The Closet Questions: The return of V-necks, the thing with leather trousers and easy workwear
All your burning style conundrums cleared up in your February edition of The Closet Questions
Welcome to your February edition of The Closet Questions; a monthly “ask me anything” column, designed to provide you with enough sartorial insight to face the world Closet-first come March.
Keep sending your questions via Instagram (@teovandenbroeke). There were plenty of meaty ones to tackle this month, so let’s get started.
What are your thoughts on leather pants? @nyc_309
Deborah McGuire, the costume designer on hit sitcom Friends, has a lot to answer for in the leather trouser department. It was McGuire, after all, who put Ross Geller in a pair of spray-on black leather pants for Episode five of Season 11, and thus cast animal skin slacks as the butt of the sartorial joke for an entire generation of dressers. As Matthew Perry’s Chandler quips in the show, “Tom Jones [called], he wants his pants back!”
Today, designers across the fashion gamut are working hard to rehabilitate the reputation of leather trousers. At Hermes, creative director Veronique Nichanian regularly shows wide leg suede slacks in muted shades, which look more like they’re cut from cashmere than they do bovine hide.
At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy has put leather trousers, treated to look like jeans, at the core of his perennial collections (said trousers come in at just shy of £5k). Whilst at Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams showed baggy cargo pants cut from burgundy Napa, natch.
There are, of course, a certain number of brands still pedalling the skintight rockstar leather trousers immortalised in Friends - Rick Owens is one, Celine another - but the style’s popularity is dwindling (not least because it’s difficult to sell trousers designed for stadium-filling rakes to blokes who eat carbs).
Which is a roundabout way of saying, @nyc_30, that my thoughts on leather pants are: they’re great, and can look incredibly chic, so long as they’re cut properly, the quality of the leather is high and the texture is smooth and not too shiny. Indeed, when wearing your leather trousers you should think of them not as leather trousers but rather, normal trousers, and thus wear them with as much ease and relaxation as you would a beloved pair of jeans.
It’s also worth noting that cheap leather trousers are invariably bad leather trousers, so if you’re taking the plunge you need to be prepared to splash the cash (important to get that point out of the way before we reach the recommendations section, I reckon).
In my opinion. the best leather trousers for easy wear can be found at Loewe - the Madrid-based master of leather goods. Creative director Jonathan Anderson invariably cuts his loose in the leg and from fine grain, shine-free pelts.
Alternatively, head to 4S Designs, where the corded leather cargo trousers are particularly good this season, or Nanushka. The Hungarian brand’s vegan and regenerated leather trousers are the finest you’ll find.
Failing that, you could head to Bottega Veneta, because who needs a mortgage in this day and age?
Are V-neck jumpers back in fashion? If so, how do you wear one? @flimflam03
This is a difficult question for me to answer with an even hand, Flim Flam, as I’ve been fighting the scourge of V-neck sweaters, T-shirts, vests - you name it - since I started working in menswear a decade and a half ago.
It does appear, however, that V-neck garments might be enjoying a resurgence - as much as it pains me to say it. So here goes nothing.
First, Jacob Elordi popped up in Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn wearing a V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt, like every public schoolboy from the Noughties worth his Napster subscription.
Then, I found myself rewatching the 1992 banger Basic Instinct, in which Michael Douglas’s detective Nick Curran regularly wears a green V-neck sweater with naught but a chest wig beneath it and looks curiously sexy doing so.
And finally, the likes of The Row and Neil Barrett started showing V-neck sweaters worn solo beneath oversized tailored garments and the chest bearing die was inevitably, unavoidably, ineluctably cast.
So, to help you (and me) wear V-necks better as they surge back to popularity, I bought a simple taupe hued V-neck sweater from Uniqlo and attempted to style it in five unique ways.
You’ll notice that in not one of the pictures beloe do I look like Callum Best or Jude Law in a navel-grazing ultra deep V Tee.
1 | The Chocolate Suit
For my first trick, I decided to team the V-neck with tonal tailored separates - a caramel viscose golfing shirt I bought in a charity shop, and a Hackett suit I had made-to-measure a few years ago.
When I originally had the suit cut, I wanted to go for the full seventies thing - flared trousers and wide lapels etc - but I half chickened out when it came to it, so it’s not quite as flamboyant as I would like.
The tone of the V-neck worked well between the shades of the shirt and the suit (like coffee ice cream sandwiched within a Bourbon biscuit) and kept me warm without compromising on the chest-bearing essentials.
The Adidas X Wales Bonner trainers took the GLAMOUR of the look down a notch - as was my wont.
2 | The Doppio Denim
You’ll know that there’s little I enjoy more than a spot of denim on denim (on denim). Case in point, this raw Tiger of Sweden jacket teamed with a pair of almost matching Bottega Veneta trousers.
The air-tied white shirt would have perhaps felt a bit stark worn alone, so the addition of the V-neck softens proceedings without compromising the excellent ANGLES found elsewhere in the look.
The black leather Chelsea boots are from Church’s and they work well with the jeans as they’re more contemporary than lace-ups but also classic enough to look moddish, which was the vibe I was going for.
