Tag: menswear

Corthay

I never thought I’d be consumed with desire for a pair of fluorescent orange patent shoes, but oh my goodness look at these! Aren’t they just mouth-wateringly delicious?

These stunning shoes are all by Corthay, a French designer based in Paris.

Pierre Corthay makes bespoke shoes by hand, and also produces a ready to wear collection from his own small factory near Paris. The shoes pictured above are all ready to wear… but sadly you can’t buy them in England. There are stores in several European cities (including Paris, of course!), plus New York, Tokyo and Osaka.

Given that there are no prices listed on the website, I’m guessing that these fall into the “when I win the lottery” category. I think they’re worth it though.

All images © Corthay

The Red Shoes.


Image © Koronya

Oh. My. Goodness.

Aren’t these shoes simply gorgeous? The uppers are made from a single piece of leather, and I adore the delicate little detail on the toes.

They’re handmade in Budapest by Koronya, who writes a blog about making shoes by hand.

It’s been really interesting to read the posts about the making of these shoes, looking at all the little details that make up their construction. A real contrast to the simplicity of the finished work.

Beautiful.

Heart Button Cufflinks

The trouble with buying men’s shirts is that the sleeves are always too long. I buy them because it’s quite difficult to find women’s shirts that fasten with cufflinks, unless you can afford to shop at somewhere like Thomas Pink.

Then it can be difficult to find pretty or interesting cufflinks, but fortunately it’s extremely easy to make your own!

This tutorial from Martha Stewart shows you how to make the cufflinks pictured above, from four mother-of-pearl heart shaped buttons.

All you need is four buttons, a needle, and some nice strong thread.

Easy peasy!

These boots weren’t made for walking.

At the end of December I received an email that I just couldn’t resist – a message about the Jeffery~West sale. I went to their website, just to have a look, you understand, and discovered that the Rochester Rafael boots were now half price. Even better – there were several colours left in my size! After much deliberation I decided that I couldn’t live without this fabulous red mock-croc pair.

They arrived really quickly, were a perfect fit, and I was thrilled to bits. I wore them once, took them off when I got home, turned them over to show the design on the sole to my husband… and was horrified to discover that they looked as though they were falling apart!

A worried email and a couple of phone calls to Jeffery~West later, and a lovely lady called Kirsty was able to reassure me that this is not the case.

I knew that the soles of these shoes were blake stitched rather than Goodyear welted, but I hadn’t realised what difference this type of construction would actually make. Because the soles are stitched directly to the uppers without a welt, you get a shallow channel around the very edge of the sole. To stitch the upper in place, the leather is cut with a knife and peeled back. Once the stitching is complete, the leather is pressed back into place. If the sole of the shoe gets damp, this channel can open up. Thankfully it can also be pressed back down again – and once I’d done that and worn the shoes a second time, you’d never know that this had happened.

What I will need to keep in mind is that these shoes won’t be as robust as my Sylvians, and I should probably save them for summer. I’d never go out in the rain in leather soled shoes anyway, but this is England, and sometimes you just can’t avoid walking on a wet pavement!

For anybody interested in the technical details of the differences between blake stitched and Goodyear welted shoes, W. Sanford (bespoke tailors and shoemakers in Shanghai) have a really interesting article, with diagrams. I’ll be studying this for future reference…

Suddenly obsessed with ties.

McCalls 2447

Not a bow tie this time, but a tie nonetheless.

The pattern is McCalls 2447, cut to the shorter length.

Although I love the way it looks, I have to say that quilting cotton is really not the best material for making a tie. Because it clings to itself, it’s difficult to make a decent knot and to slide it into place. It also gets very crinkly where it’s been tied, and I don’t think anybody would appreciate having to iron their tie as well as their shirt!

So cool I made another one.

Bow Tie

Yep, it’s another bow tie. I couldn’t resist.

Exactly the same as the last one, the pattern is Kwik Sew 3183, and the fabric is “Sew What?” by Michael Miller.

Bow ties are cool.

Bow Tie

This afternoon I made a bow tie, using Kwik Sew 3183. This is the self-tie version, and I looked at a lot of instructions for how to tie it, but these seemed the easiest to follow. It’s nowhere near as difficult as some of the instructions seemed to suggest.

The tie is supposed to be adjustable at the back, with a button and several buttonholes. As I don’t have an adjustable neck, I think I’ll probably just check the length against my shirts and then sew the two halves together. (Although the advantage of having a fastening at the back is that you only need to tie it once, and after that you can cheat.)

The most difficult part of the process was turning the pieces to the right side after sewing them. I do have a loop turner, but I can never seem to get the hang of it so I went with the time-honoured method of fiddling about with a pair of tweezers and my fingernails. I might use slightly lighter interfacing next time (this is medium weight on quilting cotton), to make things a bit easier.

