Inspiration

Permanent Style is one of the biggest classic-menswear sites in the world, read by over two million people a year for its independent take on tailoring, shoes, and the value chain behind luxury clothing.

Founder Simon Crompton is a professional journalist and editor who built the site on unusual access - over a decade spent visiting bespoke makers and factories and interviewing the craftsmen and designers behind them.

GQ, Esquire, The Times, How to Spend It, and The New York Times have all named it among the best men's sites going.

Derek Guy writes Die, Workwear! and is better known online as 'the menswear guy' - the X account that Twitter's algorithm inexplicably started pushing into everyone's feed in early 2023, turning a niche tailoring nerd into a viral main character.

He's one of the sharpest voices going on the history, logic, and craft behind clothing, and his threads are as insightful as they are cheeky. Do not approach him if you have a collar gap.

Derek Guy's profile picture is Elliot Richardson, the Nixon-era Attorney General - whom Guy calls 'one of the best-dressed men in American politics, ever.'

Michael Kristy's YouTube channel, The Iron Snail, is a deep dive into the history and construction of clothing - the kind of video that reviews a garment by explaining how and why it's actually made.

That obsession pushed him to start his own line, also called The Iron Snail: US-made outerwear, bottoms, and accessories, cut and sewn not far from the Massachusetts textile country he grew up in.

His videos are as informative as they are genuinely useful before you buy.

Fineas Jackson makes short, sharp videos - Shorts, TikTok, Reels - each one built around a single fact about clothing or craft you probably didn't know, from denim pricing to why a garment is built the way it is.

He's recently moved from just talking about clothes to making them, launching his own fashion venture, West End Rd. Bite-sized, but never shallow.

The Armoury was founded in Hong Kong in 2010 by Mark Cho and Alan See, out of their shared enthusiasm for classic tailoring and a wish to spotlight the artisans behind it rather than the advertising around it.

What began as one Hong Kong shop has grown into a small international house with locations in Hong Kong and New York, stocking made-to-measure and ready tailoring alongside its own house lines and work from makers like Ring Jacket and Ascot Chang.

Cho is also a co-owner of the British tailoring house Drake's, and writes and speaks widely on the craft - from essays on Hong Kong's tailoring history to interviews for outlets like Monocle and GQ - making The Armoury as much a place to learn menswear as to shop it.