Harris Tweed @ Walmart

After getting a heads up via StyleForum and Put This On (link here) regarding the Harris Tweed coats on sale at Walmart for about $75.00, I headed over to my friendly neighborhood store to see what I could find. I'd heard that there were anywhere from 3-6 tweeds available, depending on what the store had in stock. Several people reported back finding no coats at their local Walmart, but I was in luck at the Walmart store in Union, NJ.

Reader feedback at PTO sounds mixed, but I'm not sure what people are expecting for $75.00. Yes, the shoulders are heavily padded and the cut is boxy, but the tweed is fairly substantial and stiff, which I'm not sure lends itself to a slimmer silhouette.

That being said, I sized down from a 42R to a 40R and I'm pleased with the purchase. Of the three tweed option (Oatmeal, Grey, and Navy), I went with the Barva model in the tan oatmeal tweed. The jacket features a single-breasted, two button cut with double vents - I think it'll look great with flannels, khakis and perhaps even an odd pair of denim here and there. The shoulders are certainly less conspicuous, and while fit is less boxy, I found that there was still room for a lambswool v-neck sweater underneath.

So, is this W. Bill vintage Harris Tweed from Norton & Sons? No. Is it a fairly conservative example of  Harris Tweed manufactured in China at about 90% off the company's retail price (see here)? Seems like it to me. And unless I'm missing something, the buttons don't feel like plastic to me.

Looks like leather buttons to me . . .

And yes, the heavy wooden hanger with brass "Harris Tweed" plaque might be worth $35 all by itself!

Drake's Pop-Up Sale Pt. II - The Haul

There haven't been too many sales to get excited about in New York City recently, but the Drake's Pop-Up Sale at CHCM on Bond Street turned out to be something of a throwback to the golden days of the Paul Stuart or Asprey sample sales.

Drake's of London has long had a reputation as a purveyor of fine English silks. The company's recent acquisition by the crew at the Armoury in Hong Kong has only enhanced its reputation, as their silk ties, wool blend pocket squares, fair isle sweaters, and cashmere cardigans have developed quite a following. Surprisingly, some of the more popular men's accessories were available at the sale (you can see pictures of the available inventory here).

With so much inventory on sale at significantly reduced prices, this was a sale that you needed to make repeated visits to. Simply put, there were so many boxes that I found great looking stuff on Friday that hadn't even been unloaded and put out on display during my first visit on Wednesday.

That being said, I came away with two separate hauls that were impressive in their own right. On Wednesday, I came away with a lovely brown cashmere/silk sports jacket. The jacket featured the classic Italian 3 buttons rolling to 2 look, with double-vents and working buttonholes on the sleeves. This may end up costing me more to have the sleeves altered, but I can live with that. I believe the jacket was made by Caruso - needless to say, the tailoring on this piece is sublime. 

I also came away with 3 ties, including 2 classic silk prints. I've been looking for a solid blue dress shirt, so that was a no-brainer acquisition. The plaid lambswool throws were also a great value, and I managed to find a lovely dark blue/brown/grey/tan color combination that just looks warm.

Drake's unicorn pocket squares are all the rage, and luckily I managed to snag the only blue/red/gold color combination that I saw on display all week.

Returning on Friday out of curiosity, I splurged a bit more and came away with the cashmere fair isle vest in grey and brown, 2 more ties, and a cashmere scarf. Getting into the holiday spirit, I also picked up a creme/brown polka dot scarf for my mother and a tie for my father in law. 

I also came away with a small stack of brown unicorn and mughal motif pocket squares, which I was able to pass along to those less fortunate who were unable to attend the sale.

All in all, an amazing sale. Kudos to CHCM and Drake's for putting on a sale to remember!

Drake's Pop-Up Sale at CHCM (2 Bond Street NYC)

http://chcmshop.com/blog/2012/12/10/drakes-pop-up-at-chcm/

I was green with envy when Londoners were blogging about the Drake's/Edward Green pop-up sale back in July. We're still going without an EG pop-up on this side of the pond, but Drake's and CHCM have put together one heck of a sale at the latter's brick and mortar shop at 2 Bond Street here in New York City.

I was lucky enough to be let in ahead of the store's 11 am opening, which is a testament to just how cordial and gracious the folks at CHCM are. The owner is actually from Northampton, so in addition to all of the wonderful accessories surrounding us, we also chatted amiably about the various shoe factories located in that part of the UK. The gentleman from Drake's was equally engaging.

Sales like this are usually something a madhouse, so it was a completely different experience to be able to talk to the staff about different offerings, colors, fabrics, and textures. To try things on without being bumped and jostled for mirror time was absolutely sublime.

