What Is Too “Matchy-Matchy?”

Everyone knows that matching your tie to your handkerchief shows a lack of style, even more obviously a lack of imagination. Personally, I don’t even like matching a tie to my socks – still seems ever so slightly affected.

So I’ve come up with my own Matching Table, in an attempt to regulate this abstract area.

Let’s take socks as our constant, with everything else in the outfit being the variables. Matching your tie with your socks is relatively affected (in my opinion). Matching your jacket lining with your socks is pretty odd. In between is a range of options, from the obvious to the obscure. Pick the range that you think is acceptable, according to your own personal taste, and I’ll tell you mine later.

Obviously we are talking about coloured socks here. Plain socks – blue, grey, black, probably brown – should match the trousers rather than anything else.

Here’s the table, from most obvious to most obscure. Matching your socks to your:

[Obvious]

Dominant colour in tie

Dominant colour in handkerchief

Shirt

Secondary colour in suit (overcheck, coloured stripe)

Braces

Secondary colour in tie

Secondary colour in handkerchief

Cuff links

Tertiary colour in tie, handkerchief or suit

Suit lining

Underpants

Colour you’re thinking of

[Obscure]

The last two options are silly. They are a reflection of the fact that it feels slightly silly just thinking about this topic in such rigorous detail.

But there is a serious point here. It always looks inelegant to match colours exactly, to match things that are too close together or to match things that are both large components of an outfit. Matching should be subtle.

So which of the matching pairs above do you think are acceptable, which silly and which optimal? Personally, I think everything from secondary colour in your suit to tertiary colour anywhere is tasteful. It shows style if a faint blue overcheck is picked up in the socks, or the blue flowers on your yellow handkerchief are similarly reflected. But my personal favourite is matching cuff links and socks. (I often wear coloured silk knots for the options they give in this regard.)

One could argue that cuff links are more obvious than the secondary colour in one’s handkerchief or tie. Certainly they pop out more, though smaller. But I love the effect of matching these two parts of one’s dress – two hidden allies, secretly in cahoots, happy for the shirt, tie and handkerchief to carry on their brash party upstairs.

End of silly theory.

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British Bespoke – Part 5

It’s getting pretty exciting now. The final (forward) fitting for my double-breasted suit from bespoke tailors Graham Browne. And as you’d expect, there are plenty more technical details to get into.

I was broadly satisfied with the jacket when I tried it on, but I had asked for the middle button to be moved an inch lower – so that the fastening is exactly on my waist and the sweep of the lapel a little longer.

To my eye the initial lapel was rather stubby and short, but more than anything I think this shows the current trend to ultra-long lapels. The standard distance from shoulder seam to lapel is 3.5 inches at Graham Browne. Mine was already reduced to 2.5. Any less than that and the lapel sits away from the chest, with the point running across the shoulder and sometimes actually in mid-air. Tom Cruise and others have made this look popular, but then we’re not all that short.

In the first image below you can see how the jacket and its lining are stitched together, and see the distance of the lapel point from the shoulder seam.

To roll the lapel and inch lower down, as mentioned, Russell ironed it over – pictured below. Of course, as you roll the lapel across so that it buttons lower down, the point shifts up anyway – by virtue of becoming more vertical. So there is extra height there as well.

In picture three you can see where the lapel point moves to as a result of this adjustment – it is the chalk mark just above the lapel on the right. Not a big adjustment, but worth it nonetheless.

Russell also took in a tiny bit at the waist, around 3/16 of an inch, and a nip in the drape, just under the armhole. You can see both those adjustments in picture four – where the two pins have been inserted vertically.

Finally, as mentioned in my last post I decided to have the sleeves a tiny bit shorter. My shirts from Hong Kong might have shrunk ever so slightly in the wash, but no matter – they’re the only formal shirts I have so the jacket sleeve has to be a little shorter as well, to reveal a quarter inch of linen.

Russell wanted to shorten the sleeve by 1/8 of an inch. Possibly 3/16. But I held my ground and pushed for ¼. All this over such tiny measurements.

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Trousers For Bright Shoes

Summer brings many things bright and unusual, one of which is shoes. They may be a normal colour but in suede, they may be a pale leather or they may be in adventurous and contrasting hues. I’ve had two questions in the past week asking about what to wear with this kind of footwear – one referred to tan spectators, the other to grey/blue Oxfords from Nicole Farhi. One writer also mentioned Lodger’s summer shoe in blue/white linen (pictured alongside a spectator from the same brand).

I think you have three options: summer cloths, grey, or jeans.

To take those in order, the most formal and traditional option is to pair bright shoes with the kinds of colours and trousers they were originally intended for. So a pair of spectators (also known as co-respondents) would have been worn on a bright day with what would then have been considered informal cloths – linens or cottons, possibly flannel, in white, tan or anything in between.

So an outfit might be: cream flannels, blue oxford-cloth buttondown shirt and a navy blazer. Perhaps a V-neck sweater if you want to make it a bit more casual. A key here is also to tie in similarly coloured accessories if possible – a tan belt with the spectators for example.

Essentially, the first option is about pairing the shoes with clothes of a similar formality in similar colours. The blue/white linen shoes could be harmonised with some blue above the waist to tie them in, just as the tan belt ties in the spectators.

The second option is grey. Of the darker tones usually worn with formal clothes, plain grey supports bright colours the best. This is because bright colours will always look cheapest when paired with contrast elsewhere – a navy suit and white shirt will make a bright pink tie look cheap. Replace that with a mid-grey suit and the difference is startling.

