On the Wednesday night of my recent trip to Seoul, there was a party to celebrate the anniversary of the local cloth agency, Renovatio. The founder Sam Ahn invited everyone in the industry, and over 200 people turned up.  I have never seen so many w...

Every time we go on a trip to a new country, we try to cover a bit of the local non-menswear craft alongside the usual tailoring, shirtmaking and shoemaking.  When we were in Japan a couple of years ago, we visited the master blade-maker Sasuke in S...

Assisi is a young tailoring house based in the Huam-dong area of Seoul. It was only established three years ago, but the tailor that leads it, Kim Min Soo, has been cutting for 15 years.  Like most Korean tailors I’ve seen, the team are more style...

James is a reader I met in Korea last year. A friend of our host Sam Ahn, he joined us for dinner on the last night with Assisi.  James has been a customer of various bespoke tailors for about 10 years, but has largely settled down to using Sartoria...

This article has been updated every four years for the past 12 years. It was originally written in 2012, and has had new versions in 2016, 2020 and now 2024.  The number of bespoke tailors we have tried and covered has increased, but the growth p...

Earlier this month I visited Seoul, to see some of the tailors I had been intrigued by but mostly seen from afar, and to visit some of the shops and brands. My impression was of a dynamic city – new development, new retail, every shop with a dis...

When I travelled to Korea back in December, one of the places I was keenest to visit was B&Tailor. Because, like many people, I’d been impressed for years at what I’d seen from Chad Park and his colleagues, but hadn’t had the best experienc...

Imagine walking into a bespoke tailor and finding clothes on long racks, inspiration pieces on mannequins, and unusual mid-century furniture. A tailor, in other words, that makes it immediately clear that they have just as much of an aesthetic vision...

We covered the Korean outfit B&Tailor in some detail here at the beginning of the month. For details on them, their history and their style, please read that article.  It might seem a little odd splitting things up like this, but I find it makes...

Yeah, the collar on this shirt is kinda high. I remembered it as soon as I saw these images - it was one I tried with a higher collar in order to wear with my A&S tailoring, which always has a high collar itself. It looks nice with those pieces, ...

What is a ‘caban’ coat? Well, it's meant different things at different points in time, but it has a particular meaning as a sartorial version of a pea coat in Naples.  The caban was originally something European sailors called a coat they saw be...

Ferdinando Caraceni is one of the world's best-regarded bespoke tailors, based in Milan. It has been run since his death in 2004 by Ferdinando's daughter, Nicoletta, and they have made me three jackets over the past 10 years. You can see them and oth...

When I walk around Pitti each season, interviewing makers and researching articles, it can be easy to feel lost in a flood of Italian cashmere and trainers that look like each other.  For that reason there are a handful of brands I return to every t...

With the growth of interest in outdoor clothing in recent years, there has been a predictable dive into the history of companies that produced it, of which one of the most prominent was Eddie Bauer.  One reason I find this exploration interesting is...

By Lucas Nicholson. The idea of black boots has been obsessing me for much of the past year. It must be a fairly common menswear preoccupation, given the inspiration: Marlon Brando in his black leather and bad-boy persona, most obviously. Which as a ...

I’ve admired the style of photographer Alex Natt - who takes most of the pictures for Permanent Style these days - for several years. He’s not the kind of person to talk about it much, and he certainly doesn’t post fit pics online, but to me ...

Readers who saw the first article on Assisi, the Korean tailor that made this tweed double-breasted jacket, were impressed with how the fit was looking, and they weren’t wrong.  It’s a very well cut piece of bespoke, with a three-dimensional sha...

This jacket from Ferdinando Caraceni has become one of my real favourites in the past couple of years, and I think it’s worth exploring why. It says something about where tailoring is today, at least for me.  It was made in 2021 by Nicoletta Carac...

This suit from Korean tailor Assisi has already been teased a couple of times on PS. Once during the fitting process in Seoul, where it frankly looked impossibly clean. And once when I wore it for our summer drinks in the Burlington Arcade.  No suit...

Men's Kimono with Haori (jacket) and Hakama (pants) By Ben St George. Ben is a freelance menswear writer and has been exploring some unusual brands and shops for us.  I wasn’t aware of Furuki Yo-Kimono, a small kimono specialist tucked away at the...

I had this tweed jacket made by South Korean outfit B&Tailor over the past 18 months, using Robin Petterson - a Swede who does their fittings in London and at home in Stockholm. Unfortunately, although the end result isn’t too bad (just a cou...

  Hong Kong has long been a centre for international commerce, driven by its location as a port and later by its strategic importance to the British Empire. When it was handed back to China in 1997, the city retained its vibrancy and ...

When the shoemaker Seiji McCarthy came to New York recently to take part in our pop-up, he brought with him a recent commission from Tailor Caid, the Japanese bespoke tailor run by Yuhei Yamamoto. Yamamoto is a big enthusiast for mid-century American...

Pitti Uomo this year felt busier than last, but that was a little deceptive - two of the big buildings were still closed for lack of exhibitors, and more squeezed into the main pavilion. The show’s future still feels a little uncertain.  My time w...

Last week I wrote about visiting the Paris trade shows for the first time, and being able to interview some new brands as a result. Today I’m going to highlight three that we found particularly interesting.  The first is Yuketen, the craft-based s...