Make Berluti Your Fifth Pair. Part 1: Construction

Many people a sartorial bent idolise Berluti shoes. And well they may. Olga Berluti designs beautiful footwear that stands out for its sleek lines and subtle patinas. But there are many questions over the quality of its construction.

Let’s start with the certainties. Berluti shoes, like many made in Italy (they are constructed in the Stefano Bi factory outside Ferrara, though designed in France), are Blake constructed. This means that the shoe’s upper is folded underneath itself and sewn directly onto the sole of the shoe, unlike Goodyear welts which involve sewing the upper onto a new ridge of leather, before attaching that to the sole.

Most English shoes and their American heirs (Alden, Allen Edmonds) use Goodyear welts. They make the shoe more water resistant and tougher. They also make it easier and quicker to resole the shoe. So Berluti shoes are less likely to stand up to rain and general dampness.

They can be resoled, but it requires a Blake-specific machine. Cobblers that use these can be hard to find, but then if you’re going to pay Berluti prices for shoes you should really send them back to the manufacturer to get resoled and rebuilt to maximise their longevity.

The advantage of Blake construction is that the sole can be cut a lot closer to the upper, leaving less of a lip and making the design sleeker. The width of a sole around the upper varies hugely among Goodyear-welted shoes, but none are quite as thin as Blake-made models.

Blake shoes are not necessarily of inferior quality. Although the technique was originally created to make it easier to produce shoes in a factory, and some very poorly made Blake shoes are churned out in Italy, the top quality lines are expertly made.

But they are more delicate. Quite how delicate Berluti shoes are is a matter of some debate. Some say they have worn them for years without any major problems. Others report that they wrinkled badly and did not hold up well to continued use.

In an online forum intended to discuss such matters, one Berluti enthusiast said “I have been a customer since 1998. I believe their shoes are very well made, there are a couple of pairs I have worn for a long time and they are holding up beautifully.”

A more critical customer pointed out: “One issue with Berluti ready-to-wear is the use of Venezia leather. According to Berluti PR, this leather allows for the beautiful patina available on Berluti shoes. Unfortunately, it is also quite thin and delicate, which means that they can look very wrinkled after some wear.”

The conclusion to this debate will appear here later in the week…

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Anyone Know a Good Cobbler?

I was having a set of keys cut in a local cobbler yesterday and couldn’t take my eyes off the guy resoling shoes. He banged in the nails on the new shoe with abandon, filed off the edges of the leather while barely looking at it and then threw (yes, threw) the completed shoe onto the shelf above him.

It landed on a mound of similarly maltreated shoes, a few ladies’ heels sticking out from between a dozen black brogues. It looked like a mound of stricken corpses. You could almost hear the pain inflicted by his whining machinery.

These high-street cobblers barely deserve the name. (They certainly are nothing close to cordwainers – the old English term for makers of shoes.) But then what should you expect from someone who is equally adept at cutting keys, dry cleaning and resoling?

But there aren’t many other options. If you want a good pair of shoes resoling or reconstructing, your only choice is a high-street butcher or the original manufacturer. And the latter is likely to be prohibitively expensive – possibly involving the shipping of the shoes to France or Italy (it’s even worse for US readers, who might have to send them to Northampton as well).

This service is undoubtedly worth it if you want the shoes reconstructing, with new welts and linings etc. But it’s a little excessive just for a new sole.

I asked Steven Taffel of Leffot in New York for advice on this but without any luck. Apparently the problem is similar in the US – nothing in the middle ground.

Steven suggested I try Dean Girling (of Gaziano & Girling) to ask his advice. Dean’s best suggestion was to send them to his team, one of whom would be happy to reconstruct a shoe. This is useful and more local, but doesn’t really solve the problem.

“The problem is there just aren’t any high-quality cobblers out there any more,” said Dean. “My father still does a lot of that work but he’s in his sixties now and has more work than he can handle. It seems there isn’t the volume of retail demand for high-quality work.”

So this is a request for recommendations from the readership. There must be some good cobblers out there that I can feel confident giving my JM Westons to for a new heel. It doesn’t matter where you live, any recommendations would be gladly received.

[I also need to find somewhere that sells tongue pads that you stick to the bottom of the shoe’s tongue – it helps tighten the top of the shoe when the leather has expanded over time.]

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The Split Yoke

There is almost no good journalism about men’s style these days. Outside of this and a few other websites, no-one produces objective, informed and above all critical writing about clothes, brands and products.

I flicked through a magazine called Man About Town last week (a recent launch in the high-end fashion sector, only on its second issue) and found 20 pages about the business of fashion. Should be interesting, except that it comprised several double-page spreads on brands including Dunhill and Church’s, merely describing their luscious interiors, history of craftsmanship and key pieces.

Not one critical or substantive word about what differentiated this business, about how it communicates its value for money, or about different times and designers have changed what it does. Nothing on what its detractors say about it; or on how much water those detractions hold.

Each piece read like an advert. Which perhaps isn’t surprising, given that those companies advertise in the magazine. But this is what journalism is built on – the integrity that allows you to write fairly and objectively, if critically, about those that fund the magazine itself.

Another example this week piled ignorance onto paucity of journalism. The column Brummell in UK newspaper Financial News recommended a bespoke shirt service called Brass Bones, where you can get shirts made to your size by filling in a form online. Nothing wrong with that; it’s a good idea.