So you could pair any of these shoes with mid-grey flannels or worsted trousers (mid-grey is actually a fairly light colour – probably the lightest grey one would wear for business), a white shirt (to pick up some of the brightness elsewhere) and perhaps something that picks up one of the colours in the shoes, again.

Last but by no means least, wear them with jeans. Jeans can soak up the brightest of colours, as demonstrated by the neon trainers some guys wear. Not indigo jeans, though, or you’ll have some of the same problems as the navy suit mentioned earlier. A nice mid-blue, with some paleness where they’ve been worn in.

Those are your choices.

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The Striped Suit

“Oh yea, pinstripe suits are the best!” grinned the giggly girl in the café as her male companion reluctantly twirled around in a shiny two-piece. Notched lapels, two buttons, wide white stripes – more chalk than pin – and a garishly blue sheen, it was a spectacle suit; not exactly to my taste but still challenging and rather outrageous. My companion, a fellow eavesdropper, remarked with approval and asked for my opinion, which was, I informed him, that the stripes were a little too wide and white for my taste and that the distance between them too great.

On our wander around the neighbourhood, we passed a mannequined window displaying more than one example of striped suits. One was a double breasted example, classically chalked creamy stripe on a dark grey background, medium gauge – the sort of thing Jay Gatsby might have worn. The other was a very narrow gauge grey pinstripe on a navy background. Single breasted with ubiquitous notched lapels it looked decidedly modern. My companion remarked that a ‘blind buy’ of a striped suit was evidently impossible; you’ll never be quite sure of what you are getting.

Rather reactionary and hasty fashion writers have written off striped suits as twentieth century relics. The followers of such folly have agreed to the reasoning that they are only appropriate for the now terribly unfashionable City banker or the East End-born Capone wannabe, neither of which are characters sufficiently savoury for fashion leadership.

I myself scoff at such myopic analysis; the stripe is foremost an expression of style, not position or social class. The stripe knows no century or decade in which it must be imprisoned. The manacled confinement in which it finds itself, loathed for its associations and ignored for its aesthetic, is entirely the fault of fashion-centric witch hunters; out to sound the death knell for as many of the 57 varieties as possible. As the gushing young female in the café proved, there are too many admirers of stripes for them to be truly buried and forgotten.

However, the stripe gang has definite leaders. And, though stripes certainly cross social and professional boundaries, there are strong associations with certain types that simply cannot be ignored.

Pins and chalks of a half-inch gauge are the classic. Fabulous in double breasted format, or perhaps single breasted with peaked lapels and a waistcoat, this style of stripe is understated and timeless. A standard tailoring stripe, this is seen on many proponents of the classic English suit. This is the stripe I would prefer.

Stripes of three-quarter inch or full inch gauge are rather more brash and garish; retro gangsters, rappers and wide boys enjoy the punch and the arresting drama of this rather unsubtle choice. They are often worn thickly on black cloth rather than blue or grey which accentuates, somewhat uncomfortably in my view, the dazzling effect.

Stripes that are of a quarter-inch gauge or less are odd but certainly less outrageous and make the suit appear, due to the compression of colour – a result of the narrow gauge – ‘unstriped’ from a distance. This is a style of stripe that is becoming ever more popular.

When selecting striped suits off the rack, make sure the stripes match at the seams. There is something rather saddening about a bright chalk stripe that fails to do so. In terms of shirt and tie choice, plains are the best background for loud stripes – in other words, let your suit do the talking. A little paisley pocket square would always be welcome. Bright colours work very well with striped suits, particularly pink and lilac. As popular as the aggressively contrasting stripe suits are – black with white stripes - I think the most stylish option is light grey stripes on a dark grey background. A sky blue shirt with a burgundy tie, and possibly a white pocket square, completes this traditional look.

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Frequently Asked Questions

“I’ve got a question for you – how do you gauge which patterns work well together across the tie, shirt and jacket?”

“I’ve written about that before, it’s all about the density of the pattern.”

“Well I didn’t see it, you should write about it again.”

One of the inherent disadvantages of a blog is its lack of an easy way to view the archive. Most questions I am asked my friends and readers have already been answered somewhere, previously (and I’ve only been doing this two years). There are exceptions, of course – a friend asked recently which side the buckle should go when you wear your belt, and I honestly don’t know.

But most of the time it’s been dealt with already. So to deal with this, and avoid the dull repetition that would result from following my friend’s advice above, I’ve created a list of useful answers by topic.

How do patterns go together?

Well, it’s all about how dense they are – how large and how close together. Just keep them in balance.

And it always helps if the tie has the largest, boldest pattern. If you want to play safe, to be honest, just separate tie and suit with a plain shirt.

How do you wear a pocket handkerchief?

Well, the default should be white linen, cotton if you find linen hard to wear or arrange (or indeed a mix, as Hermes ones often are).

Then and only then should you experiment with harmonising colours.

A good way to illustrate this is by looking at the way autumnal colours can go together.

The handkerchief is also a way to anchor an entire outfit, allowing more adventurous colours or patterns elsewhere.

As to how to wear it, this is often hard to do without looking pretentious. Go for a straight line or fold with the white linen default. For silk, I prefer the Lazy Fold.

This is an refinement of an earlier post regarding some general tips on stuffing.

How do you tend to wear waistcoats?

Well, I’m a big fan of wearing waistcoats with trousers on their own, as a way to avoid the difficulties of working all day at a computer in a jacket. This has been christened the Logical Waistcoat Theory.

This can mean changing the way you have your waistcoats made, if you have that luxury.

And I do like the odd waistcoat, though this is fiendishly difficult to do well, outside of formal events.

I hope this was useful. If it was, suggestions for similar references please.

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