DIY Emergency Cufflinks

It’s a formal event; you’ve got your shoes shining, your suit pressed, and you’re ready to wow the crowd with your dapper outfit. There’s just one problem: You forgot cuff links. What can you do?

If you’re blogger Even Roth, you dip into your office supplies, grab some binder clips, and fashion some DIY Emergency Cuff Links. Roth’s posted the entirely visual step-by-step on his blog…

Clever!

Wear a white shirt

White shirts are wonderful. They are timeless, never go out of fashion, and nothing can allow us to move from the desk to dinner so easily. With a white shirt, you can look crisp, clean and cool with trousers or jeans, no matter what the occasion.

Some texture can add some personality to our humble white shirt. I love my herringbone white shirts though self stripes or a little detailing add some style while remaining versatile.

Monogramming is another great way to make your shirt suit your personal style and reflect your tastes. You can explore beyond the cuff too – monograms go well on your chest, in the middle of your back and if you are a little adventurous can even look good on the placket between your buttons.

It’s so easy to look sharp with a white shirt, especially one that fits just right.

Have you ever noticed that you don’t need to use the top button of a business shirt?

Sure you can button it up for when you put on a tie, but you actually don’t need to do so. In fact, if you do it up and the tie is too lose, it looks terrible; and if your tie is tighter than the shirt really allows, it also looks terrible!

So I am now having all my shirts made without the top button.

An advantage of this is that I can have the button replaced with an extra set of buttonholes in a contrasting colour. This can be a subtle but stylish design feature (just note it in the “special requests” section) that is invisible when you are wearing a tie, but comes out when you want to play.

And keep your eyes open for the return of pin-collar shirts…

Here are some of our great new fabric styles and design choices:

	Egyptian cotton in light blue herringbone		Egyptian cotton in white business checks
	Italian cotton with blue stripes on white		Italian cotton with wide white herringbones

These fabrics are magnificent, and equal to the most beautiful fabrics available – now totally to your size and style from Shirts and Suits.com

You can see here a range of the different customisation options available, or just login and start creating straight away…

According to our stylish cousins at Lorenzini, the “Farfalla” or Butterfly is a small triangular piece of cloth, sewn to the finished shirt at the bottom of the body side seams, strengthening the bond between the front and back panels. If you are familiar with Thomas Pink, you might have noticed that they sometimes have these in their trademark pink fabric! Of course, with ShirtsandSuits.com, you can have your shirt made any way that you want, and not only get the great style, but also get a shirt that fits…

Wearing a starched collared shirt with jeans is like pairing a sloppy joe or hooded pull-over jacket with suit pants – it’s just not natural. Weekends call for slightly-rumpled, washed-and-worn versions with pale stripes (no bankers blue). Tuck them into chinos (or “khakis”) or dungarees and feel free to leave the top two buttons undone – you’re off duty.

There is a middle ground between a tuxedo and boardroom attire. It is the solid-coloured tie with sheen. When confronted with an evening event, put on a silk one in a warm colour with a white shirt and a shine-free suit. Regular and spread collars are the look you are after; the button behind can work too though the button down does not. The darker the tie, the more formal the look. This will give you the formality that you need without the need to resort to a tuxedo. And unless your office is the VIP table in an old-school Italian restaurant, don’t wear it to work.

This looks much better than those men trying to get away with button down collars with a tuxedo – it’s all a question of choosing where to reduce your formality.

Coming up to three weeks in Shanghai after spending three weeks in London before that, I am even more amazed at the sort of things that people get away with wearing!

While the top fashion labels correctly point out that they do business suits – and very good quality ones at that – they simply won’t fit you! Speaking with my friends at the Dormeuil store in Shanghai just last night, they can make me a suit for RMB43,000 (about AU$7,000, though less than half the price of the RMB100,000 Zegna), and I’m sure that it will be a very nice suit. But I know that our suits can match them in near every regard… and you will too.

Current fashion trends as I see them:

Suits

• Two-button single breasted suits are very much the current style, and probably will be and increasingly for the next two years. These, of course, show more of your tie and shirt front.
• Double-breasted suits are likely to be on their way back in vogue, possibly even with all three buttons working.
• Single-button single breasted suits are likely to be increasingly acceptable. They are available for the very fashionable already, though will become more mainstream in the coming months, especially the notched lapel variant. I expect that the peaked lapel will remain the domain of the very fashionable – well away from the bulk of my lawyer friends.
• Pickstitching and working buttons are becoming standard on the top quality suits; leaving the bottom button undone is particularly popular to ’show’ the world that it does work – like Zegna.
• Angled pockets are great – with or without the ticket pocket. Personally, I like it, but many don’t. Some like to tuck their flap inside their pocket – that works too, though is a little more stylish than standard at the moment.

Shirts

• French cuffs – square, rounded and bevelled – are very much in demand.
• As cuff links remain one of the few pieces of jewellery a gentleman is inclined to wear, these are becoming more desirable and popular.

The best shirts still need to be ironed or pressed correctly to look as good as you deserve. Whether you are the ironer in your household or not, you can benefit from knowing a few tricks that my mother taught me…
Hang your shirts promptly
While leaving them in the washer or dryer might be convenient at times, the longer that you leave them there, the harder they are going to be to iron, and the shorter their life expectancy will be. Remember, much of the damage to your clothes is not caused when you wear them, but when you wash them!

Hang your shirts promptly, preferably on a good quality timber hanger.

100% cotton: Humidity counts
When you are ironing a 100% cotton shirt, iron it damp from washing, or at least spray the shirt and let it sit in a plastic bag for 10 or 15 minutes. This will dissolve so much of your hard work by relaxing the fibres. The result: Less wrinkles and sharper creases.
Follow the guidelines given by your iron manufacturerSet the iron temperature to suit the fabric that you’re ironing. It sounds simple… but make sure that you still do it!

1. Collar first: Start by pressing the wrong side of the collar, then press the right or visible side both of the band and of the collar itself.
2. Upper shirt: Press around the upper portion and yoke of the shirt, moving from one side of the front, around the back to the other side of the front.
3. Sleeves: First the cuff wrong sides, then the cuff right sides, then the rest of the sleeves. Yes, this is done before the rest of the shirt.
4. Position the sleeve placket side up, with the underarm seam along one edge; smooth the sleeve to find the upper arm crease. Then, flip the sleeve over and press that side before repeating for the other arm.
5. Lower shirt: Press the remainder of the shirt, working from one side of the front around the back to the other side of the front.
6. Hang: With the shirt ironed, give it space to cool and dry completely.

A dress shirts can make or break a fine suit.

• Pointed collars tend to be more formal. Button-down or rounded collars typically look better with textured jackets.
• A double breasted suit is well complimented by a spread collar.
• Tab-behind collars are sometimes called the “Ivy League” look, from their association with such colleges in the United States. It is a distinctive look, and one that I very much enjoy. Tab-behind collars remain unusual in Australia and convey a strongly distinctive style.
• Remember to choose the right knot to go with your shirt…
• We love French cuffs. They are more formal, demand the use of cufflinks (or a silk knot) and require a little more effort to iron. But they really look good!