Tweed For Spring

I do enjoy Winter, and don't mind a cold day for wearing tweed and flannel, but I'll be damned if even I can't wait for the cold to let up a little and have me a balmy walk in the sunshine. Looks like this week the sun will at least smiling on us, and while the temperatures creep up a little, we can't dive head first into khaki and tennis shirts. And though the streets may be full of people in short sleeves with no coats on, in reality we still need to keep at least comfortably warm. If you're looking to ditch the overcoat (finally), remember that tweed, the stalwart fabric of the coldest times of year, can also be perfect for Spring.

A tweed sports jacket can offer a welcome replacement to your overcoat or Barbour jacket when worn as a alternative to outerwear. It helps to keep color and weight in mind here. Many of the best tweeds are seen in earthy shades of brown ad olive, maybe punctuated with burnt orange. While I do love these fabrics, these colors are too "Fall". This time of year, I stick with lighter tans or cool grey, as seen here. Because of the roughness of the cloth, it's a good choice worn casually with jeans, and it gives me the pockets I need for keys, phone, and all the other crap we can't seem to live without these days.

I like a jacket like this tailored very soft with enough extra room for a sweater underneath. It being (almost) warm (?...not really) today, I've swapped the Shetland sweater that has been an almost daily piece since November with a lighter cotton crew neck. I may still be wearing heavy oxford shirts, but a pink stripe livens things up a bit, as dose a pink pocket square. Baby steps folks. Don't be the guy in shorts shivering at the bus stop.

A recent thrift shop acquisition, this jacket features my (current) favorite combinations of English/American hybrid details: natural shoulders, a 3/2 front, with darts, and real braided leather button. File also under the "What's in a Name" department:

Homework leads me to discover that Sibley's was a small department store chain in New York State, with it's flagship in Rochester. Absorbed by Kauffman's in 1990, and later Macy's, the store no longer exists. Stanley Blacker is a name I remember men of my Dad's generation wearing when I was a kid. It wasn't super expensive, but of generally good quality and traditional styling, in a time when traditional American style was popular enough to support lower tier brands of reasonable quality. Maybe not the most special thing I ever found in a thrift shop, but it fits well, feels good, and for $7.49, it will do just fine until a better replacement comes along.

As a side note, I've also recently discovered that leather and suede saddle shoes are the absolute JAM with jeans. This pair is vintage L.L.Bean, made in USA by Walkover, with a comfortable brick red rubber sole. Acquired through direct purchase from a consignor in my own shop for $25, and worth every penny.

We may all want the cold weather to be over, but it's not something we can control. With a few touches of color and some small changes, you can breath new life into your tweed and manage to keep warm and be seasonally appropriate. You can wear tweed in the Spring.

p.s. speaking of tweed, I have a knockout English shooting jacket available on eBay now. If you're a 46 long check it out. If not, look at it anyway as a reminder that there is s real reason why we call these things "sports" jackets.

p.p.s. the Spring Clearance Sale continues in the AAW Shop, with many items on deep discount. Enjoy an additional 10% off everything using discount code SPRING2014 at checkout through midnight Saturday.

Those Ain't Pants...

Recently I've been without dungarees. The two pair of Wranglers I bought from Shepler's a while back served me well, but eventually shrunk too much to be comfortable. For a while, I was content to live without them, laboring under some false belief that at 36 years old I was too old for jeans. But then I realized that in November and December I was a bit lost without my old uniform of jeans/bean boots/sweater/Barbour, and truthfully, no well dressed American man's wardrobe can ever be complete without some proper jeans. A few weeks back, Levi's had a one day only 40% off sale with free shipping, so I grabbed two pair of good old 501 shrink-to-fit for $56. Not bad.

So I photographed them, and rinsed them, and got ready to write about the vagaries of denim and denim nerds, but before I got a chance, these came along, eclipsing all other trousers in the house:



These ain't pants, they's PANTS. $5.99 at a thrift shop. No tags, but they are really beautifully constructed of some of the softest, most luxurious bits of tweed I've seen, and fully lined in cotton. I suspect Andover Shop, as they were known for patch tweed. Maybe Charlie can confirm this for me after they come back from alterations.

Best of all, they're true patchwork, no repetition of pattern at all to the arrangement of the squares.  These really are made of scraps, as they should be. Too bad I won't have them back in time for Christmas. Not to worry, though. There's always tartan.

