# Speed-running taste

Author: Chris Chabot
Canonical URL: https://chabot.dev/writings/the-apprenticeship-of-taste/
Published: 2026-05-25
Updated: 2026-11-03

My mother's museums and CoBrA gave me an eye and no wardrobe, so I learned cloth on purpose: three shrunk shirts, Ivy as rebellion, and a rule about who makes my clothes that my favourite shirts break.

When the laundry came back one April, three of my heavy oxford shirts had shrunk: an Atlantic blue, a blue stripe and the one I call the fun stripe, three colours of stripe on ecru. The sleeves stopped two or three inches too soon and 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 in the end, after some insisting, but there's no getting two inches of sleeve back. They were so lovely, and I miss them a lot.

Fifteen months earlier none of that would have made sense to me. In January 2025 my wardrobe was jeans and department-store shirts, decent ones, Zegna even, chosen the way you choose anything in a department store: by size, and by whichever colour looked least wrong. People who dress well have mostly picked it up growing up, through osmosis and example, in houses where this stuff is simply around and gets talked about, and by the time anyone notices, what they absorbed gets called taste. Where I grew up, nobody talked about mills or weaves. So when I started paying real attention to cloth that January I went after the same education on purpose. I can't believe how much it took, but I feel like I've speed-run it, and it was probably worth it for how differently I can present myself now.

What I did have was an eye, and I know exactly where that came from. All through my teenage years my mother dragged me to museums and exhibitions and out to the art standing around Rotterdam, and when I was younger she had taken me into nature to make things from whatever we found there.

It was CoBrA that got furthest into me, Karel Appel above all. They were painters and poets from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam who [came out of the war wanting no more instruction from anybody](https://www.kunstmuseum.nl/en/collections/cobra) about composition or beauty, and who went to children's drawings and folk art for what they needed instead. When they filled the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 1949 [a critic called it smirch, twaddle and mess](https://stichtingconstant.nl/constant/periods/cobra-1948-1951), and the public's usual remark was that their children could do the same, only better, which I can only take as a recommendation. That rebellious, colourful, expressive streak is what I identified with, and I've never stopped. [Those painters and that city](/writings/colour-after-the-fire/) have an essay of their own.

What matters here is that I can't tell you when any of it happened. There is no room I could go back to and no afternoon on which I learned something. It went in through years of exposure, while as far as I was concerned I was being dragged round a museum. So there was an eye in the house, just no wardrobe to go with it.

That turned out to be a peculiar place to start, because a museum trains only one of the senses you need. Nobody lets you handle the paintings, and a painting asks to be looked at only for as long as you choose to stand in front of it, where a shirt sits against your skin all day. My first three big failures were merino dress shirts. They looked exactly as they should and felt like polyester to me, a reaction so strong that I threw all three out. It didn't even occur to me to return them. Doh.

That was the pattern of the first year: expensive at times, painful at others, wasteful sometimes. About forty per cent of what I bought ended up donated or binned, and the other sixty per cent 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 that became unmistakably mine, and it sits underneath all the others. The basketweave breathes and holds some structure, and the texture of it tickles my brain. When I lie down to read in the evening, my free hand ends up resting on the shirt and just stays there. I don't have a tidy explanation for how soothing that is, and I've stopped needing one.

Proper Cloth makes mine to measure. The heavy American Pima oxfords are my October-to-March shirts, and they do a thing my brain refuses to process: something that heavy is supposed to feel like canvas, the long staple makes it soft instead, and every time I put one on there's a small moment of does-not-compute. The lightweight oxfords are my favourites of everything I own, thirteen of them, left to right: Laurel, Sun, Blue, Light blue, Wide light blue stripe, Light blue stripe, Blue stripe, Moss, Pink, Yellow stripe, Off white, Red stripe, Slate. Yes, that's three different blue stripes. I know. In my defence, stripes add interest where a tie might otherwise add it.

By the second spring my hands were ahead of me. A new blue stripe arrived and I knew before I'd finished unbuttoning it: the hand feel a little less rough, a little less weighty. It's not a bad shirt, mind you, it's fine. But it's not as nice. I spent an evening searching, online, social, business reports, anything, trying to find out whether the supplier had changed for this cloth, and I know how that sounds. Maybe nothing changed at the mill at all, since cotton is a crop, bolts vary and the older shirts may simply have come from a good year. I caught myself thinking “I wish the old stuff was still available, ugh” anyway.

A few weeks later I finally wore a beige Clark oxford that had sat in storage for about a year, stiff and dense and clearly made to be worn in. I spent a good part of the day feeling my own sleeve and decided it was a tiny bit lighter than my Pima oxfords. So I checked, and it's lighter. Fun when that checks out.

All of which left the question of what I wanted to look like. Somewhere in that first year I landed on Ivy, and I can't fully trace the route, although a pair of loafers later showed me [one much older root, in my years as a Sea Scout](/writings/the-boat-the-night-and-the-return/). 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, and none of that speaks to Ivy. How did I get there?

The honest answer is rebellion. I've never been drawn to capital-F fashion, and brand labels feel to me like they cheapen the expression. Being Chanel is not being me. English formality, the hard shoulder lines, the strict uniforms, the thin lapels, all those dusty rules, makes me want to scream and rail against the forced order pressing down on you. Brogues? Hell no.