CHCM has some great brands on display which were forced to make way for the shipment of 28 boxes of Drake's product for the sale. The prices, in a word, are insane. I'll post my booty later this week, but I came away with a button down shirt, a cashmere/silk sports jacket in a lovely dark brown color, 3 ties, a pocket square, and a lambswool throw that might be criminally under priced at $65. In comparison, the scarves, which are really just a portion of the fabric used for the throw, were priced at $95.

In addition, pocket squares were $40, ties were $65, jackets/blazer were $295, I don't recall what the dress shorts were priced at but I want to say $65, and scullies and gloves were $30 each. There were these wonderful lightweight polka-dot scarves that were about $95 - apparently the Sartorialist asked about them (good choice, they looked amazing).

The shop itself looks like a great shop for menswear - I'm looking forward to popping back in sometime after the Drake's sale is over to get a closer look at the rest of the inventory.

Ruminations On A Death Toll (and Other Vague Impressions): Boardwalk Empire

As a show that lives at the intersection where gangsterdom and dandyism meet, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm a big fan of HBO's Boardwalk Empire. It features great acting and compelling plot-lines, tied together by some of the best writing on TV. Part of what is so intriguing about historical fiction is that because there is so much that isn't known about the historical characters, the writers aren't necessarily tied down to a particular set of facts, beyond what I hope would be a respectable adherence to general points such as a person's date of death or whether someone might have been in a certain place at a certain point in time. So its entertaining to see a character like Gyp Rosetti who brings a certain level of drama to the plot-lines and the immediate story arc. Of course, one knows that Enoch Johnson ran Atlantic City for a long time after Prohibition ended, which probably doesn't bode well for the Gyp Rosetti character in the long run.

Yet with so many historical grey areas with which to work, I find that the writing at times has sacrificed the historical "tone," for lack of a better word, most likely with the goal of simplifying and furthering the plot in mind. This began fairly early on with the ascension of the Luciano character into something of a right-hand man for Arnold Rothstein in Season One, or about 1919.

Some historical texts allude to  Meyer Lansky first making the acquaintance of Rothstein - at a bar mitzvah, no less. While Boardwalk Empire doesn't necessarily dispute that characterization, it certainly doesn't reinforce the notion of Lansky as the initial conduit to Rothstein. In hindsight, Luciano certainly came to assume the position of preeminent Rothstein protege - he did, after all, assume a place on on Time Magazine's list of the 20th Century's most influential builders and titans. But in 1919, Rothstein had an army of young criminal proteges at his beck and call, some who wielded considerably more influence than Luciano.

That same year, Nathan Kaplan, aka Kid Dropper, assumed control of the lower East Side, with all of its corruption and graft and the attendant benefits thereof. When the Kid was put on the spot in 1923, Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen assumed control of the labor rackets in New York City. Another Rothstein protege, Orgen would have been at the height of his powers in 1923 - certainly with more clout on the street than the bootlegging, dope-peddling Luciano. At the very least, Orgen's army of ruffians - which by that time included other notable Rothstein pupils such as Jack "Legs" Diamond, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro - would have been a useful ally in the current gangwar storyline that has at times pitted Rothstein and Thompson against the seemingly inexhaustible Italian hordes led by the Rosetti/Masseria faction.

As an aside, one could conceivably argue that even The Little Champ, Abe Attell, enjoyed Rothstein's confidences more than Luciano would have in 1919. After all, Attell, a former boxing champion turned Rothstein bodyguard and intimate, was at the nexus of the Black Sox scandal. Depending on which story one chooses to believe, Attell either used Rothstein's name to put the fix over or was acting on precise instructions from the Man Uptown. The latter seems more likely when one recalls that Attell was defended in court after absconding to Montreal by The Great Mouthpiece, Bill Fallon, Rothstein's counsel of choice during this period and the preeminent trial lawyer of the day. Regardless of which version you choose to believe, both stories seem to imply that Attell was a close associate of Rothstein.

In any event, Luciano certainly came under Rothstein's influence at some point in the early 1920s, it just seems unlikely that it was as early as depicted in Boardwalk Empire. There is also another early scene where Luciano speaks down to Frankie Yale, who has been summoned by Rothstein. While properly conveying Rothstein's influence in New York at that time, this scene seems to minimize Yale's position in the underworld in the Brooklyn/Italian underworld in order to inflate Luciano's standing.

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More recently, the issue of ever-increasing body counts has become something of a nagging issue for me. Generally, there is a tendency to describe the Roaring Twenties as a period when racketeers and bootleggers were dropping in the streets like flies. Obviously, a never-ending trail of bodies serves to further the plot and keep the viewers, myself included, aptly entertained. However, rampant bloodletting seems to have been the exception rather than the norm during the 1920s and 1930s.

