Shopping for… Spring Tailoring
Some people like to draw a hard-and-fast line between warm weather and cold weather suiting. I am not one of those people. Linen for fall, cashmere for summer, wool at all times, it’s all apropos in my book. Blazers should be treated as your not-so-secret layering weapon, appropriate when you want them to be. Take a creamy linen J. Crew blazer and throw it over a merino wool rollneck, shuck a trench on over it all and you have a perfect winter’s day outfit. Take that same blazer and style it with a slightly open white shirt, flamboyantly puffed pocket square and colored chinos and you’re ready to jazz up any summer wedding. Choosing the right type of suit jacket for any season should be more about hitting the right stylistic attitude than toeing the line of convention. With that mandate in mind, here are some of my favorite picks for spring, a tailoring menagerie of the hip, the slouchy and the preternaturally pastel:
#1: Pastel Fever
Blazers in palette cleansing shades of mint green and bubble-gum pink are delightfully on trend for spring. Less jarring than the hyper saturated colors of last spring, this new color wave, while certainly subtler, is still challenging. To avoid looking like you stole your nana’s Easter Sunday suit, stick to strong, masculine cuts like this double-breasted style from Beams or heartier fabrications like the sky blue tweed of this Topman blazer.
via Mr. Porter and Topman
#2: Embrace the slouch
The joy of knit blazers is that they combine the smartness of a sportcoat with the comfort of a cardigan. Spring 2012′s sporty, on-the-go mood calls for a great knit blazer to wear with a shirt and tie for after dinner drinks or a worn down tee for weekend laziness. This knobbly Zara piece fits the bill just right.
via Zara.com
#3: White House/White Market
White blazers come back into style every spring, yet few men ever seem to master this notoriously tricky wardrobe staple. The current method dujour for sporting a white blazer is to juxtapose it with more street-wise basics like heathered tees, ribbed tanks and gray jeans. Or, for the office-bodies out there, take a cue from SUITSUPPLY and match it with a pale blue dress shirt, patterned tie and rolled up chinos for the 9-5 grind.
via SUITSUPPLY
#4: Rough and Ready
The mark of a good spring blazer is that you don’t even have to think to put it on. It can jive with any shirt, tie, sweater or polyamourous short-short you can shake a Band-of-Outsiders x Sperry boat shoe at. This unassuming khaki number from J. Crew, in their wildly popular Ludlow fit, will be THAT blazer for you.
J.crew.com
#5: A Printed Matter
If you are one of those people who can pull off anything, either by dint of your impossibly high Raquel Zimmerman cheekbones or the fact that you’re just a BAMF like that, then consider indulging in Spring 2012′s obsession with printed blazers. This Givenchy Bird of Paradise blazer is the only thing to wear to all those hip Parisian night clubs where the bartender knows your name and everyone from Kanye to Coppola (Sofia not Francis) is doing the shuffle in custom Louboutins, you know, those clubs we mere mortals haven’t even heard of yet.
-Thomas Dai 14′