The new starting point is a pair of images of David Gandy. In these images, David is wearing a camel coat, and I’ve not done much, if any, research in coats before. It should be noted that I don’t much like this example, at first glance. It does look good, but I feel its colours […]
I noted starting out that I think of denim as being an American fabric. Well, “denim” derives from “serge de Nîmes”, after Nîmes in France. And “jeans” comes from “Gênes”, the French for Genoa, in Italy. So not so much with the American. I haven’t been able to place any specific reason it’s seen as […]
There’s an interesting article in the New York Times about how clothes affect us. Apparently, if you wear a doctor’s white coat, you gain heightened attention to detail. But it only works if you know it’s a doctor’s coat; if you’re given the same garment and told it’s a painter’s coat, there’s no effect. It’s […]
An unlikely source (he probably doesn’t want to be named here) pointed me at Laver’s Law. It’s a table that summarises the view of fashion over time, and was coined in 1937 by a chap called James Laver, a fashion historian. It goes like this: 10 years before its time is: Indecent 5 years before […]
I spent some of the weekend looking for sports jackets like the one Carlos is wearing. It’s more difficult than you might expect, for two reasons – first, the description “brown plaid sports jacket” is very, very broad. And second, there don’t actually seem to be many out there that even come close to being […]
Having had little enough trouble finding out what kind of jacket Carlos is wearing, I set out to see if I could name the pattern on the fabric. This is… a bigger issue. The patterning depends to some degree on the fabric, and there are 269 different fabrics on this word list. And that, as […]
Starting from a Sartorialist photograph of Carlos Castillo, I’m now looking at jackets. I wasn’t sure if what I was looking at in the picture was a sports jacket, a blazer, or… well, I didn’t know what else was out there. It’s not a suit jacket, I’m pretty sure. The general gist seems to be […]