I wasn't going to mention Christmas or holidays at all here if I could help it. Frankly, having worked retail as long as I have, I'm downright sour on the whole thing. If it weren't for my children, I'd be completely insufferable this time of year. But I gotta say, Winter go-to-hell pants do help keep me cheery.





Dungarees: An Update

In taking a look back to prepare for this post, I realize that it's been roughly a year since I did a dungarees update, and roughly two years since the purchase of said denim. Perhaps this should become a January tradition.

Back when I bought the jeans featured here, I had written a rant or two against the then (and still) prevalent hipster practice of buying gourmet denim, wearing it every day, with everything, and never washing it. The internet is rife with blogs and websites dedicated solely to nerdly discussions of how not to clean your pants, but I'm not having it. I like clean pants. So here's a brief rundown of what happens to them after two years of regular occasional wear, and regular washing:

photo: not mine, heisted from the internet.

In digging back two years into this blog, I'm actually embarrassed at the photos I saw fit to print here. This photo shows much more clearly what my Wrangler 13MWZ Original Cowboy Cut jeans looked like when I bought them. Rigid as wood, very dark in that distinctive grey tinted navy we call indigo. Straight legs, rivets and all, I wore them "raw" for a few weeks. There are few things as uncomfortable as new raw jeans, but there is a special (perceived) self satisfaction that comes with putting up with uncomfortably hard to wear pants. I've gotten over that since, but I still have the jeans.

One year in, they looked like this.I'll admit, at this point they had reached a kind of too bright blueberry hue, but I stuck with them. For one, they were beginning to be soft and comfortable in a way that only well worn jeans that belong to only you can. For another, I knew they'd eventually reach that excellent shade of light blue that can only be achieved with wearing and washing your own jeans. That, and I'm cheap, and new jeans are the last thing I care to worry about.

Today, two years and likely one hundred washed later, they're only getting better. The color is nearing what I consider to be the perfect fade. There's cool looking wear patterns on the knees. They're stiff when they're freshly cleaned, but given a minute or two, they conform to my shape and become perfectly comfortable in that way that only your own old jeans can. Unlike they're unwashed counterparts, they feel fresh and clean, instead of grimy and shiny with filth.  Honestly, I've heard it so many times and read it so many times and even believed it a long time ago myself, but I just don't see the appeal in not washing your pants. Authenticity be damned, as I remember it, this what jeans always looked like when I was a kid, and any 19th century coal miner would have been glad at the chance to have some clean pants. Not washing your jeans in the interest of well curated heritage Americana is so much hipster revisionist thinking.

I will admit that I take care to wash them separately, turned inside out, in cold water, and I never dry them. But I do wash them, once a week or so as needed.

The older I get, I find that my take on how to wear jeans has changed over the years and begun to settle into a new norm.I read recently that part of being well dressed means being dressed for the occasion. I spend the earlier part of most days dropping off/picking up kids at school, grocery shopping, and hunting in filthy thrift shops, so I actually wear dungarees frequently. Gone are the days of pairing them with punk t-shirts and Adidas sneakers. Gone too are the days of wearing them with jacket and tie, though occasionally they do wind up combined with a tweed sports coat. These days a soft old oxford and a crew neck sweater do the trick. Bean boots, Bean mocs, penny loafers, pebble grain oxfords, and every now and then brown suede split toes are all good, adult choices for footwear. I even manage to take it up notch from time to time, go for the Continental look:

It's possible that a silk ascot will always be a pretentious and silly thing on an American, but worn just peeking out of a cotton crew neck, and worn with jeans, it may just be almost acceptable...almost.

A Donegal tweed cap ($1.99, thrift store), cashmere scarf in Black Watch tartan ($3.99, thrift store), brown leather wool lined gloves ($2.00, thrift store) and Barbour "Liddesdale" quilted jacket ($7.99, thrift store), and classic vintage Ray-Ban Wayfarers (generous gift) are all perfectly casual enough to wear with jeans, but finished and grown-up enough to make you feel like, you know, a grown up, or something.

I predict that washed and faded look will be coming back soon, along with pleated pants and properly fitted jackets. Not that I care much for fashion, but they've been feeding us tight/short/skinny/don't-wash-your-jeans for too long now. Time for an about face so they can force people to abandon everything and buy a bunch of new stuff.

Worn, old, comfortable, clean jeans are a real classic, and classics never die.