I have lots of little pieces of fabric lying around the place that I was originally going to turn into belts. I think they might be heading rapidly towards becoming bow ties now!

Social Suicide.

I wonder how many times I’m going to start a blog post with “my friend’s Patrick’s such a bad influence…”?

Yes, here I am again, showing you something that Patrick showed to me. I was musing about clothes for keeping cool in the summer, and he sent me the link to Social Suicide’s new “Holidaze” collection.

The jackets are lightweight denims and cottons, some striped like deckchairs. There’s an inside pocket big enough for a paperback, a metal-lined pocket to stop your phone from ringing, and a pocket for your sunglasses which is lined with microfibre to keep them clean. The linings are printed with game boards, so you can play chess, backgammon and even sudoku – if you can bring yourself to write on it!

If it gets too hot to wear a jacket at all, you can simply roll it up neatly inside its own sleeve – and a carrying strap magically appears. The numbers on the strap? That’s for you to keep score of your games, of course.

Intriguingly, each jacket has its own social networking profile:

…they are all members of Facebook: each jacket ships with a login and password and is, in turn, a member of a group. So all of our Summer collection of jackets are ‘friends’ on-line. Why? We’re not sure, but we’re hoping you’ll work something out!

Then, as I was wandering through the Social Suicide blog, I stumbled upon this little gem. Sharp suit? Check. Eyeliner? Check. Bright pink shoes? Check.

It’s official – Social Suicide are now on my wish list.

Patrick and I are just going to have to rob a bank (or win the lottery) before we go on our shopping spree.

Jeffery West Sylvian Brogues.

Jeffery West

Yesterday I went into London, to visit the Foale & Tuffin exhibition at the Fashion & Textile Museum with a friend. Afterwards I had a few hours to spare until I was due to meet another friend for tea, so I’d planned to spend the afternoon looking at the Relics of Old London exhibition at the Royal Academy.

While I was in the area I thought I’d just have a little wander down Jermyn Street, to have a little look at some lovely shirts and shoes. From there I ended up in the Piccadilly Arcade, where I was ambushed by Jeffery West, whose shoes I wrote about a few weeks ago.

I asked the lovely salesman whether the shoes were ever made in a size 39 (a men’s size 5), and he said that they weren’t. Then, as every good salesman should, he suggested that I try on a size 6 and see what they were like. I agreed, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t fit, and I’d be able to leave the shop without buying an extraordinarily expensive pair of shoes.

The pair he brought out were the Sylvian plain front gibson winklepickers, in black. They were beautiful, but not what I wanted to buy, so I still felt relatively safe.

And then I put them on.

They’re so narrow and so pointy that once I’d put my orthotics inside they turned out to fit perfectly.

Oops.

The lovely salesman then checked on the computer, and discovered that he had one other pair of shoes in stock in a size 6. They were a customer order that had never been collected, due to the customer moving abroad. The design is an old one, so they’re no longer on the Jeffery West website, but just look at the picture above. I have to say that these are pretty much my perfect shoes!

The Gibson style is a much better fit for my peculiar feet than the usual Oxford. Beautiful brogue detailing, and they have the signature Jeffery West cleft heel. Despite the extreme pointiness, they’re wide enough to accommodate all of my toes (something that women’s shoes never quite seem to manage), and the colour and shine are just beautiful.

Even better, because these shoes are no longer part of the regular range, the lovely salesman was able to offer them to me for a substantial reduction in price!

And then he told me that after you’ve bought five pairs, you’re entitled to a lifetime discount.

Damn him.

Jeffery-West

My friend Patrick is a Very Bad Influence. We were talking about shoes, and he pointed me in the direction of Jeffery-West. Now we’re both coveting beautiful shoes that we can’t afford – and they aren’t even made in my size! (And I still haven’t saved up enough money to go on a shoemaking course.)

These shoes may be constructed in a traditional way, in Northampton, but their design is far from old-fashioned. The leathers are beautifully coloured and often extremely unusual – check out this “blood-spattered” patent chelsea boot. The attention to detail is very impressive. The soles and linings are red, the heels are cloven, the punching is all diamond-shaped, and the message hidden underneath the shoe pictured above is “decadence, sleaze & excess”. What more could you demand of your footwear than that?

You can, of course, buy your shoes online, but if you’re looking for decadence, sleaze and excess, you could do worse than pay a visit to one of their shops. The words “fabulous” and “gothic” spring to mind, with more than a little elegance and luxury thrown in for good measure.

This is a window display from the Jeffery-West shop in Piccadilly:

and if shoes alone aren’t enough, they also have a gorgeous range of belts, cufflinks, canes, umbrellas and wallets – all the essentials a modern dandy might need.

(Unless you’re a woman, with too-small feet. Sigh.)

All images © Jeffery-West.