Back in October there was a lot of interest around my post on the bespoke service at Whitcomb & Shaftesbury. Their ‘classic bespoke’ service, which involves cutting the suit in London (by a very experienced Row cutter), and then having it...

Whitcomb & Shaftesbury have achieved great popularity in recent years because of their pricing.  They offer one service where the majority of the suit is made in their Indian workshop, and as a result can offer a Savile Row suit for just under ...

  Air force blue is a beautiful colour. Better than the bright, tonic blues that are so popular these days - so much deeper, so much more subtle. Also known as RAF blue, the colour refers to the uniforms issued to the Royal Air Force when it was f...

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. For much of my career I’ve felt like an anomaly, especially at the likes of Pitti or industry events. Principally this is because I’ve always chosen to wear structured tailoring, largely from London tailors, over the unstruct...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I'm back! Hello everyone, I hope you had a nice week in the amiable arms of Manish, and you haven't all decided he is better in every respect than me. Although even if you have, fear not - he will be writing again very soon, including the second part...

This Anderson & Sheppard jacket is part of a suit I had made over 10 years ago. When I wrote back in January about my ‘favourite clothes ever’, I named it my favourite ever piece of bespoke.  It is therefore a good candidate for our ‘Ho...

This cashmere coat from Cifonelli, which I've had now for nine years, is similar in many ways to the two coats we’ve covered previously in this series - from Ciardi and from Liverano. There are some technical differences, however, which makes the...

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,...

Please read part one of this article, here, before this one. Without that context, setting out my priorities, this summary will likely be misleading. Everyone is different, wants different things from bespoke, and simply gets on with people differen...

I’ve been playing around with black so much in recent years (note, this is classic menswear - it’s years/decades, not weeks/months) that I thought I’d try out wearing nothing but black.  This was during Pitti at Florence, on a relatively infor...

This brown wool/silk/linen jacket was made in a lightweight model that Savile Row tailor Dege & Skinner introduced last year. It has a thin shoulder pad and no chest canvas, unlike their normal tailoring.  I can directly compare the difference, ...

This bespoke jacket was made for me by Paolo Martorano, the tailor in New York I first covered in 2020.  It’s particularly significant because of the dearth of bespoke tailors in the US. Although many tailors travel to the US from the UK and Europ...

When we published our second capsule guide to trousers recently, there was a discussion in the comments as to their smartness - and a request for an article setting it out.  Now, trousers vary in more than just their material, so this will always be...

Patrick Dawson is a retired news correspondent, now living in London. During his career he worked for ABC, CNN and NBC and covered the Balkans War from Kosovo, the Gulf War from Kuwait, and was the first NBC correspondent on the ground during 9/11. H...

This is the first piece of black tailoring that’s been featured on Permanent Style, I think, outside of evening wear. Over the past three years we’ve been exploring how black’s role in the wardrobe can be expanded, beyond tuxedos and lace-ups. ...

There is an important factor in how we dress that I don't think we’ve ever discussed explicitly on Permanent Style, which is how subtle or showy an outfit is.  When we talked almost entirely about tailoring, worn largely in offices, it was clear t...

The various parts of the front of a bespoke jacket are normally sewn together by hand. This hand 'padding’ attaches the canvas that give the chest its structure, and hand sewing shapes the lapel too.  It's often used as a sign of ‘real’ bespok...

This was really fun. I guess it’s always easier interviewing someone you know well, but there’s also a temptation there to just chat - to forget the perhaps more significant topics you had wanted to discuss.  I think we got a nice balance. Th...

The Bores jacket from Chato Lufsen has been covered on PS before - it was reviewed by contributor Tony Sylvester in November last year.  But seeing that jacket in person made me reconsider the style, and then when Christophe of Chato Lufsen - who ma...

Best artisan 2021: Whitcomb & Shaftesbury I decided to give my Artisan of the Year award this year to Whitcomb & Shaftesbury because, looking back on recent commissions, they have so consistently delivered on quality and value.  Those are ...