Weekly "Shopping" Trip

Today, after a pretty intense Menswear Club exec board meeting, I went out to a J. Crew sample sale with my friend Chris.  Here’s what a sample sale is…

Every season, fashion labels have tests of the clothing they’re considering manufacturing made and sent back to check out how the finished garment looks, fits and feels before, or if at all, giving the go ahead to make 1,000s of them.  It was held on the third floor of some anonymous building in Midtown and was pretty busy.  I don’t like J. Crew stuff usually for myself but there was a basic sweater or two that I would have considered getting (cashmere for $60) if I were looking to buy something.  But… I wasn’t.  I did find a cough syrup purple men’s coat that was interesting.

After that, I headed to 5^th Ave and descended into Thomas Pink.  The best thing there, in my opinion, was this velvet blazer they had I basically fell in love with.  It fit extremely well for my body type and had small detailings that exploded off the jacket against the rich black velvet like a pink running stitch along the top shoulder lines, a pink and gold satin lining and a pink collar stand hidden under the lapel.  I took some measurements on a few parts of it and noted them for the future.

Next, I went to Just Cavalli.  They had some nice stuff there.  Yes, there were extremely flamboyant pieces on the floor, but since the overall line was so uninhibited, the most conservative of the things still had enough originality and playfulness to look amazing.

Also, they had a bubble jacket there that was almost identical to a jacket I got from Gazzarrini earlier in the year.  As they’re both Italian labels, I’m not sure who knocked off whom.  My guess though is that Roberto Cavalli was not the originator as the Gazzarrini jacket was from last year and the Cavalli jacket is on the shelves now at full retail.  Nice jacket either way though…

Next up was Salvatore Ferragamo.  Wow…  so now I’ve seen a pair of $8,000 crocodile shoes first hand.  A lot of great stuff there but my favorite was a tuxedo shirt that had about 100 ¼” horizontal pleats on the front.  The cool part of it was actually a detail I chose in my final shirt for my Patternmaking class, which is pleats are sewn the opposite direction and allowed to fall back in place.  Kinda hard to explain:

Mine are vertical, on the sleeve, ½”, and go back and forth to make a wave pattern but regardless, I thought I was so original!  Ha, oh well.

After that, I bounced over to Versace.  I didn’t like much there.  I tried on a pair of $700 jeans (gulp!) I thought would look great and I wasn’t really that impressed at all.  I like flash every now and then but I a lot of things they had weren’t really for me.

I decided to look at some of the watches on my way out.  I DID find a sweet watch I liked.  Just for kicks, I wanted to see this white ceramic diamond and ruby women's watch that was mesmerizing.  The salesman took it out of a special vacuum sealed case and, as I was ogling it, a couple came up behind me and started looking at it too.  Well, I came to see that the women had the exact same $22,000 watch on and liked it with the ruby accents, which they just got 3 weeks ago.  Uhh...  Moving on…

I decided to go through a label that I had never heard of, Blanc de Chine.  ALL of the men’s stuff had had mandarin collars.  No exceptions.  I don’t like mandarin collars but I did find a jacket that was really clean and simple and resembled a baseball jacket in my mind.  The company seemed like it had a really peaceful, balanced and uncluttered collection.

Lastly, I stopped by Diesel on my way to the subway.  I tried on some stuff that I thought would look nice but it looked better on the hanger than on ME.  Meh.

Then I put on my own clothes and was like, “Damn, that looks good!” haha :p

And that’s how I spent my afternoon!