Jeans and tweed are related, aren’t they? Years ago they were both workwear, and they still seem to share a certain coarseness, which may hang out once in a while.
I have appeared once before in the tweed-jeans combination. Now I try again pairing tweed and jeans with a red-white gingham shirt and a bandana.
Howdy.
Photo: The Journal of Style
Not long ago, I told a denim magazine:
“Nowadays the social history of clothing items is less important. The class society, as we knew it, is not there to uphold a distinction between them. What is left, roughly speaking, are physical similarities and differences. For instance, I find that a pair of dark blue jeans can make a fine couple with a brown or grey tweed jacket. It doesn’t matter (much) anymore that youth rebellion popularized jeans and English upper-class invented tweed. Both garments have a raw, dry finish, which can go well together. That is what counts today.”
Now that a new bespoke tweed jacket from Italy, made up from grey effect herringbone Harris Tweed, has arrived, I thought it was time to animate my opinion.
The single breasted jacket has swelled edges and flapped pockets. Sleeves have been attached like a manica camicia, a shirt sleeve, which makes the transition from shoulder to sleeve smooth and rounded. The blue jeans from Lee, I bought five years ago. This is the third or fourth time, I wear them. The cognac coloured split-toe shoes are bespoke from Central Europe. The unlined dark red grenadine tie comes from Grunwald, and so does the yellow voile used for the bespoke shirt, which was made up in London. The silk pocket square also comes from London.
The book is The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich.
Source: The Journal of Style
Communities tend to create a pariah. Among men, who favour classic style, jeans is the pariah. They represent all the evil that has come upon clothing nowadays. They are raw, dirty and ready-to-wear. They belong to a regime of protest instead of politeness. Jeans might be cool and sexy but they cannot be elegant.
Many men, who like classic style, the younger generation in particular, don’t subscribe to old dogma, though. They are not afraid of blending: Why not combine what cannot be combined? They put on shirt, tie and jacket pairing them with jeans.
In the upper photo, Maciej Zaremba of Zaremba in blue odd jacket and grey waistcoat. In the lower photo, unknown young man of maybe Scandinavian origin wearing a double breasted brown reefer jacket.
Source: The Journal of Style in Florence
Nowadays, a Danish shoe is an Ecco shoe, a typical brand shoe, that is, noisy and with little substance. Some decades ago we could tell a different story about goodyear welted shoes made in the center of Copenhagen.
The most famous name was Hertz. A Danish jew, Abraham Hertz, founded the firm back in 1821 in Copenhagen. The firm was to be in business for more than 150 years.
In the 1960s trouble began, because Italian shoes started flooding the market. Production was moved to the suburb of Copenhagen but it didn’t help much. In 1974 production of classic goodyear welted shoes in Denmark ended.
The man on the photo, a young doctor, found his Hertz shoes in a second hand shop a few weeks ago. He combines them with blue jeans, a Brooks Brothers buttondown shirt, and a grey herringbone tweed. Well done, I think.
Photos: The Journal of Style