Some General Observations:


The British like bold shirts and neckties that match in a certain way and have a rich look.

They seem to develop their own style earlier even if that style can be incredibly conformist or totally odd.

No Brown suede in the city. The English are in many ways quite doctrinal about what they wear and where they wear it. Clothing isn’t costume or a palette to enjoy and work off of. Tailored clothing is something to wear because you have to or it is expected.

The English separate their lives into compartments. One wears something different in town vs. country. Even if the town and country are states of mind rather than actual locations. Thus owning brown shoes are the shabby little secret of more than one Englishman. For Americans to understand some of the undertows that pull at the English with regards to clothes, we have to understand that to wear a tan suit to the office in London or brown suede shoes carries the equivalent stigma of asking an American to go to his office in a tutu.

Theoretically, the English have color, fabric weight, texture, finishing, and all items of clothing neatly filed into useful segments. In some ways this limits the choices but in other ways it creates a comfortable world of selections for a given function. If you go to someone’s country house, it is tweed jacket, tattersall shirt, moleskin pants, double soled, pebble grained country calf boots in brown, wool tie and at the office it is striped suit, striped or checked  shirt and whatever woven tie you happen to grab first. It is important for the Englishman to appear not to care about his clothes. From one point of view it appears that the English identify their character and station via their clothes. In other words, clothes for the white collar worker in London are not something to wear merely for fun, they are a uniform not dissimilar to what the butcher, the baker and the paraffin engineer wear when plying their craft.

When they are in the “colonies” they will wear more flamboyant or lightly colored clothes than they would ever dream of sporting on Albion. Silk suits, tan suits, white shoes are all fair game when in Borneo.

In America it’s quite different, We are the colonies! 365 days a year.

Americans like a more serendipitous style, they match a lot more. Brown suede shoes have become a favorite. Animals on ties seem to be more favored and Italian styles whether Milanese or Neapolitan. Even if they will salivate when you say Savile Row, they seem to prefer the Italian mode.

Deep in our national imagination we tend to identify with the fast and tough talking detectives in film noir as a more masculine, ironic humored approach to clothes.

I think also Englishmen and American men have come from different evolutionary branches. The English style is derived mostly from their upper classes and the only lower class influences are the occasional mod or punk infusing a little bit of shock. The men seem to not care about matching colors or textures or patterns and just worry bout looking smart. There doesn’t seem to be any apologies about a class system there, so wearing your school tie on a wild shirt is permissible. Though it does sometimes seem like the real English shirt is more a Bengal or butcher stripe.

Also, the English walk differently, they aspire to a different life or lifestyle, which affects posture and gait and even the lilt of their voices.

In America, we took a lot from the English/Scottish upper-class and then it was mutated by a variety of influences that haven’t touched the English male. First, the concept of the popular, carefree man as personified by Fred Astaire, was taken from African American males. They couldn’t appear on screen and Astaire, who performed with them off screen, appropriated their demeanors and disseminated them throughout the country and into the male attitude. African Americans couldn’t afford lots of clothes or even the best, but they were interested in clothes as a class raising device. Their approach was to infuse, attitude and style into the ensemble. Thus, hat brim angles, and the way one walked in a suit became as important as the cut and fabrics. An American zeitgeist was born and again spread by whites in the jazz age.

Also, we underplay the amount of influence women's fashions and gay fashion has had on the American male. The female penchant for matching things is an American male concern. Matching tie to shirt, matching belt to shoes or braces to shirt, or even tie to suit! The concern with matching has its roots in that movie "American Gigolo", and the rise of designers here, many of whom were trained to design for women first. The women’s clothing market dwarfs the men’s clothing market and the male collections are often an offshoot from a given fashion house. If it is true that a lot of gay men find their way into these design houses and design for men then many of their beliefs are also stamped into the collections of what makes a man better dressed or attractive. But whether or not that can be measured, definitely the gay communities attention to fit (and fitness) for sexual enhancement has changed the American male's body and the way and the reasons he gets dressed.

Gangster movies are another definite contribution to the American Male's approach to attire. And, now the Milanese and Neapolitans are moving in and taking over, it’s like a series of civilized style invasions here in the USA while England has remained relatively untouched. And so, the American mélange creates a very different style from their British cousins.