Ivy, American in its slant, practical in its focus and slightly intellectual in its angle, felt like a way to look nice and have an identity and still make it my own, to show I'm not interested in the formal rules while making an effort to fit in with the group: not shockingly different like punk, but not conformist either. The figure I had in mind was a confused university professor or an artist in a studio, casual, soft, a little messy, wrinkled but never neglectful. The jackets followed, the Drake's Games blazers, the ISTO chore pieces, the Private White safari coat, things that let me wear something nice without looking suited up.

I'd be careful about tying any of this too tightly to the museums. A man in a soft blazer threatens nobody, and the people who walked out of a conference in Paris to found CoBrA would not have been impressed by someone with views on button-down collars. Still, one of the two people I wanted to dress like was an artist in a studio, and rebellion is the word I end up using for CoBrA and for Ivy alike.

There's a fair objection, 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.

The coat rack got the same audit when it turned out to have gone quite English and military-inspired, with two field jackets, a safari jacket whose colonial history needs some tact and chore coats stacked on top. Was I building a costume, dressing for a job I had no intention of performing? My honest answer had nothing to do with style theory. Tailored blazers point the eye straight at my waist, and a chore coat with some drape simply hangs well on me, so I kept the direction.

The eye, meanwhile, went on behaving the way the museums had left it, with great confidence and no reasons. Until the second spring I got dressed by almost randomly grabbing whatever I felt like, and then one morning a combination landed so well that I stood at the mirror thinking, *holy shit, this is the best combo I've worn yet*, with a question right behind it that I couldn't answer: what is it that makes this work so well? It bothered me that my best morning was an accident, so I built a rotation: fourteen days of outfits, no shirt or trouser used twice inside a week, because the laundry goes out weekly and laundry is a stronger force in daily life than most style writing admits. Fourteen grew to twenty-one and then twenty-eight, which is about the point where a hobby starts to look like evidence. I know exactly how a twenty-eight-row list sounds next to an ambition of casual, soft and a little messy. What settled it was the mornings before work, because 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 list was never in charge, and I'm glad of it. When it was two days old it sent me, on a Saturday at ten degrees, into a rust and slate cotton-linen shirt, a burgundy knit tie and the Marylebone, a Private White Harris Tweed with [flecks of the five paints L.S. Lowry used](https://www.privatewhitevc.com/products/the-harris-tweed-marylebone-ink) spun through the wool. On paper it made sense. In the mirror the collar had no buttons and wasn't big enough to hold a tie, so the burgundy knit had nowhere to go, and over all that rustic warmth the tweed went heavy and loud. I'm trying the outfit for today, I thought, and I don't feel Bonita, by which I mean not good and not myself. I can't blame the jacket. I swapped to the camel blazer and went out into the cold.

By then I could tell what had changed mostly from what I no longer wanted. An army-green jacket on discount was an easy skip, more heavily military than everything else, and green was already covered. Colour took the longest. When I rebuilt the rotation for summer that May, the light blue solid fell to the bottom of my must-wears and got cut, because it sat closest to the finance-bro office look and the blue stripes are simply more interesting. What stayed was moss, slate, gold, laurel, camel, olive, burgundy, ecru and rust.

I never set out to build a palette, and nobody is going to mistake me for an Appel, even on the mornings when Sun, Pink or a Red stripe comes off the rail. But the eye that did the trimming came from somewhere, and I know who dragged it there.

There's one thing neither the eye nor the hand can tell me about a shirt, which is who made it and on what terms. I believe strongly in minimum wage, human rights and workplace protections, and I try to buy things made in the UK or Europe because you're more likely to find those in garments made close to home. It's a shorthand and it doesn't fully work. Where several countries are involved, [the country of origin is wherever the last substantial manufacturing happened](https://www.business.gov.uk/export-from-uk/support-topics/customs-taxes-and-declarations/understanding-rules-of-origin/), and a European label says very little about every factory behind it.

My own shirts break the rule outright. Proper Cloth is an American company whose shirts are made in Vietnam, and I haven't found a replacement with the same service, selection and quality at a decent enough price, so the things I love most, the babies included, remain the exception. Buying from Europe has meanwhile got harder for reasons of its own. I'd happily buy more from de Bonne Facture, whose scratchy tweed in green and brown hangs on my rack under the name of the geography teacher, but Brexit got there first, and the last coat I looked at came out so expensive once import duties were done that it would probably be cheaper to go to Paris and pick things up in person.

A year into all this I went looking for a chore coat, bracing myself first, because my sizes are thin on the ground in this corner of menswear and a browse through it is mostly disappointments. I got the disappointments: the right coat in the wrong cloth, cuts so tailored that nothing hung well on me, links that went nowhere. One brand sold exactly what I was after, but every shop it had ever listed came up as permanently closed, which looked wrong to me. Everything I could find reading around insisted it was legitimate, so I let the research overrule my instinct and ordered. The corduroy arrived flat, the trousers made a sound when I walked, as if they'd been cut from plastic, and I couldn't bring myself to wear any of it.

In May, sixteen months after the department-store shirts, I went into the Drake's store and tried on a black chore jacket in heavy cotton twill, about as plain as the category gets, soft and slightly brushed in the hand. They had plenty in my size, in four colours. I put it on and it fit, no compromise anywhere, and nobody had to tell me so. It was the first piece in that whole search bought the way other people get to buy clothes: walk in, try it on, pay. It meant a lot.

The Clark is still stiff. It'll take a lot of washing to soften up, but it feels super hardy, and I'm not worried about it.