So you might lose the shaping of your jacket. When you wash it, you might impact this shaping and you(or the dry cleaner) might not be able to press it in the way a tailor would. – A tailored jacket receives a lot of its shaping from many hours of pressing work. Maybe it is wrong and maybe Simon can explain it better.

which I guess it is not good to wash very often. – A tailored jacket has inner construction with a mixture of canvases, horse hair, interlinings ect. I can’t imagine that it would be a good idea to wash a tailored jacket every day. Sometimes I use 2 shirts per day if I have some event in the evening.

Why you can’t wash a jacket as often as a shirt. Your comment was a mixture of several questions and comments.ġ. Tie from Drake's, shirt from Luca Avitabile, handkerchief from Simonnot-Godard. George Wang of Brio above, and Ethan Newton or Brycelands in the background below. Photos in Florence by Jamie Ferguson, taken during a meet up of the ' Ten most Rakish men'. The Italians usually default to them, but generally I think they look too plasticky - without the textural appeal of horn.īut lighter colours of corozo like this tan have more texture - the 'waves' are much more visible.

Like a join-the-dots gauntlet cuff.Įlia also convinced me to go for corozo buttons, which I normally avoid. You can see below how the cotton of the sleeve has been turned back inside, and without the lining in between, the pick stitches show through slightly on the exterior. And the sleeves were left unlined (something I wouldn't recommend on many cloths apart from cotton). It was only quarter lined, with a piece of bemberg across the top of the back. The crease will lighten slightly, and do so more the more times you iron them.Īs to this suit, it was beautifully made by Elia Caliendo especially for our Young Tailors Symposium last month. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing this on a full suit at home, but you can see the effect if you dampen the crease on a pair of cotton trousers (perhaps with a sponge) and then iron them (always best to start with a tea towel between the iron and the cloth). Some Savile Row tailors used to press cotton suits when they were damp, in order to lift out some of the dye out of the folds and seams. You can accelerate the process with how the suit is pressed, too. But for the consumer, it means the particular suit or jacket will age beautifully, developing a patina around the exposed areas and seams.Īnd given that one of the big themes of Permanent Style is making tailoring relevant to a modern, more casual audience, this ageing is very appealing. That resistance to dye is annoying for a mill - it makes the colour harder to control. This is why jeans fade, why denim shirts look great around the seams, and why chinos are usually garment washed. But there is one more - something a cloth merchant or mill will often list as a disadvantage, but I consider anything but. But then the cashmere also makes the cotton even more shapeless and liable to bag.) (Cottons with cashmere mixed in, like my A&S cord suit, alleviate this problem somewhat. A tight fitting cotton suit can be pretty uncomfortable, and this Caliendo was cut a touch bigger in the waist and thigh to accommodate that. It is disliked by tailors for this reason - it is not really considered something you can 'tailor' in the same way as linen or wool.Ĭotton's other big disadvantage is that it has no natural stretch. The sartorial disadvantage, of course, is that cotton won't drape or hold a line well. And it is very comfortable, perhaps more so that most linens. It will wrinkle, but not as much as linen of the same weight. This summer, I planned for a suit and a jacket in cotton - the suit from Elia Caliendo (pictured here) in a soft Neapolitan style, and the jacket in a double-breasted Milanese style from Ferdinando Caraceni (details next week).Ĭotton is very cool in the summer, particularly if fine and lightweight like this 9oz from Holland & Sherry (276009). And I had a green one from Madrid's Reillo last year, which had an issue with the shoulders (their fault, not mine). I had a navy one made by Choppin & Lodge, but the make was really too English and structured for the material (my fault, not theirs). I've always found cotton very appealing for summer suits, but historically haven't had much luck with them.

Colour me cotton clothing