Thrifting Strategy: Ralph to the Rescue

Go ahead, sit down. Some of you are not gonna like this...

Let's begin with an old style AAW run-down of the days ensemble focusing on the crass subject of the low prices I paid for all of it, you know, like I used to do in the old days: Navy pinstriped double breasted suit, recently acqured from ebay, $30; Brooks Brothers point collar shirt, $5.49; Robert Talbott tie, trade; Albert Thurston bright orange braces, new-in-box (not pictured), trade;

and a pair of black tassel loafers by W.S. Foster and Sons of London, $9.99. Total cost of outfit= $45.48.

This suit represents the end of a long trip for me. After all, I'd been wanting the very suit for about twenty years, since the first time I laid eyes on it as a teenager in the 90s. To be sure, I thankfully no longer desire most of the same things I did as a teenager, but this particular cut of Polo suit has stayed the course. Readers may remember my excitement a while back at having also acquired a navy blazer in the same cut.

Soft shoulders, some drape in the chest, and the inimitable wide, knife sharp Ralph lapel.

And of course the 6x4 double breasted front with the option to be worn at either point, a detail I have never seen on any other make of jacket. Even the staunchest of Ralph's detractors will have to admit that there is some excellent attention to detail in the better  American and Italian made lines form Polo.

Forward pleated trousers, standard issue for Ralph in those days. People like to hate on the dude, but back then the only other place offering forward pleats outside of Britain was the Andover Shop, Yes, it's true, Charlie and Ralph have things in common. In fact, for as much as Charlie likes to rail on Ralph and his minions, a complaint I fully understand, I have heard him say the Ralph and Julia Child are responsible for rescuing American middle class taste in the 1970s. I'm inclined to agree. I've spoken in Ralph's defense here before. An entire generation may have grown up with no knowledge at all of good clothing and French cooking. To think of it.

I can remember being sixteen years old and seeing ads like this one in my Dad's copies of GQ, back before that magazine had become the complete cartoon it is now. And I wanted that suit so bad, but they were expensive. Even when they turned up at Filene's Basement (the real one) they were pricey, and besides, what business does some punk-ass teenager have wearing a pinstriped suit just for the hell of it? Talk about pretension. I suppose it went hand in hand with my underage preference for Dewar's or Johnnie Walker over cans of Natural Ice. Damn, I must have been an annoying kid. All of which brings me to my point.

Thrift shopping is of course a random and haphazard thing, but if you keep at it long enough, trends begin to emerge. Just as there are current trends in clothing, such is also the case in thrift shops, the only difference being that you'll see the trends of the past. Much of what you'll find tends to be fifteen or twenty years old, with the oldest things reaching back about fifty years. There are of course exceptions, and you may find brand new items with tags or true antiques.

A lot of whats out there now is from the 90s, and a lot of that is as dated and ugly as you might imagine. But in a time when adults first began to dress wholeheartedly like children, Polo was one of the only mass market brands producing better quality clothing in cuts and styles that don't look dated today, and there's a lot of it. Sure, there's still Brooks and Press to be found, but if we're going to survive the impending "dark times" in the thrift shops, it will largely be Polo that gets us through. Then we can breathe a sigh of relief when the young men of today who were fortunate enough to be a part of the current menswear renaissance begin to donate they're old clothes. 

You can wear well made nicely tailored and styled second hand Ralph, or else wear Armani with an absurdly low buttoning point, massive shoulders, no vent and lapel gorge set two inches too low. The choice is yours.

Worth Every Penny : Newton Street Vintage

Zach of Newton Street Vintage and I make a pretty good team when it comes to putting together a 10x10 pseudo shop under a tent in a parking lot.

Evidence of this fact can be found in the fact that the two of us can't work together without either one taking home some piece of the other guys stash. Sometimes we buy, sometimes we trade, but we never walk away from one another empty handed. This outing proved no different, as I found myself making room for what may be the best cold weather suit I've owned yet:

Trad/Ivy/Preppy authentic, well-curated vintage heritage Americana, or whatever the semantics police would have us call it now, is played in spades in this old charcoal pinstripe suit. Natural, nearly un-padded shoulders, no darts, 3/2 roll...all the details, all rendered in the kind of thick but soft sturdy cloth that barely exists anymore in the world of ready made clothing.

