Just last week, I received a couple of the deliveries from The Cloth Club. The Cloth Club, for those who may not know, is a subsection of The London Lounge, where the forum’s founder Michael Alden comes up with ideas for classic cloths and proposes them to the site’s members. People say what they’d be willing to buy, and whatever is “voted" to be the best is then sent to some of the world’s best mills to be woven on short runs. As a result, you can often get extraordinarily high-quality cloths that are not readily available on the market.
One of the cloths I received, for example, is this double-sided, grey/ brown, herringbone cashmere. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a herringbone cloth on the market with a suitably large-sized pattern. The advantage to having a larger scale pattern, of course, is that you can distinguish your jacket as an odd jacket, and more easily match it to shirts, which tend to not be so bold. I plan on getting the brown side of the fabric made up into a winter sport coat.
Michael has some other really interesting fabrics planned for fall. Two I really like are the Glenurquhart checks you see at the end of this post. The first is inspired by something seen in the Duke of Windsor’s closet. It’s a large scale, brown and cream glen plaid with a striking, dark blue border. The border check is what technically makes it a Prince of Wales (which is a type of glen plaid). The other plaid - also a brown and cream - is inspired by a few pictures of Gianni Agnelli in one of his casual sport jackets.
Part of me wonders if the ideal glen plaid might not be something like the Attolini jacket you see at the very end of this post - the one with a two-tone brown design and a faint green windowpane. The windowpane not only adds a bit more visual interest, but also seems to make the jacket more casual, which is a welcomed thing in my book.
But who am I to disagree with what the Edward VIII and Gianni Agnelli wore? I’ll probably be getting a jacket’s length of the Agnelli glen check, and be having it made into a 3/2 roll, triple-patch pocket sport coat. After all, “if it’s good enough for the aristoi, it’s good enough for the hoi polloi."