On my desk at home I have a photograph of my grandfather. It’s from 1958. He’s standing outside his Leeds terrace wearing a crisply-cut tweed jacket, an Oxford shirt, knitted tie.
Nothing flashy. Nothing overtly fashionable. And yet, Christ.
Does he look good. Not just good, but timeless.
Not many men from 1958 could rock up to Soho tomorrow and look as though they still belonged.
But my grandfather could. That’s the beauty of classic British style at its very best – this unique ability to transcend fashion while never seeming like you’ve tried too hard. Look closely at any great British dresser and one thing will become clear – the effort that’s gone into not looking like they’ve made an effort.
Staring at that photograph of my grandfather, what’s impressive isn’t just that he looks sharp as a whistle. It’s that, had you photographed him today, not much would have looked out of place. Of course he wore a jacket and shirt.
But his jacket was cut well. His tie was knotted correctly. His trousers broke neatly over his shoes.
But – and this is perhaps the most important part of the British style formula – he wouldn’t have been caught dead admitting to caring about any of that stuff. I was reminded of all this recently when meeting a friend for a pint. Charlie is a financier by trade but dresses with such unfussy precision that you’d never know how much thought has gone into each individual item of his wardrobe.
We were sitting in the pub when some City guy came breezing through the door wearing what looked like a million quid worth of bespoke suit. Suitably fine fabric, it was undoubtedly Savile Row, but he’d undermined the entire thing with safety-pin shiny shoes, a pocket square that matched his tie, and some grotesque cufflinks. Charlie gave him a look. “Too much,” he muttered through a mouthful of beer. “He looks like he’s trying.” Try too hard and you’ve already failed at dressing British style.
What we disdain as noisy Americans isn’t effort itself – far from it. It’s visible effort. There’s an entire cultural code wrapped up in the British aversion to seeming like we care too much about our clothes.
For generations we have prized understated elegance. We have crafted an entire visual language around clothing that whispers rather than shouts. If you dropped most of my well-dressed friends into a fashion magazine photo shoot they’d probably come out looking…fine.
But not_special. You have to look closer to see what makes them so well put together. How that jacket fits like it was made for them.
How soft that apparently basic jumper actually is. How those ugly-but-cool-looking shoes were, in fact, insanely expensive when they first bought them but look old and battered because they’ve been worn so fucking often. I had an American friend visit last year who was frustrated that his bespoke suits didn’t really turn many heads in London the way they did back home. “They fit like a glove,” he kept saying, completely missing the point.
Everything about his outfit looked new-to-death. Clothes should carry with them some evidence of having been worn before. About having been worn by their owners.
I took him to my tailor and asked him to deliberately leave a little extra room in the shoulders of his next jacket. “Now,” I said as we tried it on, “this jacket looks like it belongs to you rather than you belong to it.” You could say that the British interpretation of classic dressing is deliberately flawed. The tell-tale button-down collar left perpetually unbuttoned. The-Barbour-that’s-actually-two-olds-but-I’ll-reewire-it-soon-first-folded over your arms.
The expensive shoes you only bought because you’ve been buying shoes from the same guy for twenty years and he won’t let you leave the shop without. In British style culture these aren’t considered mistakes or items to be upgraded. They’re signs of a man who has clothes that suit his lifestyle, not one who has shaped his lifestyle around his clothes.
I remember what I used to wear in my twenties. Lots of labels. Clothes that were trying too hard to impress the clothes horses around me.
A Paul Smith suit that was, in hindsight, wonderfully cut but had Italian stitching on the buttonholes that basically screamed LOOK AT THESE DETAILS MAN. Box-fresh shoes. Rolled-up jeans with proudly displayed selvedge that I was careful to always turn up at exactly the same angle.
Clothes that shouted across the room “look at me! I know about clothes.” Now I look for clothes that whisper instead. The cashmere jumper from the tiny Scottish mill that cost more than your entire wardrobe but will outlive you.
