Another reason to love autumn, all of the great fall style coverage in the magazines. Low and behold, the new Esquire Big Black Book has just been released and Mr. Nick Sullivan & company continue to impress. The new fall 2010 issue features an enjoyable 190 pages of gentlemanly style and service. It includes everything from a story on classic coats, to a breakdown of the different varietals of sheep and their particular wool (do not scoff, knowledge of such matters is important), pictures of Alex Carleton on a boat, Alex Calderwood’s thoughts on Tokyo at Christmas time and the Big Black (purple) Book includes a photo essay of Billy Reid on-the-hunt down south. Plus, lots of suits, watches, socks, boots, bags and denim.  It even has a photo Esquire.com Style Editor Josh Peskowitz in a scratchy wool turtleneck and captain’s hat — about to trade his keyboard and G11 for a lobster pot. Basically, the Big Black Book will be the best $10 you spend all month.

I think I recognize that guy in the bottom right. Yep, its American badass Audwin McGee.

31 Comments

• The Mid-Century modern homes of New Canaan | [Preservation Nation]
• Mag Lite is still made right here in the USA | [NPR]
• Lake Erie Trad. T magazine visits O’Connell’s in Buffalo | [The New York Times T]
• Beautiful photos from Bert Teunissen. $20 and you own it. | [20x200] [Pictured]
• Prada “made in” collection | [Cool Hunting]

Comments Off

Another round of Kodachrome photos from the ACL collection. More fishing and lots of posing in this set. Fishing seems to have been a huge pastime, or it just was with people that shot Kodachrome. I should also point out that the husky gent with all of the camera equipment around his neck in the third photo is one of the people that took a lot of these pictures.

20 Comments

Well now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back. -Bruce Springsteen

15 Comments

There is a great suit story in the October issue of GQ that was shot by Ben Watts and features none other than Michael Kenneth Williams, who is starring as Chalky White in HBO’s epic new series Boardwalk Empire. Seeing Williams in a suit (in GQ and on Boardwalk Empire) is a departure from the five seasons he spent as the rogue shotgun-toting badass Omar Little in HBO’s other great series The Wire. The most dressed up we ever saw Omar in The Wire was when McNulty took him to Men’s Warehouse (and later abandoned him) for Bird’s trial. Getting back to Boardwalk Empire, the costuming and sets are big budget movie quality and are like nothing I have ever seen. My only complaint is that Mr. Williams (who I should point out has the exact same first, middle and last name as me) doesn’t get enough screen time.

These GQ celebrity suit stories always seem to turn out great and are something I look forward to in the magazine. John Slattery had a similar story in the August 2008 issue, which I also liked a lot. But this Ben Watts x Williams feature takes the three piece suit to a whole new level. Well played all around. You can see the whole story here.

Photos: Ben Watts

10 Comments

My affection for this duck camo has been expressed before, but I was perusing the fall offerings from the Japan-only The North Face Purple Label and am now obsessed with this parka and vest. Mostly the vest, but really I want both. Good news is, I’ll be in Japan in about six weeks, bad news is the exchange rate. If you are not headed to Japan, you might want to get that proxy moving before these are long gone. [TNFPL at Digital Mountain]

25 Comments

In 1939 two Portuguese business men approached the International Watch Company (the only major Swiss watchmaker that was founded by an American) to create a watch collection to honor the great 15th-and-16th century Portuguese explorers like Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan—men who pushed the limits of exploration. Seventy one years after the now successful Portuguese watches were introduced,  IWC led an expedition of its own back to the coast of Portugal to unveil its newest addition to the Portuguese family of watches, the IWC Portuguese Yacht Club Chronograph.

Time and navigation are siblings, and an accurate chronograph is a crucial tool in piloting a seaborne vessel — the old school analog way. To celebrate the launch of the Yacht Club, the newest member of the Portuguese collection (IWC’s most popular series we might add), the Schaffhausen, Switzerland based watchmaker chartered two racing yachts and devised an old school navigation school to extol the virtues of the new Chronograph. Our group disembarked from the marina at Cascais, a town not far from the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon, for a day-long nav course on Portugal’s coastal waters of the Atlantic ocean.

29 Comments