Consider that during the entire era of Prohibition, the largest gangland slaying was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In that bloodletting, seven of Bugs Moran men were lined up against the wall of a North Side garage and machine-gunned to death. However, the massacre stands alone as an aberration of excessive gangland violence. In recent years, some scholars have gone so far as to attribute Capone's heavy-handed maneuver to the onset of acute syphilis - essentially, the theory being that only a madman would authorize such wanton brutality. In fairness to Capone, he approved of a plan whose aim was to catch Bugs Moran unawares - the decision to gun down seven unarmed men (none of which happened to be Moran, the intended target), was more of an on-the-spot, in-the-field decision made by his underlings on-site.

Following the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the shootout at the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey, which claimed the lives of Dutch Schultz, Bernard "Lulu" Rosenkranz, Abe Landau, and Otto "Abbadaba" Berman in 1935 was the second largest gangland killing in the United States (that was not really about bootlegging, but let's not quibble). The physicians on hand did their best to avoid the grim distinction of being second-worst gangland killing in US history, but failed in the attempt - all 4 men died within 48 hours of the shooting. If you're feeling generous and include the shooting of Martin Krompier across the river in Manhattan that same evening as part of the same plot - he was left behind by Schultz to mind the store in New York at a cool $1850 per week - then the count is actually 5 victims. As it happened, Marty lived to tell about the night the lead came at him, and the surgical team at Polyclinic received a glowing commendation from Johns Hopkins for all of the work they did to save Marty.

To hammer home the theme, there was also the Collinwood Massacre in Detroit, where three members of the Purple Gang were executed by other members of the Purple Gang . . . anyway, you get the point. Multiple homicides were isolated incidents that generally received massive headlines because they were not considered ordinary course of business, even by gangland standards. Multiple murders led to investigations and crackdowns, which are generally bad for business, illicit or otherwise.

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I like a good premeditated murder as much as the next person, but the proliferation of such events on Boardwalk Empire threatens to dull the significance of such violence. In the last episode, we saw Nucky Thompson shotgun 3 men to death in his hotel suite without batting an eye. The first five minutes alone of that episode (as well as the fatalities behind Chalky White's truck) matched the body-count of the Collinwood Massacre, which only led to the eventual dissolution of the Purple Gang's vice-like grip on the criminal underworld of Detroit in the 1930s.

Then there was the even-more maniacal Ben Siegel mayhem a few episodes earlier. In that scene, a prepubescent Siegel assassinates one waitress, one newsie, and at least two of Rosetti's gunmen - three if you count the one that Rosetti wounded in all the ruckus. That's 5 victims, which equals or rivals the Schultz killing depending on your count. And which is also pretty close to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre tally. Nevermind that the Schultz job was the work of two experienced gunmen from the Murder, Inc. stables - Emmanuel "Mendy" Weiss and Charlie "The Bug" Workman; or that The St. Valentine's Day Massacre was orchestrated by Machine Gun Jack McGurn and carried out by a crew of seasoned killers.

In contrast, the "Tabor Heights Massacre" was executed single-handedly by the teenaged Siegel. While the exact date of the events of Season Three is unclear, if we placed the time-frame around 1923-1924, then Siegel would be approximately 16 or 17 years old. Impressive? Certainly. And not exactly shocking coming from a character based on the man who once contemplated the assassination of Herman Goering and Josef Goebbels while vacationing in Italy.

The Boardwalk Empire writers may want to keep in mind that it has been alleged that Siegel disclosed his body-count in conversation with certain friends and acquaintances towards the end of his life. If those  numbers are to be believed (and there are certainly good reasons to discount Siegel's own words on the subject), then the writers have raced through roughly 1/3 of Siegel's lifetime body count before the age of 18.

How can Ben Siegel be expected to operate efficiently with less than 10 lives to take and almost 25 years left to live? It absolutely boggles the mind.

Eagerly anticipating the season finale,
An Uptown Dandy

LuxeSwap's Cavalcade of Belts

LuxeSwap is a StyleForum affiliate vendor (link here), run by member SpooPoker. Essentially a large online consignment shop, the benefit to the sellers is the high traffic that LuxeSwap generates for its items on sale via eBay and StyleForum's classified section. In addition, the site will also offer various men's clothing and accessories for sale.

The Allen from Trafalgar

Recently, a large collection of belts from makers like Trafalgar and Ike Behar went on sale. At $25 per belt, prices were significantly below retail - LuxeSwap also went so far as to point out that its prices were even below the cost to manufacture each belt. I can't confirm or deny that claim, but the main point here is that these are great looking belts at a fraction of the usual price.

