IGNOTUS

Trunk Clothiers

If there was ever a reason to care about global warming – aside from total death of all living things on this planet – our ability to wear cool jackets should be it. As each year gets warmer and warmer, it feels like the opportunity to wear our favorite fall and winter clothes is getting shorter and shorter. It’s been unseasonably warm these past few months, but luckily the temperatures just dropped low enough to break out our favorite outerwear. And let’s be honest. Men’s style revolves around outerwear. 

Menswear blogs this time of year are often filled with lists about seasonal essentials – the perfect pea coat, the ideal trench. All of which can be great, but also feel a bit too generic to be personal. So while this isn’t a list of  menswear essentials, here’s a list of eight outerwear styles that have me excited this year. Hopefully you can find something here that also works for you. 

In fashion, tailors and designers get all the credit, but there’s an entire world of weavers, dyers, and finishers that are making the things we feel directly against our skin. Just as good food relies on good ingredients, the cutting and sewing of a garment wouldn’t mean much without quality materials.

In the last couple of years, I become really interested textiles – not just in terms of how they’re used in clothing, but also the broader world of woven goods. Selvedge, for example, is a great publication if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. They’re aimed at the lay enthusiast, but the articles are enriching, full of information that makes you appreciate the craft that goes into producing quality cloth (even if little of it has to do with menswear). 

Most things today are made with synthetic dyes, which were first discovered by accident in 1856. A young English chemist named William Henry Perkin was working in a crude home lab one year, trying to synthesize quinine to help fight malaria. What he ended up making was the world’s first aniline dye (the color was mauve), which soon after launched an entirely new industry. Synthetic dyes proved to be cheaper to make and easier to replicate. Within a few decades of their introduction, natural dyes all but disappeared from the Western world.

So, I’ve been working on a two-part series for Put This On (for those who don’t know, most of my writing is there). The posts were inspired by an online Vogue article I read earlier this year. Apparently, fashion editors are just like the rest of us. Despite having closets overflowing with options, they mostly rely on the same things for their day-to-day routines. An excerpt:

Like an exploding volcano of denim and satin, a tidal wave of cashmere and cotton, our clothes threaten to overtake our tiny apartments, to bury us alive under tees and trousers. This wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, if we actually wore all this stuff, if 365 days meant 365 different outfits—730 if we changed for evening! But nooo. In fact, most of us rely on a few favorites in serious rotation, leaving the rest of the orphans in the closet begging for crumbs.

To judge just how severe this situation has become, and with spring in full flower and the temptation to buy still more!—more!—beckoning from every shop and laptop, I asked some of my Vogue colleagues to share with me what it is they actually wear from their bursting closets.

I decided to ask some of my favorite people in the menswear industry the same question. With all the options in their closets, which presumably outsize anything in our own homes, what do they truly wear on practical basis?

Rome 1955.