Custom Shirt Review from Custom Suit Shop

This year I received my first custom dress shirts from Custom Suit Shop. Here's my assessment of the resulting shirts.

I was measured for made to measure shirts, and received the 4 shirts about 2 months later. I selected 2 solid colors with french cuffs, and two button downs with stripes. The photo is a detail close up of the cuffs for the striped button down and the blue herringbone shirt.

I was impressed with the huge variety of textures and designs for the cotton fabrics. Some of the available design patterns are clearly different from anything you would see in a ready to wear shirt at a department store. This is good if you want to look different, even in a subtle way, such as a blue shirt with a herringbone pattern in the cotton weave. Plus there are all the standard colors in solids, stripes and checks.

Wearing the finished shirts is very comfortable. I feel they look much better because the fit of the shirt follows the contours of your body exactly. This is not a tight fit, instead the shirt fits your dimensions in a very comfortable way, because of the large number of measurements that are taken to accommodate your own unique body shape.

The fit and workmanship are top notch. I carefully inspected the inside seams of the shirts for defects or problems, finding none.

The cotton feels softer and slightly thicker than the fabric of my $60 ready to wear dress shirts. The buttons appear to be made from a material like mother of pearl. At twice the price of off the rack dress shirts, I feel the custom made shirts are a good value. An Atlanta Realtor friend tells me that he's still wearing the first custom shirts he bought 8 years ago from the same maker. Now that's durability.

Remembering Jack - Book review

Remembering Jack is an intimate pictorial of President John F Kennedy, by the superb photo journalist, Jacques Lowe. Forty-odd years after JFK's death, Jacques Lowe's lively portraits show the character and charm of Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy from 1960 to 1963.

Aside from the historical value of the portraits, the most striking point is how well dressed the common man of the 1960's appears. The photo above is a detail from Jack Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1960. Photographer Lowe has captured a warm moment of Americana, just as well as Norman Rockwell might. Lowe snaps the shutter just as a local voter adopts Jack Kennedy as his own candidate.

This photo also reveals that a broad range of American men still wore suits and ties in public. Despite the narrow ties and lapels there is a certain dignity to the men in the crowd, to the candidate and to the press photographers.

This book is worthy of the time spent perusing Jacques Lowes' brilliant and revealing photos. The incredibly stylish Jackie Kennedy and her children are treated with great warmth by the photographer. The photo story of JFK's presidency ends with Kennedy's funeral. The final photos depict formal clothes adopted for the farewell to a charismatic leader, in somber grays. Among the sea of world leaders and military men a single face etched with sorrow jumps out at your eye. Jacques Lowe's brilliant work reveals a recently lost world that we thought we knew, and brings the vanished characters back to life as fallible flesh and blood.