haute topic
The Brawny Plan
The heritage menswear trend
has made tweed jackets, duck
boots and nostalgia hip again
On a recent fall afternoon, a phalanx
of bowler-hatted, woolen vest-wearing bicyclists
—many on vintage wheels — pedaled up 18th Street
NW. These dandies (and their hobble-skirted female
compatriots) hadn’t rolled in from 1928; they’d joined
the D.C. Tweed Ride, one of many such old-timey
Americana-gone-sporty events that have sprung up
around the U.S.
The sort of sartorial nostalgia that inspired these “tweeds” to paste on fake handlebar moustaches and knot bow ties seems also to have put designers and retailers in a backward-looking mood. Old-school brands — L.L. Bean, Brooks Brothers — have teamed with hipper, younger designers to produce slimmer, sleeker spins on classics like seersucker blazers and plaid shirts. Newer lines —Southern revivalist Billy Reid, J. Crew — recast things your grandpa or father might’ve worn (a wool cardigan, a hunting jacket) into so-called heritage clothing, aka trad pieces more suited to nights on the town than days on the farm.
“Men like authenticity and realness,” says Michele Casper, spokeswoman for Lands’ End, which launched a heritage line, Canvas (Canvas.landsend.com), last year. Instead of fleece and turtlenecks, its catalogs star young men and women wearing breezily belted trench coats and rumpled sweaters as they frolic in what appears to be Brooklyn.
“I think it’s a reaction
to the skinny-jeaned
rocker look we’d been
seeing in recent years,”
says D.C. style blogger/
author Walker Lemond
(Walkerlemond.com).
“It’s only natural that
people were craving
masculine, older, more
traditional clothing.”