But there’s no journalism here. They haven’t tried the service or cast anything like a critical eye over it. There are several online shirt services that have been around for months, even years, yet they don’t get a mention – let alone a comparison. This service is presented as a one-off.

Such is the presentation of the piece, just like the examples in Man About Town, that it could be mistaken for an advert.

But the worst thing is ignorance about the product they are describing. Aside from a rather casual use of the word ‘bespoke’ (see previous post on Sartoriani), the boys at Brummell insightfully point out that the shirts have desirable details such as mother-of-pearl buttons, gussets and split yokes.

Mother-of-pearl is standard. If they didn’t have that you should send them back. The value of gussets is debateable. But split yokes are the worst. They are an anachronism.

Split yokes used to be a sign of quality because it showed that your tailor regularly adjusted his shirts, altering the length of each side of the yoke to fit the individual customer. This is unlikely to be the case today.

In fact, you could argue that having a yoke that is one piece demonstrates quality, as a bespoke shirt by definition doesn’t need to be split and adjusted. Either way, listing it as a feature hardly demonstrates incisive criticism.

I’d bet a decent sum of money the writers of that piece just copied the list from a Brass Bones press release, with little thought for what it meant. Oh well.

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Whether You Suit Pink, Blue or White

Tradition has it that when British men came back from the war they only had two ties they felt they could legitimately wear – that of the military regiment they belonged to and that of the club they were a member of. Both were relatively plain, either a series of crests on a dark ground or a club stripe in two colours.

Eager to partake in the new openness in men’s clothing, these men wanted to dress up their ties. So they turned to more colourful shirts. Jermyn Street sprang up to service them.

This is the reason that, to this day, a pink shirt and most forms of stripe are perfectly acceptable as business attire in London. Even lawyers who rarely stray from a navy suit, black shoes and black socks (sad but true) will happily wear a pink or striped shirt and not consider themselves any less formal.

Not so the Americans, for whom the white shirt is the business staple, blue or stripes a little casual, and pink ever so slightly effeminate. Loosened from the formalities of London’s business regime, Americans are more likely to wear patterned suits or brown shoes (particularly in Boston). But not pink shirts.

Which is a shame, as pink shirts suit many people. Smarter and cleaner than blue or a stripe, they add a little frisson of colour while remaining very formal.

I was reminded of this the other day by a colleague who was wearing a pink shirt for the first time. In fact, he admitted it was probably the first time in his life he had ever worn anything pink.

Which was a particular shame, because pink suited him. Anyone with slightly ruddier features or more than average pink in their skin will suit a pink shirt, perhaps more than any other colour.

The great Alan Flusser tells us that a blue shirt goes with more people’s skin tones than white. And he’s right. While white may be cleaner and smarter, it tends to wash out people with paler skin, leaving them looking even whiter than they are. It looks best on high-contrast complexions – broadly speaking, those with darker skin.

Blue, on the other hand, is more forgiving on all types of skin tone. That is one of the reasons it is universally the most popular colour for casual shirts.

Pink, logically, tends to suit those with a little red or pink in their skin. Contrary to what you might expect, it will look more manly the paler the colour, as Hardy Amies informs us. Nothing will look worse than a strong, deep pink.

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Know Your Trouser Width

I like narrow trousers. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a fashion thing – they are trendy and have been for a good year or two, but I think it has influenced my choice in tailoring for longer than that.

(Side note on very narrow trousers: They only ever look good on thin people. Do not wear them if you have any softness around the middle. They will make you look immeasurably fatter. Like a blancmange on matchsticks in fact. I’m consistently amazed at exactly how fat they can make men look that I would otherwise have considered slim.)

I like narrow trousers because they suit, to my eye, my other clothing choices – slim shoes and tailored jackets. Having a rather large number of shoes I would like to display, it also helps having slimmer trousers that will rest on to of the shoe and not envelop it.

I know it was considered stylish for a long time to pair fuller, wider trousers with short, nipped jackets (Cary Grant, Oxford Bags) but I prefer to put together items that balance rather than contrast. As Coco Chanel said: “Fashion is architecture; it’s a matter of proportions.”

However, I have a problem: perhaps due to several years of cycling, I have larger than average thighs and bottom. So trousers that are too narrow or too low-waisted get as far as my thighs and stop. This is particularly a problem with contemporary jeans, though less so with formal trousers.

For jeans, I end up going for more traditional cuts – Levi’s 501s are pretty good, as are the Kilgour range of jeans, which are purposefully cut higher and use a clean, dark indigo in order to be smarter.

As a result of this, it is always worth me keeping in mind how narrow I like trousers to be, in precise measurements, when trying trousers on. Without a ready comparison, it can be surprisingly hard to try on a new pair of trousers and get an idea of how narrow they are compared to your optimum width. You can, of course, compare them to the trousers you were wearing that day, but if these are very different in style or material they won’t help much.

It also helps to get an assistant to pin the trousers at the length you would have them hemmed to – width can vary surprisingly along the trouser leg, and it is easier to see the width when the ends are not crumpled up on top of your shoe.

All of which is a long way of saying that I now make a point of knowing the widths I prefer, in inches. I recommend doing something similar.

My preferences are (measured as the circumference of the leg at the bottom – just measure the width when flat and double it):

Suit trousers – 16 inches. (Anything less than this I would class as very narrow).

Jeans or more casual trousers – 17 inches.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s preferences.

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