I spent a good part of a day this month feeling my own sleeve. The shirt was a beige oxford fresh out of storage, a Clark that had waited there for about a year. The cloth is stiff and dense, clearly made to be worn in. The workwear comparison makes sense as soon as you handle it. By the end of the day I’d decided it was a tiny bit lighter than my other oxfords. I checked, and it was. Fun when that happens.
Sixteen months ago I couldn’t have told you any of that. In January 2025 my wardrobe was jeans and department-store shirts (decent ones, Zegna even), chosen by size and whichever colour looked least wrong. I grew up lower middle class, where none of this existed or was discussed. My mother did drag me to museums, to art wherever she found it, and into nature, where we made things from whatever was around. The house gave me an eye for things, but no education in clothes.
My first three big failures were merino dress shirts. They felt like polyester to me, and I disliked them enough to throw all three out. It didn’t even occur to me to return them. Doh. The first year was expensive, painful, and sometimes wasteful. About forty percent of what I bought ended up donated or binned. The rest taught me fabrics, weaves, mills, buttons, collars, tucked in versus worn loose, and what feels amazing against the skin versus what feels disgusting.
Oxford cloth was the first preference I developed and still sits underneath the others. The basketweave breathes, and its texture tickles my brain. When I lie down to read in the evening, my free hand often rests on the shirt and stays there. I don’t have a tidy explanation for how soothing that is, and I no longer need one. Proper Cloth makes mine to measure. The heavy American Pima oxfords are for October through March. Cloth that heavy should feel like canvas, but the long staple makes it soft. My brain does a small does-not-compute each time I put one on. The lightweight oxfords are my favourites of everything I own. I have thirteen, from Laurel to Slate, including three different blue stripes. I know. In my defence, stripes add interest where a tie might otherwise do it, and I don’t wear ties.
Caring like this has a price. In April the laundry returned three heavy oxfords with the sleeves shrunk by two inches. The shirts looked as though they belonged to a little brother. All I could say was: “Just look at what they did to my babies.” The service reimbursed me after some insisting, but the shirts were still ruined.
Somewhere in that year I landed on Ivy, and I still can’t fully trace the route. I’m a Dutch guy who moved to England at eighteen, was in Amsterdam and Rotterdam from twenty-two to thirty, lived in San Francisco for six years, and finally settled in London. None of that speaks to Ivy. How did I get there?
The answer is partly rebellion. I’ve never been drawn to capital-F fashion, and brand labels feel like they cheapen personal expression. Being “Chanel” is not the same as being me. Ivy’s slightly intellectual character also appeals. English formality, with its hard shoulder lines, strict uniforms, thin lapels, and dusty rules, makes me want to scream. (Brogues? Hell no.) Ivy is American in its slant and practical in its focus. It gave me a way to look nice and show some identity without following the formal rules. I could make an effort to fit in without dressing as a conformist or setting out to shock people like a punk.
What I’m aiming for is a confused university professor or an artist in a studio: casual, soft, a little messy, wrinkled but never neglectful. The jackets I’ve kept suit that aim. They include Drake’s Games blazers, ISTO chore pieces, and a Private White safari coat. Each lets me wear something nice without looking suited up.
By spring the coat rack needed an audit. It had become quite English and military-inspired, with two field jackets, a safari jacket, and several chore coats. That was odd for someone who rails against English formality. Was I building a costume for a job I had no intention of performing? My answer had little to do with style theory. Tailored blazers point the eye straight at my waist, while a chore coat with some drape simply hangs well on me. I kept the direction. I knew the rack had become one wardrobe when I started turning things down. An army-green jacket on discount was an easy skip because it was more heavily military than everything else, and I already had enough green.
The last part of the education was learning why my best mornings happened. For most of this spring I got dressed by grabbing whatever I felt like. Then one combination landed so well that I stood at the mirror thinking, holy shit, this is the best combo I’ve worn yet. I couldn’t explain why it worked, and it bothered me that my best morning was an accident. So I built a fourteen-day rotation with no shirt or trouser used twice inside a week. The laundry goes out weekly, and laundry has more influence on daily life than most style writing admits. Fourteen days grew to twenty-one when I saw what was still unused, and then to twenty-eight. At that point I had enough rows to compare instead of guessing.
I know exactly how a twenty-eight-row list sounds next to an aim of casual, soft, and a little messy; for a while I worried the list was the opposite of the thing it was chasing. What settled it was the mornings before work. There are only so many minutes between the mirror and the door, and a morning that goes wrong at the mirror follows me out and hangs around the rest of the day. The rotation took most of those mornings away. I stopped having to figure it out before coffee. (The system has its own failure modes: by mid-April one rust shirt kept turning up in row after row until I was tired of the sight of it, and I benched it for a week. Overused. It’s back now.)
Colour took the longest, and the rotation finally settled it. When I rebuilt the list for summer this May, the solid light blue shirt fell to the bottom of the must-wear list and was cut. It came closest to the finance-bro office look, and the blue stripes were more interesting. Moss, slate, gold, laurel, camel, olive, burgundy, ecru, and rust stayed.
There’s a fair objection here, and I’ve made it to myself because I don’t want to be biased into being delusional: Ivy is a rulebook too. Follow trad faithfully enough and you end up dressed like an alumni photograph. So yes, I swapped one system of rules for another. But nobody handed me this one, and every rule in it has been tested against my own body, climate, work, and neighbourhood. The ones that failed went the way of the merino shirts.
One rule in the book has nothing to do with looks: I try to buy things made in the UK or Europe, because I believe strongly in minimum wage, human rights, and workplace protections, and you’re more likely to find those in garments made close to home. It doesn’t fully work. Proper Cloth is an American company with factories in Vietnam, and I haven’t found a replacement with the same service, selection, and quality at a decent enough price. So my shirts, the Clark included, remain the exception.
In May I went into the Drake’s store and tried on a black chore jacket in heavy cotton twill. It was about as plain as the category gets, soft and slightly brushed in the hand. I asked for a 46 and they had plenty, in four colours. I put it on and it fit without compromise. After sixteen months of ordering, returning, donating, and auditing, I bought a piece the way other people get to buy clothes: walk in, try it on, pay. It meant a lot. Many people learn this by growing up around clothes and hearing them discussed at home. I can’t believe how much work my version took, but I do feel as though I’ve speed-run the education.
The Clark is still stiff. It’ll take a lot of washing to soften, but it feels super hardy. I’m not worried about it.