Engineered Garments SS14

Engineered Garments is another Daiki Suzuki vehicle. Established in the late 90's the label is Suzuki's main production and the creative outlet for his designs.

Unlike Woolrich Wollen Mills, here he has the freedom to establish his own quirks. The designs are set to add simple tweeks to well established vintage sportswear and hunting silhouettes making them modern and adaptable to today's uses.

Below are the coming summers offerings with some interesting patterns and some nice indigo washes.

Photo Source: Men's Reverie

Nanamica x Clarks

Collaborative partnerships are driving the menswear market and many British brands are directly benefiting from the current trend.

Wallabees have been a staple of Clarks productions since the early 1960's, developed from a traditional moccasin they are a familiar silhouette instantly recognisable. Whilst their classic design has never completely fallen out of favour now (thanks to Walter White's character in Breaking Bad), like with the Hip-Hop generation of the nineties (thanks in most part to Ghostface Killah), they are enjoying a bit of a revival.

This effort in partnership with Nanamica is Gore-Tex re-enforced in the areas that typically see the most wear to ensure a long lease of life and sports a red brick Vibram sole for comfort:

Photo Source: Hypebeast & Wellgosh

Duffer Japan Launch @ Anthem

Back in 1989, what started as a vintage stall in Camden, London selling deadstock and army surplus 5 years previous had transformed into a West End retailer specialising in the reproduction of the surplus items they had began their journey with.

Trawling the US for coveted vintage pieces the brand move from strength to strength and a successful decade in the UK was twinned with huge success in Japan, where the brand set up their heritage label.

Now, for the first time, Duffer Japan will be available in the UK. Their SS14 range will be stocked at selected stores across the UK and Europe, and Anthem are one of the privileged few.

Inspired by American sportswear and the surf, a few weeks back I had the chance to preview the summer collection up close at an event held at the Anthem shop in Shoreditch.

A big thank you to Anthem & Duffer Japan.

Graham Browne: A Bespoke Guide (Part III)

Foward Fitting

Every visit to GB's shop in the eastern quarter of central London brings with it a greater understanding of your own stature and stance and the daunting realisation that the majority of the clothes in your wardrobe don't fit you all that well after all. However the rapor that Dan and Russell have with clients is comforting and whether this is your first bespoke experience or otherwise the help and advice received whilst making decisions is impeccable.

At the forward fitting the garment is almost as it will be when finished, in terms of the fit and form it is largely complete with the fabric now cut and the patterns sewn, the latter stages of the process are in effect. It is at this point that the smaller adjustments can be made to the final piece to ensure the best possible fit.

During the fitting focus is on details like the length of the arms and the fitting of the jacket at the waist, altered by slight adjustments to the centre-back and side seams. For trouser fitting, your options range from a more traditional composition with two pleats to a more contemporary flat fronted example with no pleats. This is the point at which nips and tucks can be made at the seat and the taper of the leg, and/or for the addition of turn-ups to give weight to the material and hold the crease in the leg of the pant. You will also have the decision of whether to add side adjusters if preferred to relinquish the need for a belt. These finer details are all based on personal preference and the aesthetic you wish to achieve in the finish garment, be it a slimmer/tailored fit close to the body, a more relaxed fit or a contemporary modern style.

Once these final adjustments are procured it is on to the final fitting.

Part I
Part II

Nanamica SS14

More Tokyo based stylistics now with the new Spring/Summer drop from Nanamica.

As I have said countless times on here, I just can't help but be amazed by all and sundry coming out of the Eastern Continent at the moment. The tailoring is a little more relaxed drawing inspiration from the chore and workwear styles of the early 1900's with just the right amount of modernity applied. Similarly their outerwear is simple but well designed and with the application of a vibrant colour here and re-imagined pattern there it's brought bang up to date.

Recent collaboration's with Clark's shoes on a classic 'Wallabee' style and their involvement in The North Face's Purple Label have brought the brand to the fore and I'm sure we'll see a lot more stockists in the UK as they grow in popularity.

You can pick up the new collection at END. here.

Photo Source: Men's Reverie

Graham Browne: A Bespoke Guide (Part II)

The Baste

On the second visit to Graham Browne, with colour palette, cloth and composition discussed with fervor the baste can begin. It's in this refined procedure that the subtle nuances of bespoke can really be appreciated.

When buying off the peg, even made to measure, the garment will always be to a formulaic template, assuming that this will be suited to the majority of it's consumers. However, the discretion that can be applied when going bespoke at somewhere like Graham Browne is endless. From the height and cut of the arm holes to the slope of the shoulder, the width of the lapel to the composition of buttons on a double breasted coat or jacket, working cuffs and side adjusters for your trousers. These details which are lost in the mass market are applied to show a competent craft.

