A Bauhaus design from the 1920s. The shoe rack lets your leather soles breathe. Read more …
Probably the best polishing brushes in the world. Hand made of yak hair in Germany. Read more …
Webshop: Pure Linen Ties
Brummell loved linen, “and plenty of it”. Find our linen for spring and summer here.
The hatter’s studio
On Nørrebro, Copenhagen, through a back yard and all the way up on the fourth floor in a lovely old factory you will find the very last hatter. Or, at the very least, one of very few left. His name is Stig Andersen. I met him last summer and wrote about him for the Børsen, Denmark’s leading financial newspaper.
Stig Andersen starts a hat with a piece of natural felt – from China, “they do actually make the best”, which he tars and dries out. He then wets the felt and drapes it over a mould. After that the mould and felt goes into a drying oven and after that the hat can be taken off the mould, brushed and dressed.
Stig Andersen has countless hat and visor moulds to hand, most of them decades old, originating from the time his father ran Andersen & Berner, as the company is still called to this day. It was founded in 1946.
I think Stig Andersen can bring any design in felt to life. He has created some surprising and kooky felted hats designs for Soulland and Stine Goya, a couple of today’s happening design companies. Several of these were stacked on tables and chairs as I popped in. Otherwise Stig Andersen designs for theatre and film productions and he has several overseas clients.
I too am toying with the idea of collaboration with Stig Andersen. I have a particular piece of head wear in my mind, something that would suit him right down to the ground. Hopefully I will find the time to do this.
Photo: The Journal of Style
Smart once more
Narrow trousers, which are on the short side, are not a new invention. Neither are cardigans. We have seen skinny ties before. And the desert boots, they too have their place in history.
Recently I flicked through some back issues of the defunct French magazine ‘Adam’. They were curiously up-to-date even 50 years later. I think almost every suggestion ‘Adam’ made would appeal to the fashionable man of today.
Fashion may be new by definition but is in many cases a repetition of the past.
Photo: Adam/The Journal of Style
The Blue Coat
One of the eternal questions I keep coming back to and do try to give a satisfactory answer to is this, which colour can be considered the absolute classic colour in a suit: navy or dark grey? Although the dark grey is the more universally popular of the two today, especially in Northern Europe, I would say that the navy is the father. This is the colour of preference for Beau Brummel’s blue coat had when he unwittingly defined the core of the suit at the start of the 18th Century and – as I recalled recently – that is the hue of Werther’s renowned coat in ‘The Sorrows of the Young Werther’ from 1774. As mentioned in this entry dated the 6th September:
“It cost me much to part with the blue coat which I wore the first time I danced with Charlotte. But I could not possibly wear it any longer. But I have ordered a new one, precisely similar, even to the collar and sleeves, as well as a new waistcoat and pantaloons.”
Blue stands for a fresh start, in the world of suits if nowhere else.