Secrets of the Well-Dressed Man (straight from the horse’s mouth)
Where should we stand on man bracelets, chinos or hoodies for 45-year-olds? Lisa Armstrong asked Mr Porter’s Jeremy Langmead to reveal everything about the modern stylish man
The very first item purchased on Mr Porter, the upmarket online men’s retail companion to the equally upmarket Net-A-Porter, was a navy cashmere jumper. That was five years ago. Man – and Mr Porter – have made considerable fashion strides since then. Where there were “only” 70 brands originally, now there are 400, and four distinct tribes of shopper have been identified. There’s Mr Conservative (works in the City, loves Belutti suits and Richard James shirts), Mr Creative (an architect or advertising copy writer, wears Acne) Mr Fashion (a slave to Saint Laurent) and then there is Mrs Porter, who buys for her husband because he never knows what size he takes and has never knowingly expressed an opinion on either Acne or Saint Laurent. It is because of Mrs Porter that sales at Mr Porter rocket by 30 per cent each Christmas.
Navy cashmere remains a staple – men are not fools. What’s interesting, though, is that along with the cashmere and the chinos, “Gucci menswear is flying out,” says Jeremy Langmead, brand and content director. “It’s not just loafers. It’s pattern, embroidery… When I walk through London on a Friday night I’m always amazed by how much colour men are wearing. Even men who work in the City have a diet of pink shirts.” And bracelets – those leather plaited ones they pretend they were given by their children. They add “edge” to suits, apparently.
Langmead used to be all about a suit. Journalists are not, to put it mildly, natural exemplars of elegance and refinement. But in his former life, as an editor at the Sunday Times Style
Magazine, the Evening Standard and Esquire, Langmead was famous for his beautiful tailoring. He still keeps suits in his office in case of formal evening events after work – and newspaper portraits. On normal days, however, he’s in a sweatshirt, cords and trainers. Tom Ford, but still… He’s had to get with the programme: luxury sweatery is where it’s at. Or is it? “I went to supper in a pizza restaurant in the East End with a group of young actor friends recently and there I was in my sweatshirt while they were all in suits… Young friends. That makes me sound ancient, doesn’t it?”
For the record, he’s an eternally youthful, Tintinesque 50, albeit one who now leads a comfortable life in the country with his partner and dog. It is a league or 10 from his early days as a St Martins student. But his two sons, 20 and 23, keep him fully apprised of their generation’s sartorial preferences (fashion interpretations of gymwear, or “athleisure”, as it is referred to by the industry). He moved to the dark side (as journalists sometimes refer to the commercial side of fashion) at Mr Porter’s inception. “I remember sitting next to Natalie Massenet [the founder of Net-A-Porter and Mr Porter) by our screens on the day it went live, waiting to see if anyone other than our friends bought anything.”
Could it be that keeping up with the latest menswear nuances is now as demanding as staying in front of women’s fashion? Yes (the Hoxton hipster’s uniform of tweed jacket, bow-tie and hyperactive facial topiary has morphed into a more rugged lumberjack shirt, frayed jeans… and hyperactive facial topiary). And no. Classic investments in menswear still outsell one-season wonders.
Men, it seems, ask far more questions before they buy. “This sounds sexist, but women tend to be more emotional and trend-led,” says Langmead. Bang on cue, a Net-A-Porter staffer glides past his glass cube of an office in an off-the-shoulder peasant top. “You can so tell what’s on-trend this minute by looking round the Net-A-Porter offices,” beams Langmead. It’s a bit more sweatshirt and cord-y in the Mr Porter section. “If you say to a fashionable woman, ‘This is Céline, it’s the bag of the season’, your job, as a retailer, is almost done. But that won’t do it for men. Not even the Hoxton hipster. You can say something’s a huge hit this season, but you can’t say it’s a must-have.”
Nor can Mr Porter’s editorial team mention layering in their copy. “My rule of thumb is, would you talk about layering to your friends in the pub?”
If it doesn’t pass the pub test, it doesn’t pass Mr Porter’s portal. This, I suspect, is what makes it such a credible, relaxing read (besides the online editorial, there is Mr Porter, a bimonthly gazette). But it also means you don’t always get a straight answer to a straight question. How many Oxford brogues, one of their most popular styles, have they sold since day one ? Enough for every male MP to own 32 pairs. That’s a charming statistic, but it does mean I have to get out my calculator, do a
spot of googling, then recheck the calculator, before coming up with the total of 14,656). Ah well, pub banter. There’s none of the frenetic drumbeat that drives so much fashion-writing directed at women. Instead, there is lots of “information”. Five ways to wear this. Three things to see at the Venice Biennale. Two ways to “take your tacos to the next level”. It’s in the vein of Schott’s Miscellany, but it’s wearing Tom Ford or Belstaff – and it makes me faintly envious because always, with men’s fashion, there’s an underlying assumption, grounded in truth, that men get more value for money when they shop.
Perhaps that’s because, although the men’s clothing market is now worth £13.5 billion in the UK, according to retail analysts Mintel, and has grown by 22 per cent in the past five years, many men don’t actually like shopping. “They certainly don’t like shops,” muses Langmead. “Our research shows they hate the small changing rooms, feel pressurised by sales assistants, loathe running the gamut of the perfume spritzers in the beauty hall, and don’t want to have to make instant decisions.”
Shopping online means they can read, digest, walk away, take a sneaky look in the mirror (“men are much vainer than women, but hide it, and they have very fragile egos”), before returning to key in their credit card’s vital statistics. “Men like value. They have to know that they are going to get lots of wear out of something.”
No detail was left to chance when Langmead and Massenet were plotting Mr Porter – even the typeface looks more manly than that on Net-A-Porter. “We wanted it to have a newspapery feel. Designers are referred to as Mr Ford and Mr Lauren, as is the custom in The New York Times.” It’s all very self-improving – but make no mistake, it’s about selling. An article on the best pasta is accompanied by the five best outfits to wear when eating spaghetti (not cream Balmain). It works because Langmead, for all that glossy magazine background, is permanently curious about the rules of style himself. “My generation’s fathers didn’t pass them on. Men were pretty stylish in the Fifties and Sixties, but in the Nineties it all went to pot. Shellsuits…”
And chinos, I add. Langmead demurs. There is nothing wrong with chinos, he informs me, provided they are by Incotex, which are a very good fit and cut. Hoodies on middle-aged men are more contentious. Especially hoodies with suits, both of which Langmead has worn. “But we probably need to define what middle-aged is,” he reasons. “It keeps changing.”
We agree on 50, although I think we may shortly regret it. Langmead’s own solution to ageing is a certain vague blurriness when it comes to dates. That and the closet manis and pedis. He is not alone in being secretive. “You won’t believe how many quite conservative-looking men have them now. We have to look better for longer. Our face is our fortune,“he laughs. Do I detect just a soupçon of ruefulness?