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The non-designer Oxford shirt that looks suspiciously like something you’d pick up at the Gap but feels like it’s sewn from silk rather than cotton. The suit that doesn’t quite hug your body in all the right places. These days I try to wear clothes that I know will look better in five years time than they did when I first bought them.
British style isn’t effortless. It’s just owned so fiercely by so many British men for so long that we don’t actually have to think about it most days. All of my oldest friends, men I’ve known since childhood, dress better than I did at the height of my looking-hard-bothered period.
Without exception. Spend enough time with truly effortless British-style dudes and something will seep into your subconscious. Take my barber, Neil.
He’s wearing clothes that he’s been wearing for the last 40 years: Leather loafers broken-in so heavily they’re practically laminated to his feet. Plain white shirts with just enough bespokedetailsoflongterminvestmentthatyouknowtheyrearrow. 501s so worn-in they’re almost part of his genitalia.
And three tweed jackets he’s had since university, worn-so-hard-they’ve-shaped-to-his-shoulders kind of worn. Everything he owns looks worn-in and comfortable. There are no carefully-matched outfits.
Just a collection of items that have slowly been curated over a lifetime to fit his lifestyle. The first time I went to a Permanent Style trunk show, founder Simon Crompton was showing me around a rack of handmade shoes. I couldn’t stop picking his brain about which was “best” – shoes from Company X vs Company Y etc.
Finally he stopped and gave me a serious talk-down. “You know,” he said, motioning at the shoes, “the best shoes arent the ones that look most perfect when you first try them on. The best shoes are the ones you actually wear for the next ten years.” If that isn’t British classic style I don’t know what is. It’s why English dudes tend to excel at piecing together entire outfits from margins of high-end quality and deadstock vintage.
Those well-worn jeans worn with a designer belt you had in the back of your wardrobe for a decade. The £900 shoes with holes in them worn with flannels from Costco. The faded Hollins & Nicholson shirt with the monogrammed Ralph Lauren polo underneath.
Combine two seemingly perfect outfits and you’ll more often than not end up with something trying too hard. British style is the magic trick of making that undone look effortless instead of just sloppy. I know a guy called David who is the best-dressed person I know without question.
Invariably wearing an impeccably-cut navy suit, good-but-old looking shirts, and old-school Cambridge socks with randomly rolled-down hems. If you met him you’d never realise that he spent years studying how to dress this way. He wears his clothes so frequently and comfortably that they’ve taken on a life of their own.
Everything he owns has been worn to death already but is also perfectly tailored. When he puts his suit on he doesn’t look like he’s wearing a suit. He just looks like David wearing clothes.
The thing is, each of these dudes has something that stops their outfits from looking perfectly curated. A jacket two sizes too big that he wears with modern trousers and camera-ready shirts. Bright birdwatching socks with perfect suits.
Off-brand ties with handmade suits. Anything to throw off the clever-clothes pendulum just enough that you can’t quite put your finger on why they look so good. The Italians have sprezzatura.
The Boy Scouts have Don Carlepennilessforthecauseoutheycantaffordbetter.attire. We British have middle-aged dudes who look like they could (and probably do) dress themselves in the dark but somehow make it look like an art. Oh, and weirdly specific vintage t-shirts.
Learning to dress this way is half picking out the right items, half learning what to leave out.
Unlike many other style archetypes, British style is less about sewing together the perfect outfits as it is slowly curating wardrobes that will never technically be finished. Start with the building blocks.
Buy the best navy jacket you can find that fits your shoulders perfectly. The best shoes you can afford that can be resoled when they wear through. Shirts made of fabrics that soften with every wash instead of autumn apart.
Items that you live in so often they become, essentially, yours. It doesn’t matter if they come from vintage stores, charity shops, or unholy-priced workshops. Buy less.
Wear more. And once you’ve bought something, wear the shit out of it until it can’t physically be worn any more (at which point you send them to my tailor.) Ignore people who ask where you got something as much as possible. Own your clothes, don’t let them own you.
The true British style secret isn’t knowing how to dress, it’s caring about it so little that people forget to notice you’re dressed at all.
