The London Lounge

Minh, Thank you again for these images. The winter sports attire is really outstanding, and the accessories leave me with a sense of loss because we just don't see anything like them today. This is a good time for inspiration, as Chris Despos and I are talking about how to make up the gray Donegal h...

It looks more 50s/60s to me. Certainly from the days before men's suits became standardized to a few shades of blue or gray and fewer than a dozen patterns. Looking at the illustrations Minh has been posting from the 1930s, you see a broad range of what we would now consider "loud" patterns that wer...

My frank critique is that you have a really finely designed example of a balmoral and that anything you might change would be different but not really better. Beautiful shoes. Along with David, I am interested in how they wear and whether they meet your expectations for that elusive "feel". Thanks f...

I second Hector's suggestion. With the different accessories he has suggested, you can create very different ensembles. That is why it is very important not to use a stripe (says "business"), or a highly unique cloth that everyone will remember more than the whole of what you are wearing. A moderate...

I have gone from square shoulders in my 20s to sloped shoulders 30 years later. The shoulder Chris makes for me is, to my eye, the best I have worn. It is well constructed and squared, but not heavily padded. After he had already had a fair amount of experience, he worked with one of the Caracenis w...

Wow! Another treasure trove of ideas, Minh. Frederic, that's a great story. Proper hats seem to be like vinyl records, hanging on and making steady growth. Optima Hats here in Chicago recently opened a second location in a higher rent area. I wanted also to note that the man in the blue suit and ove...

That raglan topcoat caught my eye also. I have a long tweed DB overcoat (well below the knee, heavy LBD lining and sleeves a half inch longer than normal for more overlap with my gloves) that works great for this nasty Chicago winter weather we are having. I have to say that in my normal casual wint...

Minh,

Thanks for these fantastic images! My eye also went to that midnight blue shawl collar dinner jacket. The lines and color are wonderful.

There is so much here to revisit.

Michael, I know you have posted before about the difficulties you have had in trying to produce heavy worsteds. Please let me know if I am wrong, but as i understand it the high quality yarns are not being produced that are needed for this type of cloth and the old machinery has in many cases been s...

Thanks lord superb. That looks like a nice old heavy worsted. It's hard to see in the photo, so I can't tell what the surface is like. Certainly those old heavy glen plaids, etc. had texture and were not entirely flat like what I see in today's books. The ones I am talking about could be a single co...

Thanks for more great images, Minh. Menswear is supposed to be in an upswing, and just based on the attendance at Pitti, that appears true. Still, while we have gained in access and spontaneity with the web, we don't have any publication with the high editorial quality of the ones we have lost.

That's good news! Suffice to say, I am intrigued.

My recent post on the handwork in an Oxxford suit from the 1930s got me thinking about another unique aspect of that suit rarely seen today -- its cloth. It was a substantial worsted in a blue-gray color that had the slightest hint of green to warm it up. What I rarely see today though, is the textu...

The shoulder seam on the tweed is an example of what can be done with hand stitching on a cloth like that. Oxxford sews that seam by machine today, but if it were hand sewn, it still would not be as nearly invisible on that worsted cloth as on the tweed from Anderson and Sheppard. I didn't have the ...

Ironically, posting on this thread got me thinking about my desire for a black shoe other than my typical-for-business punched captoes, to wear on a fun evening in a social setting. In Hawaii for the holidays, I stopped in at Leather Soul and found they were having a John Lobb trunk show the Friday ...