Should You Wear a Belt?

Following on from my last posting on what belt to wear, there is one, perhaps more important question – whether to wear a belt at all.

Those who wear braces deride belts as “pull-up not stay-up”. They suggest that several times a day you will be forced to hike up your belted trousers back to their original position. This would not happen with braces.

Now, I have never worn braces. But I have also never had to pull up my belted trousers during the day. I would suggest that the reason for this is that I, like most young men these days, wear my trousers on my hips. Not my waist, and nowhere in between.

Your hips – that gap just below the first ridge of your hipbones – provide a fairly stable location for the waist (the irony!) of your trousers. The swell of bone above and below stop them moving.

This is not necessarily the case on the waist, where a variable amount of fat can provide a less rigid shelf. Unless you have less than 5% body fat, there will always be more softness here than on your hip bones.

Most people who wear braces also wear their trousers on their natural waist. So it is understandable that they would deride belts as useless.

One good way to make sure your trousers don’t slip is to have a belt that fits you perfectly. The best way to do this is to have a belt cut to your waist size and punctured with holes at your precise measurements, with perhaps one either side to be safe.

(Most luxury brands offer this service. I have one from Lanvin that cost £40. Not a bad investment for something in both black and brown – it is reversible – that I will wear often, for years.)

Outside the realm of braces, there is a much better reason not to wear a belt. It can seem like too much clutter in an outfit, spoil the long lean lines of a suit, and suggest that your trousers simply don’t fit.

The first two of these points are the most important. How much more elegant is it to wear no belt with your suit – indeed, no belt loops – and have one clean, smart colour from shoes to tie? I would recommend not wearing a belt with most suits if you are dressing smartly – perhaps defined as when you are also wearing a necktie or a handkerchief.

With neither of these accessories, a belt can be a nice addition – a focus point for the eye, a replacement for those missing accents. It is also a natural accessory for a casual outfit – with odd jackets, with tweed, cotton or linen.

P.S. Make sure you look after your belt. It will get worn and fray over time, but this can be mitigated with cleaning and an occasional polish. Wearing a frayed belt is akin to wearing unpolished shoes – no matter how much of a favourite they might be, it just looks scruffy.

Indeed, my father tells the story of the manager of one company who paid to give all his male employees new belts, because Englishmen “tend to wear old favourites, and never consider that their belt might be denting their image of professionalism”.

How to Pick the Right Belt

This seems like an easy task. But it can be fraught with problems.

Let’s start with the most basic guidelines. If you are wearing a leather belt, it should match your leather shoes, if you are wearing them. Black shoes should be paired with a black belt, brown with brown and tan with tan.

The shades need not match exactly, but they must be close. The brown may be a little paler or a little darker, but it should not be able to be described as tan.

The texture need not match exactly either. The belt can be crocodile, ostrich or brogued. Indeed, a belt that matches the shoes exactly (both black crocodile, for example) smacks of artifice. Somehow it suggests you are all crocodile skin underneath, and only these two bits are peaking out.

Suede belts and woven leather belts are naturally more casual, and that should be reflected in the suit or outfit they go with – linen suits, odd jackets, outfits without ties. But again, colours should be similar.

Brightly or unusually coloured belts can work well, particularly as one pop of colour on an otherwise plain outfit. However, the colour of the shoes and belt should always be different enough to be a real contrast.

Brown is not an effective contrast with black or tan. Try primaries – reds, yellows – with black shoes, as you would with socks. And more muted colours with brown – oranges, greens – again as you might with socks.

The belt should not be too wide or too narrow. The easiest way to gauge whether it is either of these is to compare it to the width of the belt loops it will go through. Jeans have wider loops and should have wider belts. They can also be heavier, to reflect the material. Worsted wools should have sleaker, slimmer belts. But again the width of the loops is your best guide.

The buckle should be obvious, at least with a suit. Slim, discrete and silver in colour (unless you wear much gold elsewhere). No logos.

