Category: Cloth

This is the second in our series presenting all the cloth bunches currently available for bespoke, summarising what they contain and picking out our favourites. The summaries should help determine which bunches readers ...

Linen has long been a favourite for tailoring intended for hot weather. Its prime appeal is it’s cool to the touch (a lot more than wool, and a little more than cotton) because the fibre is a good conductor. Metal ...

Great as our Guide to Cloth series is, it deliberately doesn’t recommend specific cloths in specific bunches. This is largely because bunches change regularly (sometimes every six months) and if we did, the Guide ...

In many ways, tweed should be the perfect material for a modern man. It is practical, hard wearing, and can be dressed up or down, from almost-formal to definitely-casual. On the formal side, a navy tweed jacket, grey w...

*Cloth now sold out. Fox are taking pre-orders for the next batch* At our pop-up shop back in April 2017, Fox Brothers brought up some vintage bolts to offer readers, including a rather beautiful ecru cavalry twill. I...

A couple of years ago, a friend asked me for advice on dressing down his normal suit-and-tie wardrobe. Like many men, he wore suits (in worsted wool) to the office, and jeans or chinos at the weekend. The office was beco...

Caccioppoli, the Italian cloth merchant, was Jamie’s favourite place to photograph when we visited Naples over the summer. The aesthetic appeal is not immediately obvious. The Caccioppoli building is big, taking u...

  In some ways, summer trousers are more challenging than jackets in terms of cloth, and therefore more interesting. Trousers present the challenge of having something cool, but with enough body or crispness to hang...

It's hard not to feel that the future of the suit lies in more practical cloths than the fine worsteds of the past 30 years. We may move towards a situation where these cloths will be reserved for formal wear, while eve...

When I was in Japan at the end of last year, I was keen to see not just menswear crafts, but traditional crafts in other areas as well. Previous articles on swordmaker Sasuke and kimono maker Motoji attest to some of th...

Pop-up shop update: Sartoria Formosa are in the shop today, Friday and Saturday. Gennaro Formosa is on site, together with Gianluca Migliarotti – director of the ‘O Mast’ film among other things   ...

Shop update: Sartoria Solito and Luca Avitabile shirts will be in the shop today and tomorrow for a trunk show. They're pretty full already, but if you want to try and make an appointment, please contact l.a.shirtmaker...

Someone asked me the other day when I'm going to run out of things to write about. To be honest I have yet to have that problem - there's usually too much rather than too little. But as one writes more (1612 posts and ...

The next in our series on Cloth is a guide to weaves and to designs. As with the A-Z this is meant as a reference tool, which we will link to as we publish more detailed pieces about trousers, jackets or overcoats. When ...

As the next post in our series The Guide to Cloth, we have put together a glossary of cloth-related terms, covering everything from different animal fibres and their properties, to the various stages of spinning and fini...

Choosing a suit cloth is, in some ways, harder than any other area of clothing. Because they all look so similar. If we leave aside the more aesthetic – and subjective areas – of colour and pattern, we are l...

What makes a cloth suitable for a jacket, but not for a suit? This is a question I know many readers struggle with, particularly as offices become more casual. Without the safety of a dark suit and dark shoes, what shoul...

The amount of good soft-tailoring in London seems to increase by the month. And not just because people decide to start travelling: sometimes I just miss them. Nunzio Pirozzi has been travelling to the E Marinella store...

Selecting cloth may be the hardest part of the bespoke (or made-to-measure) process. You pick the style of a suit every time you buy one off the rack, but you’re unlikely to have ever looked at a tiny square of clo...

This week we are launching another big project for Permanent Style: The Guide to Cloth. This has been a long time in the works, but we wanted to do it right. There is a lot of piecemeal information out there about cloths...

I have a friend who wears what he calls ‘knockabout’ suits. How exactly he knocks about in them I don’t know, but the meaning is clear: these are casual suits, that don’t belong in a formal envir...

Summer clothing, particularly from Italian brands, often includes a lot of light, bright colours. These can be difficult to wear, particularly in northern European countries where the sun might not be that consistent. ...

We covered the appeal of cotton as a tailoring material generally last week, but didn't talk about the different types of cottons. There are corduroys and moleskins of course, gabardines and seersucker. But a differenc...

I've always found cotton very appealing for summer suits, but historically haven't had much luck with them. I had a navy one made by Choppin & Lodge, but the make was really too English and structured for the materi...

A couple of months ago I sat down with Gregor Thissen, Executive Chairman of cloth merchant Scabal, in Brussels after a tour of the factory. You can read more about Scabal and that factory on my first post here. Perma...