THE JOURNAL
Illustration by Mr Xavier Truant
About three weeks ago, I bought myself a particularly handsome pair of roomily-proportioned, army-green corduroy trousers. They were from De Bonne Facture and I found them on this very website. About two weeks ago, I wore them while cleaning my apartment, and accidentally sprayed them with a cleaning product, leaving the legs with a permanent mottling of bleach across the legs. It was, to say the least, quite annoying.
And yet, since the aforementioned incident, I’ve hardly stopped wearing them. Suddenly, they’re not just another pair of trousers: they are mine. Nobody else has a pair with bleach-out thighs. And more than one person has asked me where they could get such a pair. It’s the same with every other part of my wardrobe that resellers might euphemistically describe as “gently used”: faded jeans, denim shirts that are fraying at the hems, a knitted cardigan with runs up one sleeve. In their apparent scruffiness, these clothes stand out.
Certainly, it’s no longer the norm. The dogma that has been passed down by most men’s magazines over the past couple of decades will tell you to throw out your T-shirts the moment they’re not perfectly white, and to have a yearly wardrobe “detox” to get rid of anything that no longer looks pristine. While, admittedly, the advice has shifted from “chuck” to “donate”, it still reinforces the idea that your entire wardrobe should be made up of flawless, unimpeachably “new” clothes.
Menswear Reddit channels, meanwhile, are filled with panicked posts on the same subject. “I find that my clothes get pretty faded or frayed within three to five years,” reads one. “At what point do you donate, get rid of stuff, or buy new things?”
This suggests a problem with our contemporary relationship to clothes. I once worked for a streetwear magazine that advised, in total solemnity, that “serious” connoisseurs should stop wearing any pair of white sneakers the moment they received their first scuff. Needless to say, it’s not sustainable when around a truckful of perfectly good clothing is thrown away every second.
“We have become conditioned to think that the secret to good style is for everything to look as though it’s just come out of the box”
Meanwhile, TikTok is awash with videos of men frantically baby-wiping their shoes to help them look “like new” for as long as possible. We have become conditioned to think that the secret to good style is for everything to look as though it’s just come out of the box (or the MR PORTER garment bag, as the case may be).
But this, of course, is a relatively new mode of thinking. Historically, menswear was largely agnostic to the hamster wheel of trends that dominates the women’s fashion cycle. The idea was to buy a few good things, spending as much as you could afford to, and maintaining them throughout their life cycle. It might sound a little quaint to model yourself on King Charles III in his younger years, patching up old suits and resoling the same pair of shoes over and over again. But I think it’s worth reconsidering as an approach to style for today. Not least because it’s so hard to imitate.
The best dressers – such as the stylist Mr Robert Rabensteiner, the visvim founder and creative director Mr Hiroki Nakamura, and the rest of those men who are always photographed looking so effortlessly elegant at Pitti Uomo – already know this. It’s why they so often wear clothes that have been patched, or patchworked, or re-hemmed.
It’s why visvim boots come with crease marks on their leather uppers. And it’s why those men look like they properly inhabit their clothes, even if their knitwear has a few holes in it. (For what it’s worth, it’s also how “old money” types have always behaved – it was once considered a sign of the nouveau riche to have clothing or furniture that had been bought, instead of inherited.)
There’s also something to be said for clothes that don’t need to be spotless to look good. In Los Angeles, a new wave of cult brands are embracing a more lived-in, less studied approach. At the top of that pile sits Enfants Riches Déprimés, the LA label founded by the artist and designer Mr Henri Levi, who has built a diehard following for his perfectly worn-in leather jackets, faded denims and slouchy hoodies. Crucially, they only look better the more that they’re worn.
“There’s also something to be said for clothes that don’t need to be spotless to look good”
More broadly, menswear seems to be showing a renewed interest in clothes that benefit from time spent wearing them in. Leather jackets are back on the menswear agenda in a major way – they dominate this spring’s arrivals from the likes of CELINE HOMME, LOEWE and Fear of God. They’re the kind of jackets that will, over time, mould themselves to the wearer and shift their shape as they become more and more worn. In other words, buying one is only the start of a journey. They’ll only become more precious in three, five, 10 years’ time.
The same is true of the season’s best denims, another fabric currently enjoying a major revival. Brands such as KAPITAL produce their jeans with patchwork panels across the legs, to charmingly idiosyncratic effect.
Of course, simply rewearing and repairing your clothes is the most important element. And with the ease of repair services (including MR PORTER’s FIT & FIX, for customers located in the UK), it’s never been more accessible. With time, you’ll learn to love the worn-in knees of your jeans and the slight smudge on your shirt cuff. Who wants to look immaculate anyway?