Style

When I travel, my default these days is a blouson over shirt and trousers.  It makes a nice switch from tailoring during the working days - perhaps a little more comfortable, but more importantly just a change that fee...

I just got back from our annual summer holiday: two weeks in Portugal, in a villa with my wife and children, miles away from anything.  I normally write a post running through things worn on holiday, as I know readers ...

Gauthier Borsarello is one of the most refreshing people in menswear today. I hope that came across in o ur recent piece on his shops and projects in Paris - including Holiday, Le Vif and L’Etiquette magazine.  What ...

Great as Instagram is, a definite flaw is its lack of an effective archive. There’s no way to search old images, so unless you save an image yourself, you can't find old pieces or browse effectively.  Just as importa...

Gene Krell is a legend. Today the international fashion director for GQ and Vogue in Japan, he ran the seminal glam and dandyism shop Granny Takes a Trip from 1969 and later worked with Vivienne Westwood. He is a punk, ...

Jamie Ferguson (above), the photographer I’ve worked with over the past few years on Permanent Style, has a different style to me.  He gets tailoring, and wears tailoring, but he also wears more sportswear, more work...

Today is a lovely day in London (the day I write this, that is, July 3, not the day it’s published). Sunny, a light breeze, a few clouds drifting across the sky.  It’s twenty-three degrees celcius. The kind of temp...

Tatsuya Nakamura Japanese fashion drives so much of classic style that we barely see in the West. Italian brands can be huge in Japan, yet barely be covered here. Partly as a result, Japanese buyers are some of the most...

One of the lovely things about the questions and comments we get on Permanent Style is the trends they highlight. In the past two weeks there have been dozens of questions on old posts about wedding attire. So I know ev...

One of the most popular posts we’ve ever written on Permanent Style was ‘Which office are you?’, back in February 2016. It showed a spectrum of outfits from T-shirt and jeans, through knitwear and flannels, up to ...

  I always wondered why my friend Tommaso was such a fan of British style: he always wore tweed jackets, flannel trousers, Scottish knitwear. Even cotton Harrington jackets. His green tweed jacket from Loris Vestru...

These ‘Building a Wardrobe’ pieces have now been collected into a Guide, which will expand over time. You can see the list at the right (on desktop), at the bottom of this post (on mobile) or simply on its ow...

Over the next few weeks, will be doing a few posts on creating a core wardrobe of clothes – often called a ‘capsule collection’ – to add to those already published on ties, shirts and handkerchief...

This outfit, worn on the last Saturday of our pop-up shop, is a good illustration of the kind of clothing that excites me at the moment. It could be defined, perhaps, as casual but luxurious, muted but refined. Casual, ...

High contrast Readers regularly ask about whether they should wear certain colours, and why certain clothes might appear to ‘wash them out’. My opinion has always been that skin colour and complexion is less importa...

Best lookbook: Drake's Runners-up: Stoffa, Saman Amel   This was our first award on lookbooks, and I think it raised some interesting questions about how brands present themselves in their imagery. Certainly that w...

  Best-dressed non-professional 2019: @Gusvs9 Runners-up: @urbancomposition, @flannels_and_tweed   @Gusvs9 doesn’t like people to know who he is. You never see his face on Instagram, and there is no biograph...

The tangerine orange looks nice against the brown tweed, doesn’t it? This combination, worn up to see Joshua Ellis recently, spurred a few thoughts on colour. Here they are. First, I don’t wear many strong colours j...

Layering knitwear can be both stylish and practical. Practical, because it gives particular warmth on a cold day - more, usually, than a shirt. And stylish because it looks so relaxed and casual, yet unusual.

You know when you think you’re not part of a trend, and then see everyone wearing the same thing? As a clothing snob that likes to think he’s different to everyone else, it’s very annoying. I had admired Michael H...

  The starting point for any decision about what shoes to wear with an outfit, is that they should be darker than the trousers. So with a charcoal trouser, a black shoe or very dark brown. With a mid-grey trouser, d...

Thank you for waiting so patiently - particularly those on the waiting list, who were alerted to the Friday Polo's availability a couple of days ago. The Friday Polo is now back in stock, in its original four colours: n...

Eight months ago I quit my day job as a financial journalist in order to dedicate myself to Permanent Style. (Many heartfelt thanks for all the messages I’ve received since then.) This prompted an interesting question...

Wearing a white tie with a blue shirt is something that makes perfect sense in Naples. To a certain extent, wearing sugary-pink jackets and lapis-blue tailoring makes sense too. It's just sunny so much of the time, even...

'Dressing up in a Dress-Down World' felt like a very timely subject for this Symposium, our first in New York. And particularly relevant in the US, perhaps, where there has always been a cultural aversion to dressing to...