Again, it is GB's nonconformist attitude which really warrants a championing here. The house cut for a tailors will typically dominate, at very least, to some extent the look of your garment and it's easy to understand why when specific styles like Huntsman's single button or Anderson & Sheppard's peak lapels are so revered. It would be simpler to cut a dash in a bid to garner a cult following, however at GB the commitment is to the client and giving them exactly what they want, a truly bespoke experience.

For the baste fitting you move from a series of flat panel cloths to build up a prototype of your garment. Once the pattern is cut and struck it is passed to the coat maker to make a baste for the first fitting. The baste is a process of temporarily sewing the panels together loosely so as to create the basic form. This paper panel composition now allows for any adjustments. Adjustments to the major structure of the garment can now be finalised, fittings like the chest canvas and shoulders can be tweaked into place and prepared for final procurement.

For future fittings these paper patterns are kept in the records at GB.

Part I

Salvatore Piccolo @ Pitti85

Salvatore Piccolo is the embodiment of our interpretations of Neapolitan style, casual tailoring and unstructured compositions for the warm weather of the Italian south coast.

For the winter period they retain their relaxed aesthetic but with slightly heavier fabrics, tweeds, wool and heavy gauge cottons to beat the falling temperatures.

At Pitti in January this is what the Napoli based menswear company had to offer:

Photo Source: Men's Reverie

In Conversation with Dashing Tweeds

With a bitter cold wind whistling through Camden Road train station it was mostly the promise of a cup of tea that was so exciting about this particular Saturday morning. Although upon our arrival at the head quarters of Dashing Tweeds and our meeting Guy Hills, a slight character in an exquisitely cut green, purple and yellow tweed (DT's own) waistcoat and jodhpurs with a broad smile, it was clear that this was a man with more than just a fleeting interest in changing a boreish market.

At a glance it would be easy to dismiss Hills as an eccentric dandy, which for all intents and purposes he is, but not just for the theatre of it. A photographer by trade, he is well aware of his projected image. His keen eye for aesthetically pleasing visuals and design are an immediate presence as we are invited in, his kitchen sink set within an antique apothecary cabinet adapted for him by his brother and filled with an extensive collection of snuff boxes made from shells and precious metals. As we scale the stairs down to his showroom he tells us that we've come at a good time, the place is filled with stock and fittings to furnish a new shop which should be signed and delivered early in the coming week.

Before firing any questions off we sit for a cup of tea and discuss Guy's plans to better equip his jetty than his current row boat which sports a slight covering of moss and a puddle of rain water. We venture past a work bench, vice poised and accompanied by press studs, into the more studious areas. Here there are a couple of promotional films made in corroboration with suppliers to show the more inquisitive customer what the process of weaving the tweeds, way up in the Scottish borders, and screen printing their silk scarves, deep down in Deptford in South London, entails. A dedication to British production and industry which although well publicised is refreshing to see in practice.

Dashing Tweeds was first envisaged in 2006 by Hills and woven textile designer Kirsty McDougall and presented formally in 2011. Their website addresses the brand as a tweed textile and menswear company with a dedication to challenging the market with elegance, colour, heritage, technology and humour among others. Committed to collaborating with partners from fashion and interior design to architects and scientists. It's more of a mission statement than an ethos and their creative diversity is intriguing.

Q: How did you make the transition from photographer to founding Dashing Tweeds?
Guy: That was quite an easy transition really because I was always interested in fashion from a young age and my stepmother was a dressmaker who taught me to sew. So I would earn money during the school holidays sewing hems for, I also liked making myself clothes. Whilst working as a fashion photographer I has this sudden realisation, hanging out on beaches with beautiful girls. I was just a cog in a machine and what I was selling were high street clothes, making all this shit look really good. Then a lucky thing happened and I was asked by Esquire to do some portrait work and during this assignment I met Andrew Bolton curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He introduced me to Andrea Rowland, head cutter at Anderson & Sheppard, who was founding the Savile Row Bespoke Association and needed a photographer to be the image maker for the organisation. I was given 'carte blanche' to go to every tailor on the row, who up to this point had been a very closeted, and told I could photograph all I wanted. The tailors said they hadn't very much cash but we can pay you in tailoring, so I ended up getting a suit made by almost every tailor in exchange for all this work over the course of around 5 years. The work was exhibited at an event called 'The London Cut' curated by James Sherwood and accompanied by a book called 'Savile Row'. Whilst I was looking through the archives I thought, wow, men used to have so much fun with their clothes and there was such a wide variety of materials, then you look at the current trends and its all, grey grey grey, blue blue blue. I thought, 'where's all the fun gone?', every man was his own designer, he could add such a varied range of extra details such as fishtail back on trousers and all those things that you can't really do for ready to wear. You think as you're growing up that you are 'where it's at' and that menswear is the most sophisticated it's ever been then you realise that we're really in the doldrums. Then I met Kirsty who was a weave designer at the Royal College of Art, whilst looking for a stylist to work with at my photography studio. I asked her to weave me a one off bespoke tweed and then had the material cut in Savile Row and ended up getting completely sidetracked from my commercial photography and that, in a nutshell, was were it all started.