The extra high third buttonhole, right in line with the breast pocket, age this one solidly in the late 1950s/ early 1960s. The stripes are not-quite-white. That's a huge bonus for me. I rarely wear black shoes, and will likely never wear this business suit in a business setting, so those tan stripes ought to work nicely with my near fetishistic collection of brown shoes, most especially cordovan longwings and tassel loafers.

Despite the weight of the cloth, the coat is "skeleton lined" only at the shoulders. The more I learn about clothing, the less I appreciate a fully lined jacket.

A note on button holes: the best of the old jackets had four button holes, evenly spaced. Don't forget that the coveted "3/2 roll" is a derivative of the old tunic cut military uniforms, not just a fashion detail. Note also how the buttons are sewn on a full half inch from the edge of the coat.  This is a sturdy garment meant to last a long time, not a fashionable thing meant to work for a year or two. Likely 60 years old, I just got it, and intend to see at least ten Winters use from it. No doubt I will.

The previous owner had the pants let out...all the way out...so much so that some extremely talented tailor in the alterations department built this gusset in the back from scrap cloth rescued from elsewhere in the suit. I'll have them taken in, but it's almost a shame to destroy that gusset.

From, as you may by now have guessed, the High Holy Brothers, back when the Brothers were all High and Holy.

As I stated at the start, I got this one in trade, for a bottle green blazer by J. Press, a vintage tweed jacket, and a pair of tan gabardine slacks with side tabs and forward pleats by Ralph Lauren Purple Label. Fair enough. Had I paid the $125 it was priced, it still would have been worth every penny.  Think of the kind of junk you would have to settle for on sale at Marshall's for that price.
Vintage clothing, whether found for pennies at a thrift shop or bought at a fair price from a well respected seller, is usually worth every penny.

Striped for Spring

The grey pinstripe suit is a stalwart of a business man's wardrobe, second in importance only to navy blue. I come across a fair amount of such suits in  my travels, usually in heavier fabrics for Fall and Winter. I even have such a suit myself. Finding a version in a lightweight worsted for Spring and Summer is a real treat.

I found the jacket alone, priced $6.99, a crumpled, wrinkled mess, on the rack in a thrift shop. As we always do when I find a jacket that is or was clearly the top half of a nice suit once, my little daughter and I took it to the trousers racks to play a "matching game". Sure enough, there were the trousers, an equally wrinkled mess, for $5.99.

3/2 undarted jacket with a two button cuff, a "sack" if you will, but with enough shape to look good. The fabric is very lightweight and breathable, The front is fully canvassed. A good friend and well known expert in these matters took one look at this suit and surmised by the high cut of the lapel notch, and lack of button hole in the left lapel, that this garment was likely made by Hertling in New York in the late 1960s.

Given the fact that I really don't need to wear a suit, ever, and this is such a business uniform, I find that the big unlined rolling collar of a vintage Brooks Brothers shirt ($5.49) and a silk knit tie knock the seriousness of this one just enough to make it comfortable for walking around town.Sacrilege to some, but so too in a way is wearing a suit to a job wear others wear jeans. It's all about middle ground.

Hailing originally from Serry's of Hanover New Hampshire, a store that catered to Dartmouth students for nearly 100 years before closing it's doors in 2004. Perfunctory internet research shows that Serry's was founded by an Italian tailor, and later sold to a pair of Italian brothers in the late 1950s. Proof positive that the WASP stronghold on the right to wear these things was not as tight and exclusive as the nerdy world of clothing dorks would have us sometimes believe.

It might not be easy, but if you find a nice lightweight striped suit, pick it up. It makes a refreshing alternative to all the khaki and tan worsted that is the order of the day this time of year. Get striped for Spring.