3 | The Velvet Entendre
This brown velvet suit is from Favourbrook. I was given it several years ago and I’ve clearly filled out a bit since then because it is now cut veeeery close.
I could have worn the V-neck entirely on its own, beneath the suit, but I like the addition of the knitted M&S nana cardi buttoned to the top. The pop of pink accentuates the lustre of the velvet.
I’ve teamed the suit with a pair of chocolate brown Chelsea boots from Boss which I thought I would never wear again, but well, here they are. It felt nice donning proper shoes with heels and leather soles instead of plastic platforms. It’s been a WHILE.
4 | The 90s Armani Redux
Every element of this look is from Giorgio Armani, bar the sweater. The velvet loafers I bought in Venice, the trousers I found at Bicester, the jacket is second hand from Wow Vintage in Covent Garden (£50!) and the shirt was a gift from years ago.
The tone of the jumper is slightly too warm to work with this look, but you get the idea. When a shirt is cut from a very fine cheesecloth fabric like this one is, teaming it with a middle layer can help things feel more tied together and less flappy.
A tonal waistcoat (very Armani) would have worked just as well, but I’m quite pleased with how the V-neck looks. I would probably go grey next time.
5 | The Cruel Intentions
I was fully inspired by the wardrobe of Ryan Philippe’s character Sebastian Valmont, from 90s cult classic Cruel Intentions, for this look.
The coat is vintage Canali cashmere (sourced from a little shop in Herne Hill), the white Tee is from Arket, the trousers are from an old Burberry suit and the boots are Prada. A V-neck sweater over a white tee (hello, Felix Caton) is a look I rocked A LOT at university, as I sobbed to Colour Blind by Counting Crows whilst sipping on pints of snakebite and black (I was a fresher in the same year that Saltburn is set). This combination unleashed a heavy dose of nostalgia-driven dopamine into my brain.
The trousers are perhaps a little slimmer than feels current, but they work with the roominess of the coat. Remember to always think about your waist (the flash of white tee beneath the sweater helps in that regard).
Desperate for help with smart-but-not-stiff workwear for a professional in a creative company… @henryhird
I’m of the firm belief, Henry, that it’s easier to navigate getting dressed every day if you give yourself a uniform. Personally, I love getting ready for work in the morning, as I’ve recently decided that despite working in a very casual office, I’m going to wear tailoring whenever I go in. Such sartorial guardrails help to simplify my approach, meaning that each morning I pick out a blazer and build my look around that. Simple.
My advice, therefore, would be to find one garment, brand, colour or style which you particularly love and use that as the foundation stone around which to develop your own working wardrobe.
One idea could be to head to Homme Plisse by Issey Miyake. The brand does a mean line in easy wearing garments which are cut with pleats, meaning they sit as elegantly as tailoring against the frame, but are also considerably more comfortable (the stuff is machine washable, too).
Alternatively, you could head to Batch London, which does an excellent range of simple worker suits (effectively chore jackets with matching trousers). The “suits” are cut to fit all frames and are available in a range of colours, so you can pick a different one for each day of the week as your starting point.
To surmise: give yourself some clear rules and start from a simple-yet-smart garment which you love to wear in order to make getting dressed each day considerably easier, and - I’d venture - more enjoyable, too.
How early in the year can you wear seersucker? @oliverjones.styling
The thing about seersucker, Oliver, is that it’s specifically designed to keep the body wearing it cooler. The puckered nature of the fabric encourages air flow, meaning that the surface of the skin remains ventilated even when the sun is beating down.
It might seem perverse to menswear purists, therefore, to wear the fabric sooner than entirely necessary, Oliver. But I say - go for your life.
Because although seersucker is often crafted from cotton or linen, making it more suitable for the summer months (unless you choose to wear it as a layer), there are a host of wool seersucker pieces currently available in moody wintry hues, which can be worn just as easily now as they can when the mercury begins to rise.
Would you recommend any other style-related substacks? @jazzlesb
I find Leandra Medine Cohen’s Substack The Cereal Aisle particularly inspiring. Cohen understands what it means to PLAY with the clothes we wear. She seems to have a lot of fun getting dressed, which I love. Cohen primarily writes about womenswear but the combinations she pulls together often inspire the outfits I build. Worth a subscribe.
Emilia Petrarca is a fashion writer at The Cut, and her Substack Shop Rat is great because it’s funny, observant and pretty silly. Petrarca also has great taste. It’s focused on womenswear, again, but there are very few good menswear-focused Substacks out there to choose from.
5 Things You Should Buy by Becky Malinski inspired me to start this Substack. Malinski is an erstwhile fashion editor like me. She writes to serve, which I like.
Matt Hraneck’s WM Brown Weekly is nice, as is A Continuous Lean.
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Thank you Teo for the important (leather) trousers advice (point that the key word is “trousers” here and not necessarily “leather” thoroughly noted). And for the fun text: one of the reasons I like reading you is that the text is entertaining, even if I’m not 100% sure about the fashion item under discussion. But you’re pretty persuasive…