Q: What influenced your decision to specialise in tweed?
G: I never sat down with a business plan, these decisions were led by things that I liked and seeing that there was a gap in the market. As a photographer I was always riding around on my bike to various agencies to get work, you want to look smart but be comfortable so I was wearing my dad's old tweed jackets and they looked slightly out of place and of course if you're trying to sell a specific look as a photographer, you need to portray an image and I wanted to adopt something that was interesting and relevant. So I looked around and couldn't find anything so I created it.

Q: There's been a great deal of interest in British produce recently, do you think that will continue?
G: That's a really interesting question, I'm not an economist but manufacturing in England has become very expensive so it's unsustainable at one level. At luxury level, we have a great reputation for quality so the really important thing for the factories is to make sure they maintain that reputation. The quality is what people will pay for. If you go to factories around London in Tottenham and Edmonton trying to get the quality is difficult, but having said that I have found manufacturers and I've also joined the UKFT who have an initiative called 'let's make it here', and they're really helping factories. The whole idea is that should someone have the initiative to make things here they should have the support to be able to produce the absolute best in terms of quality.

Q: What did you think of Jeremy Hackett's comment that he didn't trust British tailoring and that our textile industry is incapable of making his Essential British Kit?
G: I can totally sympathise with him, we're negotiating with factories at the minute. We're putting everything on the line to make this work. If they can't stick to timelines and guarantee quality it's impossible. However the UKFT aims to create a code of conduct and the factories enter into a contract and sign a contract to provide orders on time. It's difficult because the factories owners have lots of people who are not very well paid working and they need to profitable too. What's interesting starting a small business, ordering from the mills in Scotland if we collaborate we order twice as much and that's twice as much work for the factories and that's nice, to know that we are directly helping the country. We wouldn't be able to exist if there were not these mills with their fantastic history and we're very grateful for that.

Q: You've collaborated with brands like Boxfresh and Converse, was that a conscious decision to try to lure in a young customer, a high street customer who may not be aware of the diversity of tailoring?
G: Exactly, we want to broaden our appeal. We are very much about be a creative company we're a very tight creative company Kirsty, me and Holly, it's all about making exciting things but if you don't get that out to a wide audience you can't progress. So the plan was to make a cloth and then collaborate with people on one level so we could get to that wider audience. The brands Boxfresh and Converse are very interest in our ideas so that is brilliant. We've also collaborated on some bags with a company called Knapsack as well, we will collaborate with loads of people. You need to realise were your strengths lie and ours is in design and our weave design.

Q: What do think of the perception that tweed is for the countryside and eccentrics?
G: Traditionally a man's wardrobe would have a tweed suit for going to the country and worsted wool suit for work and maybe a linen suit for summer. Our interest is in tweed as a sportswear, and for us making that sportswear modern. The advantages of tweed are that the fabric wicks sweat away from your body and that the moisture evaporates quicker than in cotton, it also doesn't smell. The only reason really why it was not seen in town traditionally was that it was considered a sportswear and a relaxed dress.

Q: On your website you list one of your mantra as humour, how does that translate to the brand?
G: You have to enjoy yourself, and especially if you look at the history of menswear with sports and tweed, a lot of it is about having fun. Working all week then finally being able to relax at the weekend, traditionally people went bonkers with checks. That's how people had fun. We've forgotten how to have fun, people have fallen on hard times recently and the 70's is probably the last time anybody had any fun. I experienced the rave, chemical generation but people didn't really dress up. When I started going to big raves in fields people would be wearing crazy things during that acid house generation but that is not the case any longer.

Q: Do you feel the current incarnation of menswear is too serious?
G: Definitely, I think the whole market has been swayed and it's only women who get to have fun. Men are pressured to not stand out from their peers.

Q: When did you become aware on your own personal style?
G: I think it comes to everyone at around 8 or 9 years of age, and your mum comes home with some more clothes from down the market and you start to think, 'there's no way I'm wearing that'. It's time to start shopping. But really once I discovered my step-mother could sew and I was able to make stuff for myself that was the beginning of my development.

Q: Who has been the biggest influence of your own style?
G: I genuinely feel as though it has not been influenced necessarily by one individual but rather by my experiences. When you're younger you may have certain idols, but I'd always been a fan of the old fashioned hero, a gentleman, a swashbuckling knight of a character. The well dressed Englishman as a concept, David Niven, that type of character or a cross between James Bond and Bertie Wooster.

Q: What's next for Dashing Tweeds?
G: The shop, hopefully. Having a proper showcase, to have bricks and mortar and be part of that scene and to show people that men's fashion and quality can move on. Also to maintain the sense of luxury in quality and innovation and all it's forms.