went to T&A .. was the most pointless exercise ever ..with shirts all the classic designs ie everything apart from the wacky multi colour striped shirts are not in sale .. & the the wacky multicolour garbage is £95 a pop.

hope the wife is feeling better btw

Last edited by Oldfruit1 (2013-01-04 14:36:34)

^ I did a lightning fast walk round John Lewis but did not see those shirts. I was mostly looking for cheap toys after Christmas and also a Beano annual which I failed to find. WH Smith always used to have them at half price.

i like budd although they have a very limited choice in rtw and even within this a lot of the time dont have your size as they seem to only carry 1 or 2 of each size in stock ... practising japanese JIT stock management or something i presume .. get the feeling they are more interested in pursuing the mto / bespoke side of the business.

i also had a look in chester barrie (in the saville row shop and not any of the lower quality stuff they churn out for various dept stores) but the prices were far too high even in the sale .. sports jackets were selling at £850 reduced from £1000/1200 so not a great deal of discount on very expensive RTW to start with. id probably have bought a jacket and a couple of trousers if the prices were more like £500/600 for a sports jacket after reduction but since my tailor does a fully bespoke jacket with practically any cloth selection for about £1.5k it makes no sense whatsoever to me to buy RTW which fits almost how i like it with a cloth that isnt quite what i would have gone for myself in terms of weight and weave etc. the funny thing is whenever i pop in there is literally not a soul in the shop .. its a ghost town and when ive spoken to the shop assistant its like ive awoken the dead as they seem in shock that someone has actually walked in .. wonder how they manage to keep that business going or perhaps im wandering in when noone else is (Although is usually a saturday afternoon)!?

fruity

Last edited by Oldfruit1 (2013-01-04 17:36:23)

You have something similar going on here in the Hague, there's quite a few Italian "tailors" and the prices of RTW Brioni for example cost upwards of Euros 2,500+ for a jacket. Insane, but the marketing of Italian-wow-pazazz and sprezza seems to sucker them in. RTW suits in this range can be towards 3,000 grand.

I got:

- a brown herringbone jacket in Gant (after checking it over carefully to make sure there were no logos) at 1/2 price;

- a pair of cords in Cordings but only £10 off;

- two scarves at Cordings at about 40% off each.  Their scarves are remarkably cheap compared to the rest of the stuff they sell.

Cordings is well worth a visit if only to take a look at the staff which is seemingly combined of moonlighting old trouts from Ladette to Lady and young lovelies from Made in Chelsea (you get the idea even if you don't watch crap UK tv).

I asked the assistant in the Brooks basement if the shell cordovans were for sale.  They weren't.  The assistant said that they were going to discontinue them in London.  If that was supposed to encourage me to buy or lose my chance it didn't work.

I looked into the window of Budd but their ancient madder ties didn't appear to be on sale.

May take a look at T&A but generally only buy button down shirts these days.  Oh, and John Simons.

Apart from that there isn't much out there.  I had my eye on a sports jacket in the Paul Stuart online sale but it's still insanely priced at over $1k.

I think that a lot of people with money to buy high-end Italian ready to wear just don't care about that stuff.  They just want something from a prestige brand and wouldn't be seen dead in e.g. M&S.

I was flicking through a copy of Hello the other day and looking at the photos of Ronny Wood's wedding.  There he was with his groomsmen Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart and all three of them looked terrible, though doubtless their outfits had cost a fortune.  Lots of people don't care about the end result and simply don't know what sort of fit and proportions work best for them.