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                                            On the sales floor of any boutique nowadays, you’ll find a sales associate encouraging some potential customer to stroke the sleeve of a tailored jacket. “Feel that!,” he or she’ll triumphantly say. “That’s Super 200s wool.” The truth is, super wools are just a numbers game. The traditional way of grading the quality of yarn is to see how much can be spun out of one pound of raw wool. The finer the fibers, the more spools – or “hanks” – can be filled. Thus, if a wool is “60s,” it means that a pound of raw wool will...

                                                              In a perfect world, bespoke clothing and excellent custom tailoring would be affordable and widely available. Commissioning a new suit would be as easy as going to the grocery store – every neighborhood would have its’ own local tailor with their own private atelier. Unfortunately, this clothing nirvana has yet to come to pass, and the vast majority of clothing that most of us will own is considered “off the rack” – created not for you individually, but produced from basic patterns designed to be suitable for a variety of body types. Fortunately, finding a good tailor, and...

                                                                Traditional men’s clothing – or dress clothing – is full of arcane rules and customs that are often inexplicable, yet are very important in demonstrating to the world that you know how to dress yourself. One of the most common mistakes men make when wearing suit jackets and sport coats is buttoning the bottom button (confession time: we’re guilty of this ourselves sometimes). Unless you’re wearing a one-button jacket, leave that bottom button undone.   But where did this rule come from? And what does it mean?   Fortunately, unlike many fashion traditions, we’re able to definitely trace the...

Anyone who lived through the ‘80s probably remembers some of that decade’s classic “buy American” ads. The ones that showed a mother trying to explain to her son why daddy lost his job at the factory, or a group of union workers singing “Buy American” songs. Those ads tried to save a struggling American manufacturing sector by appealing to consumers’ sense of patriotism, but the message was largely ineffective and mostly forgotten by the time the ‘90s tech boom hit. Only, a decade later, the message reappeared as the US entered its Great Recession. Except, this time, they were different....