Sunspel

We dropped in on Merci in Paris the other day. What a great place to wander around. It’s only been open about a year, and the idea is you can shop with a good conscience. The store donates all profits to a women’s charity in Madagascar, but it’s hardly your normal charity shop. This is a place...

We’ve been working to produce a set of t-shirts for Joseph. The tees are all white and, of course, made of the finest two-fold Egyptian cotton and finished to our usual high standards. There’s a crew neck short sleeve, a v-neck short sleeve, and a crew neck long sleeve. Note how the v-neck short sleeve t-shirt has...

Jonathan Anderson is one of the most interesting young designers working out of London. His signature approach is taking classic/old-fashioned fabrics, often with a distinct air of of mustiness about them, and giving them a new lease of life. He likes adding a touch of the sinister or the urban. We watched him present his fourth...

The London restaurant chain Canteen is, as the name suggests, not a pretentious institution. It likes its food traditional and tasty. Bangers and mash, for instance. This is everyday British grub, but because they do it so damn well, it’s also exceptional cuisine. Which makes us want to cheer. We love basics done beautifully. Now the...

We have just heard that Ben Saunders, who we featured on this site recently, has had the go-ahead to make his attempt to break the North Pole Speed Record. He’s attempting to be the fastest human to reach the pole solo and unsupported. That means facing some extraordinary challenges and walking over an awful lot of ice. We’re...

How did a jeans ad become the most famous boxer ad ever? Robert Elms, style journalist, author and broadcaster, looks back at that iconic launderette moment. Before the boy in the launderette nobody wore boxers. Back in the 1980s, baggy Y-fronts and skimpy briefs, probably in inflammable manmade fibres, were the male underwear order of the...

You can’t get any simpler than a plain white t-shirt. It’s a design classic. And a Sunspel white cotton t-shirt is a classic among classics. GQ magazine understand this, which is why they picked a Sunspel plain white t-shirt for their 100 Best Things In the World Right Now. Once, the t-shirt was an undergarment. But...

When Peter Hill (great-grandson of the company’s founder) returned to the Sunspel factory recently, he brought in an old minute book. This is where the company recorded what took place in management meetings, what decisions were reached, as well as keeping copies of correspondence. It gives a fascinating flavour of the day to day goings on...

Benicio del Toro, Jude Law, Charlie Watts: these are men with authentic style, and William Gilchrist has the nerve to choose clothes for them all. He is sometimes referred to as stylist to the stars, other times celebrated in style blogs as a London dandy. The truth is William knows his clothes, whether he’s picking them...

Here’s an advance announcement. We’re going to be opening a new, permanent London store in Shoreditch in the next few weeks. (And our Christmas store in Davies Street is now closed.) The main reason we’re doing this is because people coming into our temporary Christmas store kept asking us when we’d be opening a proper shop...

Last week Peter Hill, great-grandson of the company’s founder, came back to the Sunspel factory for the first time since he sold it. Mr Hill is now 85 and a wonderful fund of stories about the company and its clothes dating all the way back to before the war. (He remembers, for example, how clothing for...

William Church is obviously a man of taste. (This is William Church of the famous Church’s shoes family, by the way.) He’s featured in the latest issue of the Japanese magazine Men’s Club Magazine (not what it sounds like) revealing what he packs in his suitcase when he’s out and about. Tucked in there with...

We’ve just recently got back from showing our autumn/winter 2010 collection at the menswear trade show Pitti Uomo in Florence. Pitti is a fashion institution and it’s where the trends for next season start emerging. For our stand we wanted to present something simple, where our clothes did the talking. We picked some Robin Day chairs...

Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law are sporting some Sunspel items in their publicity shots for the recently released Sherlock Holmes movie, and we can tell you they both look decidedly dapper. The clothes were our navy Riviera polo, plain white boxers, classic tee in navy, and fine striped t-shirt in grey. The pair are currently promoting Guy Ritchie’s...