I really like the look Mark is projecting in those photos. Until you reach ground level and see the selvedge jeans with giant turnups worn with loafers, looks so contrived and slightly hipster. Not good.

I agree as well. although I often wear selvedge jeans with a turnup, the turnup is more modest and I am usually wearing desert boots. Mark mentions his love of the desert boot and I wonder if he normally has desert boots on with those jeans?

Yeah. Another vote against those jeans. They look like the kind of thing I would have worn during my mercifully short lived double denim, boots and newsboy hat period.

Like Robbie, I’m a big fan of the smaller turn up with db’s (or loafers and CVO’s).

I love what he says about choosing clothes according to your body shape. This is a detail that’s so often overlooked in the in the clamour to emulate.

And that olive jacket? I know navy is the accepted industry standard. And khaki works nearly as well. But those photos really state the case for olive don’t they?

The cuffed jeans look is overdone.  I still do it myself, more often than I should, sometimes with loafers, more often with desert boots.  But it's a default look, used when I just want to get out of the house in a hurry in order to do something mundane.
I also still like the L.L.Bean denim with one and five eighths stitched turn-up with dirty bucks.  Looks best with a polo shirt or crew neck sweater.  Pretty relaxed, pretty pared down.  Less is still more.

The jeans draw attention downwards and not in a good way.

High water trahseez need a narrow cut not a wide flapping one. I will not comment on turn ups as I understand denim freaks require them to demonstrate selvage bona fides.

Take out the button down and the loafers( shirts and shoes again) and it has moved on from a sharper late 60s look.

However, this is what the chore coat brigade are after.

The Dick Emery ‘skinhead’ character had high water jeans with a big turnup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNvrthMfmng

To be perfectly candid, I put on a pair of USA-made dark Levis earlier this year, adjusted the hems, formed the cuffs, then wore them out with cordovan wingtips and a Dhobi Maincoat.  I probably looked like an old pikey.  It was not a look that was ventured on again.

I was with Mark on that first trip to J.Simons in 1986 and experienced the same epiphany as him. We have been on the same journey ever since. John Simons has never been purely about Ivy League, and the clothes sold and worn by its customers have embraced many items of workwear, and more formal British tailoring as well on occasion. John was importing Carhartt before anyone else, sold American work boots including Red Wing, some of his best sellers were leathers from Golden Bear and Willis & Geiger. So there was a kind of J.Simons look which incorporated elements from beyond strict 3-button Ivy. The cool guys always mixed it up and as John himself said "we don't want to look like little Americans". I used to wear Walkover buckle boots with my red tag twisted seam big E Levis, with an Ivy tweed jacket by Linett and a plaid Sero Purist shirt. So Mark's jeans are part of that. Great denim is definitely part of the JS Look. That prissy ex-mod thing with a mean little turn-up, such a pinched narrow, inexpressive look, is definitely square and out.

'The cool guys'.  Very self-defined.

And in fact I'd say this highlights one of the big problems with people who follow a code, a look, a prescribed set of rules, all of which of course many men like and need in order to feel they are 'fitting in' and safe in their decision making. Such men rarely seem able to look themselves in the mirror and assess - do these clothes/this hairstyle/this beard/these shoes make me look as attractive as I can be? In an absence of the ability to make such an assessment they return to the code, for there safety lies.

Kleman are Poorman's Paraboots. If you're going clumpy French you may as well do it properly. Like choosing Freeman Hardy & Willis brogues when you have the option to get hold of a pair of Florsheim Imperials.

I've never aspired to be cool.  I told Frosty so.  Frosty said, 'How cool is that?'  I didn't take him at all seriously.

Jazz aside, I despise the very notion.