This ulster-style overcoat was made for me by Sartoria Ciardi, the Neapolitan tailor, in 2020. Although I’ve had a few pieces of tailoring from Ciardi in the past five years, this is my only coat from them.  It has proved to be one of my favour...

In our last installment in this Tailor Styles series, we looked at the modern incarnation of the Neapolitan jacket: light and soft, but also short with a small shoulder. Today’s suit, from Sartoria Ciardi, is the diametric opposite within Neapolit...

Artisan of the year 2020: Sartoria Ciardi Enzo Ciardi has a lovely smile. It’s big (but then he’s big), it’s warm, it’s friendly. It’s extremely welcoming.  And best of all, I can enjoy that smile fully. Because when he opens the door to...

This is the film of our small presentation with Sartoria Ciardi a couple of weeks ago - at Mark's Club in London. We had 25 readers in the audience, with Poppy Charles kindly translating, and the result was a nice, intimate-feeling event with the ...

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 in winter - and that sun is st...

A friend used to say that he knew whether a suit was going to be good at the first, basted fitting. I’m not sure I entirely agree. The first fitting is largely for the tailor, to make sure the fundamentals of balance and so on are correct. It is ...

Renato Ciardi, who sadly passed away earlier this year, was one of the greats of Neapolitan tailoring. Succession planning is rarely one of a bespoke tailor’s strengths, but fortunately the Ciardi family began planning for this several years ago,...

In the past few months on Permanent Style, we’ve shown a few outfits that are a little more unusual than perhaps typical: a notch or two further along the subtle/showy scale.  The Art du Lin suit at Pitti probably falls into that category, as does...

Please read part one of this article, here, before this one. Without that context, setting out my priorities, this summary will likely be misleading. Everyone is different, wants different things from bespoke, and simply gets on with people differen...

This jacket was made using fabric from the interiors house de Le Cuona. A previous one - in a beautiful but rather adventurous orange - was covered here last year.  It’s the ‘Primitive’ quality of their linen, which is slubbier but also heavie...

I’ve been buying and wearing more corduroy in recent years - including the new dark-brown jacket above, from Sartoria Ciardi.  I think the reason is that if you’re not dressing for a formal office, worsted is likely to feel out of place; flannel...

Two new stripes in the PS Oxford shirt have been added to the shop today: a light pink and a pale green. As is often the case with PS products, they have been chosen as particularly understated, easy-to-wear styles.  The pink is the same as that use...

I like wearing suits. Not only do I have a lot that I like wearing, but I continue to commission them – not as much as sports jackets, certainly, but consistently. It can be an issue knowing how to wear them without a tie though. I know I have a bi...

This outfit I wore last week really tickled me - I think primarily for its combination of T-shirt and tailoring.  Working the two together in some way (as in this, perhaps Summer equivalent) is often an effective way to achieve the ‘casual chic’...

This was really fun. I guess it’s always easier interviewing someone you know well, but there’s also a temptation there to just chat - to forget the perhaps more significant topics you had wanted to discuss.  I think we got a nice balance. Th...

I was very excited when I received this jacket a month ago. Primarily because of the shoulder. Enzo Ciardi is fast becoming one of my favourite tailors. I like him, I like his roomy Neapolitan style, and everything he's made for me has been good: on ...

For the past five years or so, I’ve been wearing Hamilton & Hare’s tubular T-shirts under things.  They’re what I wear underneath knitwear, what I wear under a shirt, even what I sleep in. They’re the best fine-cotton tee I’ve ever wo...

Next week we’ll begin a series of articles that breaks down the style of my bespoke coats, building on the popular 2018 series that looked at suits and jackets.  That turned into a book, Bespoke Style, which was a great illustration of the rich...

In recent weeks I’ve been playing around with this button-through cardigan from Colhay’s.  Initially I was sceptical as to whether I’d ever wear it tucked in - and afraid it was a little lightweight to wear untucked. The same fear put me off t...

My love of bespoke overcoats continues unabated: the thing I was most excited about this Autumn was the prospect of wearing them again.  It's annoying that, useful as they are (and arguably today, more useful than a bespoke suit) they are limited to...

In a couple of weeks (Wednesday, March 7) Sartoria Ciardi will be coming to London for the first time.  They will be holding a trunk show all day on Thursday 8th, but we thought it would also be nice to have an event the night before.  So on the ...

After a long wait, Neapolitan bespoke leather experts Sartoria Melina are finally coming to London - on May 16th and 17th.  They will be at Mark's Club, and as with Sartoria Ciardi last month, we will hold a small event for them on the Wednesday ni...

One of the less-discussed sides of Pitti Uomo is the increasing number of tailors that set up in a hotel or appartment at the same time as the fair, in order to see customers. Although the majority of visitors to Pitti are buyers from around the wo...

It’s hard to use terms for this past year that haven’t already been overused, and lost most of their meaning along the way. But there are certainly several issues and trends that have naturally emerged from it, and which I wanted to reflect in t...

   Florence is best known as a tourist destination in the summer - the Uffizi, the Duomo, the Ponte Vecchio - and a menswear hub in January and June, when it plays host to the men’s trade show Pitti Uomo.  But it has enough unique shops to mak...