Ribbon belts can work well, particularly with summer outfits (again, matching the weight of the belt to the weight of the material it ties together). Best not to combine them with every other preppy accessory, though.

Ties as belts may have been a favourite of Fred Astaire but they are hard to pull off with elegance. If he had started wearing neckties around his waist before he was universally considered stylish, I would bet a chunk of money that it would have seemed artificial.

Next week, the follow-up question: whether to wear a belt at all. You lucky things you.

The Shape of Your Feet

Different types of shoe will fit you better than others. This has nothing to do with the material or the design. It is the last.

You will occasionally hear people, deep in sartorial conversation, say something along the lines of: “Well, you see I’ve never found anything to quite fit my feet ever since Edward Green discontinued the 202 last.”

They are referring to the shape of the sole of the shoe, how pointed, chiselled or rounded it is at the toe, how wide through the ball of your foot and how tapered at the waist. This is the last. At a basic level, it is the footprint the shoes make, and it is the most important thing to fitting you well.

[By the way, do not panic EG fans, the 202 is live and well! It was just an example. Think of the summer sales and calm down.]

Now, I have no idea what last suits me in Edward Green, John Lobb, or any other shoemaker for that matter. But over time, largely through chatting to friendly staff in shoe shops, I have discovered a few things about my feet.

I have very wide feet across the ball of my foot. I know this because, whenever I put on a shoe that is too slim or too pointy, I have to try it in a bigger size to avoid pinching down either side of my toes.

However, I also have a relatively high in-step and narrow bridge across the top of my foot. I know this because when I try this pointy shoe in a bigger size, I cannot do the laces up tight enough. My heel slips at the back, which is never a good sign.

The lovely co-owner of Hardrige shoes, just off Bond Street, taught me this, during a long consultation. (I recommend Hardrige for custom made shoes. For around £250, 20% on top of the ready-to-wear price, you can customise the lining, piping and colour of the leather itself. www.hardrige.com)

Now I know this about my feet, it doesn’t mean I know which last to pick. But I do know that a chiselled toe fits me best, something that can be wide yet still elegantly slim at the toe. I know that I need to be able to tighten the shoe effectively, often to extremes. An oxford shoe (one piece of leather split into a V where the laces are, rather than two pieces tightened from either side – a derby) needs to start with quite a lot of space remaining in its V. Even when the leather has expanded and the V narrowed, it must tighten well. A monk-front shoes also works well in this regard, as an extra hole can often enable it to be tightened further.

It also means that if I ever walk into John Lobb to pick a pair of shoes, I’ll be able to give a fairly good description of the last I want, if not the number.

Go find an accommodating sales person. I recommend glancing through shop windows and finding one that looks a little bored.

The Berluti Shoelace Knot

Last October, I was wondering around the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai. An absurdly largely shopping centre that contains its own Italian street and indoor ski slope, it has the best shopping in the Middle East. (Or did. So many of these things are going up everyday in the UAE that it has probably been overtaken by now).

Alongside the usual fashion brands, it had an Etro, a Carolina Herrera and a Berluti. I was impressed. As I walked into the Berluti branch, preparing to umm and err over a particularly beautiful pair of loafers, before inevitably walking out empty-handed, I saw that the sales assistant had his head in his hands.

Three Americans, in loud shorts, were complaining, almost shouting, about the prices.

“How the hell can these be three times the price of the Gucci and Prada shoes?” they asked. The assistant tried to explain that Prada, and to an extent Gucci, are not shoe companies. That their shoes are made by other people. And that some of them are, well, a bit rubbish. All that’s branded is not gold.

They refused to believe this. Instead, they enquired when the sales started. Berluti doesn’t have sales, the assistant replied. This was the last straw, and they stomped out (even though the oldest American, who was wearing some fairly funky tortoiseshell glasses, was staring wistfully at a pair of Club wholecuts in chocolate (see picture)).

