Last week I explained why I find the knit polo shirt to be such a fundamental part of my summer wardrobe.  This week, I’m using that polo and a pair of cream linen trousers as the basis for three different looks - three different ways of doing ...

This past weekend I attended Wimbledon for the first time in a while. I used to go a lot when I was at school: it was nearby, and standard practice was to walk down after school and try to catch people coming out, and ask for their tickets.  People ...

This is intended to be a partner to the ‘If you only had five shoes’ article in our Wardrobe Building guide, which was all smart footwear. Today’s piece is shoes that aren’t smart enough for a traditional office or - perhaps a better defini...

I began the companion piece to this one - looking at smart trousers - by saying that it was the hardest chapter to write in our Wardrobe Building series.  I was right. I thought this one would be harder, but it’s not. The problem with going fr...

Let’s move the conclusion up to the top of this review, just to get it out of the way.  This is a great made-to-measure suit. It’s fitted well, styled well and made well, and for me illustrates the pinnacle of what made-to-measure should be.  F...

  Over the next few weeks on Permanent Style, I’ll be setting out the pieces that form the foundation of my smart/casual summer wardrobe.  We’ve covered the smart (read tailored) side of summer dressing in quite a lot of de...

Shades of tobacco and tan are one of the loveliest things to wear in the Summer.  As the weather warms up, I've put together three outfits here - all somewhere in the 5 to 7 formality range, also known as smart/casual - that illustrate this.  The...

Hello lovely readers, Here’s our regular update on what’s coming into the PS Shop over the next few months - apologies for the short delay.  This only covers Spring/Summer, but feel free to ask in the comments about anything in Autumn/Winter, an...

Have you got a summer suit that needs an outing? Linen tailoring sitting in the closet with no matching 'garden party' invitation? Come to Permanent Style drinks on May 9th! We're taking over the Burlington Arcade, closing the space for just us and a...

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 ...

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 ...

How do I feel about orange? This linen looked more like a terracotta red when it was a swatch, but let’s face it, it’s orange. Fortunately I rather like it. Strong colour isn’t normally my thing, but when I do wear it, I prefer the colour to be...

It may still be cold outside (in the UK), but it’s late April and time for a write-up of the Spring/Summer pieces I’ve liked from our favourite brands.  If you have any questions about other releases from these brands (or indeed brands not featu...

Hello everyone, As has now become customary, I'd like to give you an insight into what’s coming up in the next six months on the shop.  Of course we can’t detail everything in advance, but we wanted to give you a rundown on what’s confirmed so...

By Manish Puri Imagine a Venn diagram with three rings representing quality cloth, construction and design. If you buy an item of clothing that sits in one of those rings you’re still doing better than half the landfill-peddled-as-fashion you’ll ...

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...

The key functional aspect of trouser cloth is the body that enables it to drape well and hold its shape. It should throw a nice, clean line down the leg, hold its crease, and recover from wrinkling when hung at the end of the day. Unfortunately, th...

Shoes can be one of the trickiest areas for clothing in the summer.  Unless we require a jacket, it’s pretty simple to wear a well-cut polo shirt on top and drapey linen trousers on the bottom, and stay cool.  But shoes are always required, a...

About a month ago, proper Summer started in the UK.  Now I don’t define Summer by the solstice, the calendar, or even the moon. Summer, for me, is when it's so hot that it severely affects the clothes you can wear.  Anything consistently above 25...

 This Caliendo hopsack blazer was completed earlier in the year and is now fast becoming the most useful item in my wardrobe.Just like the Solito cashmere blazer I had made for Autumn/Winter last year, it is thrown on with everything: with a shirt a...

Thomas Mastronardi is one of the best-dressed men I know. So, in the spirit of welcoming a greater range of voices onto Permanent Style, I asked Tom to bookend the summer by writing something on the seersucker and linen suits he loves so much. We dis...

Simon, Would you be willing to do a post on (casual) summer dressing? It’s the area of dress I struggle with the most. Every time I go on summer/spring holidays I find myself browsing through the internet looking for a good mix of casual and el...

Great as our Guide to Cloth series is, it deliberately doesn’t recommend specific cloths in any of the pieces. This is largely because bunches change regularly (sometimes every six months) and if we did, the Guide would rapidly be out of date. S...

This summer suit from Sartoria Cornacchia was made for me last year, and I would like to apologise for the delay in covering it. I didn’t get around to shooting the suit until the end of the Summer; events and the pop-up then got in the way; and by...

This might be our last piece on summer clothing this year, and I wanted to use it to talk about one of my most useful pieces of the last few months - this vintage ‘jungle jacket’.  I bought it two years ago, at the now sadly closed Vintage Showr...