions, just making things better each season, like sensible people do. And Hansen is quite sensible,…
08/08/2015
Visiting London at this time of year can be an immensely stressful experience. It’s likely to be warm, and it’s absolutely certain to be totally full of people. For this visit I wanted to keep is simple and I had almost nothing planned apart from a very short list of places I wanted to stop by. One of these was the Army…
08/07/2015
When it comes to parkas, there are three companies that immediately come to mind (to me, others will argue at length why they have a different list), and all three have certain similarities. Engineered Garments, Battenwear and Monitaly. All have a Japanese designer, produce their goods in the USA, and have at least one parka design that is incrementally changed…