Morning dress is an area I’ve always found fascinating, but never have occasion to wear myself. I do want to have some guidance on Permanent Style, however - so when Aleks Cvetkovic told me he was having morning dress made for the first time, I as...

y Aleks Cvetkovic Having now been to my first Royal Ascot, it strikes me that the hardest thing to do with morning dress is to get the details right, and in so doing capture a kind of comfortable ‘old school’ elegance without looking like you’r...

By Aleks Cvetkovic Welcome to the basted fitting for the bespoke morning suit by Whitcomb & Shaftesbury that we referenced in the first instalment of this series. As mentioned previously, the coat is cut in traditional black featherweave worsted...

  Everyone gets dressed in the morning. Most put no thought into it; a few put too much into it. My approach, formed through nothing more than hazard and habit, is to do one of two things: Pick out one piece that I really want to wear (usually so...

A friend of mine once told me about regular meetings with Prince Charles (as he then was). Assembled at Clarence House, a team of six would wait in a shockingly cold room, to the extent that anyone who was near a window could see their breath. Charle...

At Pitti Uomo back in January I took the opportunity to wear mostly tailoring and ties - the two outfits shown above and below. And it felt great.  I know there are traditionalists who see me as the antithesis of this, as I’m rarely pictured weari...

As I wrote earlier this year, I’m usually quite conservative when it comes to gowns. They’re very practical for me, thrown on early in the morning to get up with one of my three daughters.  They can still be luxurious, and beautifully made. I’...

Alessandro Squarzi has a reputation as a good dresser, and usually looks appealingly stylish yet relaxed.  Yet the way he currently dresses is actually very straightforward, and I think can be a lesson to guys everywhere - in how to keep things s...

This great coat from Edward Sexton is probably the most unusual model in this series, which has been looking at the styles of my various bespoke coats, in particular how they are cut and made. Sexton coats tend to have a bit of drama to them anyway,...

Having met the Florentine tailor Vittorio Salino last summer, I took the opportunity of being in Florence this past January to commission a jacket. I got on with Vittorio, was impressed with his outlook, and realised PS readers would be interested in...

Near where I grew up in Mortlake, south-west London, there is an incredible antiques shop.  ‘Memories of Mortlake’ is the life’s work of collector Elke Crowther, who sadly passed away last year, after decades of selling anything and everything...

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 everyone is thinking about what ...

My day begins around 6:30am, when my three-year-old starts shouting over the monitor that she wants to get up. That’s my job, in the highly organised division-of-labour that is our family life. I have to coax her out of her pyjamas and downstairs f...

Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in my office in Playhouse Yard, next to Blackfriars station, writing an article about structured finance transactions.  I remember it was very cold, much like today, though there had been no snow. My seat was a...

Wearing a sweater over the shoulders has a lot of negative connotations. But if you can get away with it - because of your style, of where you are, or just because of your personality - it’s incredibly practical. This suit I wore at Pitti earlier i...

Simon is only our second reader profile from outside the UK. He lives in New York, although when we talk on the phone he’s actually in Washington DC, having just landed on the red eye from Arizona.  Simon travels a lot. He’s a journalist and his...

In the past year Davide Baroncini, of knitwear brand Ghiaia, has been putting together and posting some looks that really resonate with me.  Comfortable and relaxed, but with a really high taste level, they seem a long way from both the hype-driven ...

Broadly speaking, I dress in one of three ways during the week. They are defined quite clearly (to simplify the process, as much as anything else) and represent three general levels of smartness. I know readers will be interested in having these set ...

You know that feeling when you realise a new purchase unleashes potential in an old, beloved garment? Like getting a yellow oxford and realising it doesn’t just look good with jeans, but also with your favourite herringbone jacket? OK, I’m going ...

By Tony Sylvester. I used to travel to Oslo regularly for a decade or so. A beautiful city, but not one abundant with window shopping options for those interested in menswear. One of the exceptions was Cavour; slap bang in the well-heeled part of tow...

A few years ago, I wrote a piece detailing what I packed when I travelled - focused on Naples in wam weather, but with application to colder weather too.  However this was a ‘work’ trip for me. One where I was expected to give a certain impre...

When we went to see Nicoletta Caraceni (above) in Milan recently, she had been approached several times by the Italian media to speak about the death of Silvio Berlusconi, who was a customer for much of his life.  She didn’t want to talk on TV, bu...

Ian is retired, and got into luxury menswear late in life. But he always had an interest in clothes, from his early days in Ivy clothing to the forties and fifties influences that came with learning jive dancing.  It could be easy to see him as bein...

The Cashmere Rugby - our reintroduction of the classic four-ply quality of Scottish polo - has just been restocked.  A dark navy has been added to last year's flannel grey, covering pretty much all the bases for a slightly classic, slightly better-d...

As we did last year, during Pitti I picked out a few people and outfits that I really liked, but that could have been missed - because they’re not Ethan, Jake or Tatsuya Nakamura. They’re deliberately a mix of smart and casual, tailoring and stre...