Blog

Corduroy gets described as a winter fabric and left there. It is a construction, and the construction is unusual enough that knowing it changes which pair you buy. What corduroy is Corduroy is a pile fabric with raised cords running the length of the cloth. Extra weft yarns are woven in, floated over the base weave, then cut and brushed so they stand up as velvet-like ridges. The channels between the ridges are the wales. Everything people notice about corduroy, the warmth, the depth of color, the way it wears, comes from that cut pile. Wale count, and what it...

Oxford is the most misused word in shirting. It gets used for a collar, for a level of formality, and for a whole category of shirt, and it is none of those. It is a weave, and once you can see it the rest of the confusion resolves itself. What an Oxford shirt is An Oxford shirt is a shirt made from Oxford cloth, a basketweave where two or more fine warp yarns cross a single heavier weft yarn. That structure gives the cloth its visible texture, its weight, and its slight roughness compared to poplin. Oxford describes the cloth....

Part 5 of The Wolf vs Goat Guide to Menswear I fit a lot of trousers, and one of the most common problems I see is also one of the easiest to spot: the pants are simply too tight. For a long time, menswear pushed this idea that a closer fit was automatically a better fit. Thighs got slimmer, rises got lower, leg openings got smaller, and eventually a lot of guys ended up wearing pants that were fighting their bodies. That's not what I'm looking for when I fit a pair of trousers. I'm looking at the whole picture....

Almost every polo sold is the same garment. Cotton piqué, jersey knit, a short placket, a soft collar that gives up inside a season. The category has a definition so loose that the definition is not much use to anyone choosing one. What a polo shirt is A polo shirt is a short garment with a collar, a placket of two or three buttons at the neck, and no full front opening. It sits between a T-shirt and a button-up shirt. Everything beyond that, the fabric, the knit, the collar construction, is where polos actually differ from each other, and...