Lee-paul Crossan

"Which brands are high quality, so I can look for them in thrift stores?" I will give you three answers to this: a bad answer, a good answer, and an answer that tries to make compromises given reality. 🧵

Example of high vs low quality tailoring: — Luca Museo: Double-breasted raglan sleeve overcoat made from a heavyweight pure wool. Garment is fully canvassed with a horsehair chest piece and pad stitching, which gives the lapels a beautiful roll. Raglan sleeves can be hard to get right on a customer, as fixing issues can be laborious, but there's a very smooth shoulder line here. Inverted back pleat adds visual interest and allows for freer movement. Big enough to comfortably layer over a sweater or sport coat. — Unnamed company: Marketed as an overcoat, but there's not enough room inside for layering (even for a sweater, let alone a jacket). Garment is made from 64% wool, 17% polyester, 8% cotton, and 11% nylon blend. Garment is bizarrely short for the style. Garment may have a fused construction. No shaping. Marketed as "athletic fit" with "technical fabric stretch." Not sure why an overcoat should have stretch.

There's no shame in wearing a cheap suit. The suit on the left supposedly cost $20k, according to the wearer. It's from Savile Row. Someone at the tailoring house told me that this person interjected a lot during his fittings, which is why the suit doesn't fit very well. The wearer was both too confident in their opinion, but not educated enough on tailoring. A dangerous combination. The suit on the right costs $200. It's from Jos. A. Bank. I think it fits better than the $20k Savile Row suit. It fits well because the wearer is humble and took the time to learn some things about tailoring. Thus, he was able to select something that looks good on him. No one will ever see the label inside your suit. They will not know the maker or how much it cost. Thus, the only thing that matters is whether something fits and flatters you.

Black dress shirts have become oddly popular in the last decade, but most men would do well to avoid them. It's not because they're verboten, but because they require a trained eye to style well. And most men don't have the eye for it. Black dress shirts were historically the mark of the lower working classes, often the type to patronize or own seedy nightclubs. This doesn't necessarily make them bad, but it does help us contextualize their meaning. For much of the 20th century, men wore dress shirts in white or light blue — or combinations thereof — partly because White Anglo-Saxon Protestants defined respectable culture, and that's what they wore. So by wearing a black dress shirt, you were either defying these rules or signaling that you had no interest in partaking in them. We see this kind of character in this scene from Goodfellas, which I've attached in the first slide. This is what gives the style its allure, much like how black leather motorcycle jackets hold a certain mystique. However, to wear this look well, you have to know how to style it. For instance, Ben Shapiro in the second slide is wearing a light gray sport coat with a black dress shirt and black pants. The sport coat has relatively soft, narrow shoulders and thin lapels. The cut of the jacket and color combinations are all wrong. Overall, the style looks more low-rent than rakish. This is the sort of outfit you see on prom DJs or cruise ship magicians, not louche nightclub habitués. In the third slide, the style is pulled off a little better. The lapel has a bit more verve; the jacket is slightly fuller, with an extended shoulder line. The trousers are high-waisted with double pleats. The overall effect is very convincing — more cool lounge lizard than maître d' of a restaurant that serves $20 spaghetti. So yes, black dress shirts allow you to forgo a tie, but the chances of you looking good in a black dress shirt are very low, at least if you're wearing a tailored jacket. If you're in a suit or sport coat and want to wear a black base layer, you are safer with a black turtleneck or knitted polo (something made from a finer knit than a pique cotton), as you see in the final slide. This shifts the shirt away from "I bought this at Express."

Two mistakes I think guys commonly make when they first start paying attention to clothes: — Going whole hog into an obvs trendy aesthetic driven by Instagram — Going whole hog in the other direction, buying tons of "classic" things they think allow them to escape this dynamic