🚀 go-pugleaf

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zaDvE3EeeQg/Ul7nzEAY5xI/AAAAAAAAMRA/lvjmP6cwZeE/s1600/el+aristocrata+dj.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zaDvE3EeeQg/Ul7nzEAY5xI/AAAAAAAAMRA/lvjmP6cwZeE/s320/el+aristocrata+dj.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;"><u><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span></o:p></u><span style="font-family: Cambria;">In 2008, the Spanish blog <a href="http://www.elaristocrata.com/%E2%80%8E" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">El Aristocrata</a> went online and became the web’s first (and likely only) resource about Spanish tailoring. The blog’s creator, who uses the pseudonym El Artistocrata, launched it at the suggestion of friends, most of whom came to him for advice about dressing well. Five years later the blog has a considerable readership, which has led to other sartorial endeavors for its author, namely the composition of a book on dressing, <em>The Perfect Gentlemen</em>, and the formation of a gentlemen’s club here in Madrid, El Club del Aristocrata. Some time ago, ASW spoke with El Aristocrata to discuss his personal style and the state of Spanish tailoring. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">We met at a bar slightly below street level. Wainscoted and dark, it had a room adjacent to the bar divided into semi-private sections. He motioned to a couple of armchairs, and after we sat he told me that he considers his style conservative. His clothes mostly bore this out; a mid-gray worsted three-piece with subtle shaping at the chest and a slight taper at the waist, balanced lapels folding gently to a high, but not internet-high, notch. “More British than Italian,” he said. “More Cary Grant than Duke of Windsor.” Yet there was a bit of interest in the rest of his clothes, a bit of subversion and fun: a knit tie with horizontal stripes, a double-breasted vest, and a silk square from Charvet in a pink one might see at dusk. He noticed me squinting at the silk and pulled it from his pocket. It was patterned with large dots an even darker shade of pink. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“How does this go over at the office?”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“Well,” he said, a tight-lipped smile forming. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Like most men with an interest in clothes, he has two wardrobes, one for work and one for leisure. Suits for the office are almost always solid or semi-solid worsteds in hues of gray or navy, and cut with just enough contour to intimate the quality of its make. They are so plain, in fact, so simply meant to function as office garb that when he has them made his tailor, Jose Reillo, suggests the least expensive worsteds he carries. El Aristocrata’s leisure clothes, however, are cut a bit trimmer, the trousers a bit more pegged, the jackets with more shaping in the waist and a defined chest––not unlike those Sr. Reillo wears himself. He also favors non-city colors, greens and tans, and a shade of brown the Spanish call Albero (essentially the hue of Spanish dirt), and he prefers bowties, tweed, double-breasted jackets, chalk-stripe suits, and on occasion dark brown double monks. The lines between the wardrobes are not always well demarcated, though. At work and play, he likes shirts with very stiff collars and double cuffs. “I want to feel them,” he said. And he thinks nothing odd about wearing horizontally-striped shirts to his rather conservative office. He is, simply, not unlike many a modern day well-dressed man, elegant but with a few sartorial flourishes. Some call such flourishes aesthetically dissonant, if not attention-grabbing, and thus antithetical to being well-dressed, but the louder elements of El Aristocrata’s clothes seem so perfectly enveloped in sober colors and shapes that neither the throughline nor the subtext of his dress seems disharmonious or attention seeking. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Naturally, there are many things he has worn that he can’t see himself wearing again. These regrets include large geometric patterned neckties; animal prints; corrected-grain, beefroll Sebago loafers (but only with very casual clothes); and, though he still admires them, tattersall waistcoats. These admissions prompted me to ask about how his own tastes have changed, and he stated that his aesthetics have been mostly the same since he was a teenager, with the only significant change in his dress occurring when he began having his clothes made, allowing him to be both more exacting in his tastes and more exploratory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“What about your father or your grandfather? Did they have any influence over your aesthetics?”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“They wore suits every day because that was what men in their profession wore. They cared nothing about style.”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">About Spanish tailoring he was mostly laudatory and said what many (who read menswear blogs) already know, it is close to Italy in its fine handwork and to England in style; but he was also fairly candid about its failures. He believes Spanish tailoring looks best when one is standing still, in contrast to Italian tailoring which he finds is cut for movement. For emphasis, he offered an anecdote about a meeting of the aristocrat club: a well-known Spaniard who wears Italian clothing was asked why he didn’t patron Spanish tailors, at which point the man stood, removed his jacket, rolled it into a ball, sat on it, bounced, and then put it back on. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“It was perfect,” he said. “Not even a wrinkle. And this is a problem for Spanish tailoring.”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">It is a point difficult to refute, for much of Spanish tailoring is constraining, if not altogether stiff. There is, furthermore, no denying that Spanish tailoring can be a bit dowdy, more so when one looks away from Madrid and Barcelona to tailors in provincial cities. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“The key to choosing a tailor here is to find one willing to work with you to give you what you want. You can’t just choose a famous name.” </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">That is to say, the tailors here tend to be quite old and the firms they run and the patterns they cut even older. Few have kept abreast of contemporary tastes or seem aware of makers outside the country. One might even say that few have tried to improve what they do, and it is easy to understand why; what they do works and has always worked. Nonetheless, by relying on the structured Spanish style of the past they’ve sent the sons of their customers and the men attuned to the menswear resurgence looking elsewhere for clothes. Spain is a convivial place after all, where moving from one pintxos bar to another has as much to do with keeping the conversation from dissipating as it does food and drink. In terms of lifestyle, it is no great wonder that young men here prefer the unshackled tailoring of Italy. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">El Aristocrata’s own style appears headed across the Mediterranean, too, at times. In addition to Sr. Reillo, he uses Calvo De Mora and Langa, both of whose house styles are more contemporary than a typical Spanish tailor. And getting more attention on his blog of late are large lapels, light cloth, brighter hues, and trimmer cuts. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">“For me, the most elegant man in the world is Prince Charles, and the most stylish is Matteo Marzotto.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;">They are befitting choices. To look at his dress is to see the distant styles of each meet.</span></div><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Text by Anthony Eleftherion and photo courtesy of El Aristocrata</div><div class="feedflare">
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