The Kensington from Trafalgar

I picked up 3 Trafalgar models for myself, which arrived the day after Thanksgiving (2-3 days after purchasing online), and I couldn't be more pleased. I went with pretty basic styles (1.25 inch widths in various shades of brown, with silver or brass-colored buckles): the Allen with silver buckle in scratch grain chestnut brown Italian leather; the Kensington with silver buckle in brown hand polished cortina leather; and the Lucas with brass buckle in chestnut brown vegetable tanned cortina leather.

The Lucas from Trafalgar

There are literally hundreds of belts, primarily in size 36 (which can be cut down for smaller waists or   have loops added if you're a bit bigger). In many cases, there's only one belt per model/style, so check it out before they're all gone.

Photos: LuxeSwap

A Cut Above: Brioni

As I was leaving Chartwell Booksellers the other day with my signed copy of Churchill Style, I noticed that just down the hall from the bookstore is Brioni's New York store.

Much has already been written and re-written about the Roman house of Brioni, which was founded shortly after World War II. By the 1950's, the tailoring house's client list included Cary Grant and Clark Gable. By the 1990s, Brioni was outfitting James Bond (Pierce Brosnan and later Daniel Craig) as well as the "Dapper Don," John Gotti, who by then was already known for his collection of bespoke Brioni suits.

One can enter the store via the 52nd street entrance or the arcade of the Park Avenue Plaza Bulding. The store was very quiet when I passed by on a weekday afternoon, so take your time and peruse the  lovely four and seven fold ties, as well as the wonderful suits and sports jackets that show off the Brioni cut and Roman silhouette.

Chartwell Booksellers: The Home For All Things Churchill

Chartwell Booksellers isn't exactly a hidden gem here in New York City, but its certainly a unique little shop. Currently celebrating its 30th year, the shop bills itself as the only bookshop in the world devoted to the writings of Winston Churchill.

The proprietor of the shop, Barry Singer, is also the author of Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill. I dropped by the shop, which is only a few blocks away from my office, to pick up a signed copy. I haven't had a chance to delve too deeply into the book (although I hope to write a brief review shortly), but its worth the purchase price just to get an up close look at Churchill's monogrammed velvet slippers, made by the legendary N. Tuczek.

If you happen to be in midtown, I highly recommend visiting the shop. The atmosphere is downright cozy and offers a quiet respite from the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan, with classical music playing softly while you peruse what must be the world's foremost collection of rare, signed editions of various works by Churchill.

The Wells Fargo Stagecoach

Taking a brief detour to post something a little different as things return to normal after 9 days of nomadic living courtesy of Hurricane Sandy. In any event, I was walking in midtown a few days ago when I came across a Wells Fargo branch with a Wild West stagecoach in the lobby.

The carriage was in absolutely pristine condition, and the leather storage piece at the back looked amazing - like something out of a Swaine Adeney calatog.

Berluti: All In The Patina

Before I was unlucky enough to have power knocked out for 9 days by Hurricane Sandy, I was fortunate enough to come away with quite a thrift haul during one of my routine forays. One pair that stood out was a pair of dark Berlutis. A sleek loafer with a wingtip broguing pattern, I was particularly intrigued by Berluti's well-renowned burnishing technique - in this case, what seemed to be a dark polish over a tan calf leather.The result speaks for itself.

More Big Game Thriftin'

I've already posted pictures of my most recent thrifting finds on Style Forum, but I thought it was time I got around to throwing some pics up here at An Uptown Dandy.

It goes without saying that this was a pretty nice haul - even by An Uptown Dandy's admittedly high standards.

Pictured are Edward Green plain-toe shoes with elastic side gussets in what I believe is dark oak leather that has developed a nicely weathered patina; Berluti brogued loafers in what looks like a chestnut antique leather that was finished with a dark polish/burnish to give it that distinctly Berluti look; two pair of Alden shell cordovan loafers - one with a full-strap and the other with tassels - in the classic #8 burgundy shell cordovan color; and another pair of tassel loafers in a light brown/tan leather, made by Grenson for Paul Stuart.

The fact that all of these shoes were in my size is almost too ridiculous to believe. However, if all that weren't enough, I stumbled upon a basket full of ties and suspenders priced at $1.00. So I also came away with the creme tie with navy blue pencil-stripe tie by Polo Ralph Lauren; the pastel/rainbow stripe tie by Hermes, the navy blue tie with yellow stripe and coat of arms by Turnbull & Asser; and a pair of blue/green suspenders from Polo Ralph Lauren.

Not a bad haul for under $75.00 - Essex County continues to impress!

So get out there and keep your eyes open . . .