There followed a rather pained conversation between me and the assistant, where he complained that he gets this everyday. Most shoppers in the Middle East, it seems, whether local or tourist, are after brand more than anything else.

I soothed him with some ooing and aahing over the loafers. But before I started with the umming and the erring, he taught me the Berluti shoelace knot. I’m glad he did, as I now tie my shoelaces like this everyday, unless I’m in a real hurry.

It’s simple, but effective, and I shall explain to you how to do it.

Start the knot as you would do a normal bow, crossing the two laces tightly (you can even cross them twice if you wish, which keeps them in place more effectively – I was taught that by a sales assistant in John Lewis in Kingston, when I was 12).

Form the two ends into loops, again as you would a normal bow. Then hold one of the loops while you go around it – twice – with the other. This is exactly the same as a normal bow, except that you go over the same place twice.

It achieves the effect of a double bow (where you tie the two loops and then tie them again, rather than going over the same place twice) but is far easier to undo.

Now, I’m not sure whether Berluti can be credited with inventing this knot. I’m sure I’ve seen it too many places for that to be the case. But it does work well, so there’s no harm in allowing them to christen it. Besides, it gives me a reason to make a star out of that poor sales assistant.

[For pictorial assistance, first look at the picture, which uses the Berluti knot. Then try this link - http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/surgeonknot.htm - which I believe refers to the Berluti knot as the surgeon’s knot]

New York Men Shine in the Sun

New York puts London in the shade. The hot weather (it’s been above 30 Celsius all this week) brings out the city’s hidden peacocks.

Walking down Fifth Avenue this morning, almost every block presented a summer delight. Several seersucker suits, a plethora of summer hats, sockless suits with loafers, white linen and white bucks.

You just don’t see that in London. Granted, the consistency of the weather here makes summer clothing a better investment – a sunny day is actually sunny all day, rather than being half cloud in the morning, patchy at midday and just overcast in the afternoon. But I would bet good money that these impeccable gentlemen own four or five summer suits, and their peers in the UK own none. Such a shame.

Some would say that the Americans are not dressed well, in one regard. No matter how well tailored the outfit, or daring the cloth, every one of those summer suits had pleated trousers and no jacket waist to speak of. So while they were striking, I would argue they weren’t very flattering.

The trousers also had cuffs (or turn-ups) which, while I know many people are a fan of, create a very cluttered picture in my eyes. Given that the gentlemen I saw were wearing trousers that were wide, decorated with pleats, worn with a belt, and few of them wear slim, the last thing they needed was another bit of texture to break up the line of the outfit. All the slimming, heightening effects of the suit were removed. (I know cuffs are also meant to help pleats stay straight, but doesn’t tape add just as much weight?)

So the cut was not to my taste. This is the difference between silhouette and fit – something I stressed in a previous posting. The fit was immaculate, but the way they had chosen it to fit (the silhouette, the proportions) were, in my eyes, questionable.

But this is obviously a personal choice. I have to admit that what they did, they did well. In fact, I think many Americans get a bad press in the UK. Too many of them wear chinos that are too wide. Almost a third of them seem to be wearing the same outfit, which pairs these chinos with a shirt (or polo) and deck shoes. [I had the surreal experience yesterday of being in a list with four Goldman Sachs employees, who were all wearing blue button-down shirts, brown belts, chinos and brown deck shoes. It was freaky.] Finally, some Americans wear their chinos with trainers, which is just ugly.

Yet there are none of the classic English howlers – no suit jackets with t-shirts, no shiny tracksuits, no voluminous untucked dress shirts. The rules seem to have stronger roots in New York. Yes, the outfits can be boring (if a third were wearing the deck shoes outfit, about a quarter were wearing blue blazers) but the belts generally matched the shoes, the shirts were generally tucked in, and no one had a matching tie and pocket handkerchief.

So here’s to New York men, for their peacocks and their consistency. Without them English style wouldn’t have got far.