With the slow disappearance of the tie from the male wardrobe, the shirt collar has become increasingly important. It now bears almost sole responsibility for framing and flattering the face.  However, guides to shirt collars - such as this one -...

In some ways, summer trousers are more challenging than jackets in terms of cloth, and therefore more interesting. Trousers present the challenge of having something cool, but with enough body or crispness to hang straight. Jackets are less res...

Our new book, The Style Guide is available to buy online through Permanent Style and in 3X specialist menswear stores around the world.  Copies will be arriving in the stores listed below on Thursday this week. Please do visit and pick up a copy if...

  [This is part of a series that aims to produce a comprehensive guide to shirt fabrics, from the simplest points to the most technical. So far we have introduced the basics of selecting shirt fabric, and gone into depth on weaves and d...

The aim of a shirt bought for summer might seem easy: to stay cool. But there are several variations here, and crossovers with styles and other functionality. This, then, is our substantive yet focused guide to buying a shirt fabric for the warme...

The next in our series on Cloth is a guide to weaves and to designs. As with the A-Z this is meant as a reference tool, which we will link to as we publish more detailed pieces about trousers, jackets or overcoats.When we describe the benefits of gab...

On Thursday April 6th, we will be launching our latest book at Fenwick's department store in London - and all are welcome.  The book, put together over the past six months, is called 'Permanent Style presents: The Style Guide'. It is constructed ...

UPDATE: The readers' special edition of this book sold out on its first day. It is now only available from the shops listed at the bottom of this page. The standard edition is available in bookshops and will be on the PS Shop in the future too.  Ove...

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 ...

A denim or chambray shirt can be great with tailoring. Perhaps more than anything else, they have the ability to subvert its corporate, even dandy associations. They reliably give the appearance of being both casual and practical. The two terms, h...

I’m a relatively new convert to winter shirts.  Although I’ve had brushed cottons in the past (such as my grey made by Simone Abbarchi, above) it’s only this season that I’ve started wearing heavier flannels and cords.  Perhaps it’s b...

As ever in the lovely, international, interactive community that is Permanent Style, this article was spurred by a reader. He asked about the appropriate configuration of jacket pockets on a suit he was ordering, and I realised we hadn’t covered...

Performance fabrics are very in. Every retailer seems to be offering travel shirts that resist wrinkling, staining or soaking. Fans of classic clothing are usually sceptical about such fabrics. This is largely because they can seem like a short...

The cloth that you select for a tuxedo (or black tie) probably won’t get as much thought as the design, the shirt or indeed your bow tie. The options are fairly limited, and all those other things will have a greater impact.  But for those that w...

One sweater says lambswool, the other says merino. What does that mean? What’s the difference? This cashmere sweater costs £30; this other one costs £300. Can they really be made of the same thing? In our first chapter of this series - The Gu...

What makes a cloth suitable for a jacket, but not for a suit?This is a question I know many readers struggle with, particularly as offices become more casual. Without the safety of a dark suit and dark shoes, what should a man wear? Why doesn’t the...

With men wearing fewer ties with their jackets these days, shirts carry more of the burden in creating style and interest.  Of course, there is another way to look at it, which is that we have more freedom. Suddenly those bold patterns that were ...

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...

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...

As Permanent Style is now 11 years old (that past year went quickly…) I thought it would be nice to consider what my favourite 11 posts from that little-more-than-a-decade. And I’d be really interested to hear what your favourite is too. It??...

This week is vintage week. You didn't know that, but it is. We're starting today with an article on a vintage piece of mine; we continue on Wednesday with the advice of three experts on buying vintage; and we finish on Friday with an interview about ...

Choosing a suit cloth is, in some ways, harder than any other area of clothing. Because they all look so similar.  If we leave aside the more aesthetic - and subjective areas - of colour and pattern, we are left with dozens of similar-looking suiti...

This is an update on availability of our book The Style Guide - with the sweet sweetener of an extract from the Accessories chapter. So far, The Style Guide has sold just over 1000 copies, out of a total run of 2000. So they're going pretty fast - ...

A couple of years ago, a friend asked me for advice on dressing down his normal suit-and-tie wardrobe. Like many men, he wore suits (in worsted wool) to the office, and jeans or chinos at the weekend. The office was becoming more casual, however, a...

I was in York last week. It’s where my wife grew up, and I’ve been dozens of times over the years, though not for the past three or four. The centre has a lot more closed shops since Covid; it’s quite sad. But I did notice one big new shop on P...