By Tony Sylvester. “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzli...

I really enjoyed Tony’s evocative piece last week on Riviera style. The image of the rose-coloured hotel with palm trees cooling its flushed façade, in particular, has stayed with me I also thought there was more to explore. Given how challenging ...

By Manish Puri Whilst the recent sun in London has brought a sugar rush of excitement for the warmer days that lie ahead, it also brings a more troubling, recurring question: how do I usually dress for summer? It shouldn’t be difficult to answer. A...

Espadrilles are my preferred, casual summer shoe. I’ve always liked their clean lines and simplicity, which make them more elegant than pretty much any other option. I also quite like the massage-like feeling of walking on rope. They’re cheap, ea...

 I’ve been looking for rather a long time for my perfect T-shirt. One quality maker, one perfect model, with the intention to stock up on white and grey crew-necks and (in theory) never shop again. Readers will, I’m sure, empathise with this ap...

This is the first of three articles celebrating menswear stores in London, following our call to arms earlier in the week urging readers to support the shops they love. We’re starting with Adret, the achingly beautiful shop opened by Adam and Seto ...

The Palm Beach Casino at CannesFebruary 1936. "This on-the-spot sketch of Riviera resort fashions, quite aside from its obvious decorative ping, has its uses as a check-up on prevailing plage fashions, because our southern resort fashions follow thos...

Naples has the biggest concentration of high-end handmade menswear in the world. Although not so much for shoes, for tailoring and shirtmaking this is the motherlode, with hundreds of tailors in the city and surrounding region, and thousands workin...

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 find it interesting having d...

For a long time, my favourite linen overshirt has been an old model from Drake’s - readers will have seen it previously here, and it’s been worn continuously and lovingly since.  One of the reasons I liked that model was that it had just two che...

UPDATE: This is a nice video from Diegos showing how espadrilles are made. You can see the better, neater hand sewing of the soles mentioned below.  I remember clearly when I got my first pair of espadrilles. I was 19, on holiday in Spain, and bough...

By Manish Puri Not all chores are made equal. Some take longer, some require more exertion, and some involve going out into the cold. On a typical weekend you’ll find me frantically searching for loopholes in the chivalric code so I can cherry pick...

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...

Southern wear is elaborately casualEsquire, January 1935: "The big idea this year, if you want to be well dressed for the southern resort season, seems to be that of carefully conveying the impression that you don't give a damn how you look. The Fren...

At Eden Roc on the blue MediterraneanEsquire, August 1936: "One of the world's most fashionable swimming holes, Eden Roc at Cap d'Antibes, has no beach at all, just steps and all sorts of intricate plateaus that have been cut out of the rocks.Against...

“God, you look like a …” Insert the appropriate style paradigm here. Sailor, English huntsman, City banker, Italian lothario, geography teacher, preppy Ivy Leaguer. This is the reaction you normally get when an outfit has particular connotation...

 At this time of year I normally do a list of Christmas gift suggestions. Apparently last year a reader took the initiative and left a print-out of the list sitting on a coffee table at home. It did the trick - a couple of the items turned up und...

   Dressing well is as much about propriety as it is about style, quality or personality.  This is particularly true at work, where there are often prescriptions, or at least expectations, about professionalism and clothing. I have often talke...

This post is an illustrated explanation of how I wear trainers, or sneakers. As with similar exercises on the blog, I have attempted to be as structured as possible, keeping some parameters constant in order to focus on those being discussed.So in t...

Last Friday was annoyingly cold, and damp.   Combinations of subdued, rich colours always give me the most pleasure - but it felt particularly appropriate on a day like this. The textures of the three pieces also went well together: the fuzzy sur...

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 important a frustration - for me - ...

The origins of the ‘casual chic’ look we’ve discussed in recent months - which I see as a route forward for relaxed yet smart menswear - can perhaps be seen in the leisure and sportswear of the 1930s.  That era saw the growth of leisure pursui...

When we covered Ivy-inspired clothing in a recent Reader Profile, there were some slightly dismissive comments about Ivy as a whole. Given I’ve found that tradition particularly inspiring in the past five years, I thought it might be worth setting ...

I wasn’t going to do a ‘high summer’ version of our seasonal Top 10. After all, the spring edition back in April included such things as panama hats and boat shoes.  But everyone’s stock has been arriving so late that the intervening months ...

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...