Richard Armitage in Brunello Cucinelli: Cheap at twice the price?

I was thinking today about what to do with my New York Times subscription and was paging through idly and found this reflection on Brunello’s clothing, and its cost / value ratio. (The author, Jon Caramanca, can’t afford to buy the clothes himself, or at least not at retail, but — enraptured — he drops a lot of poetic pose that assures us they’re worth what they cost. I think I need to read more fashion writing. I thought this was a great article although I was not in the least sold on the general point.)

Caramanca writes:

You never want your clothes to speak for you. Better they should whisper.

The cut, the fit, the color, the details: They should all conspire to communicate ease and confidence. Brunello (we’re on a first-name basis, at least in my mind) is a details guy. He makes clothes that whisper for you.

Wear them, and instantly start making better decisions. You’ll telegraph confidence, not cocksureness. Old ladies will trust you when asking for a hand when crossing the street. The younger you wouldn’t have known how to wear these clothes, but at the sunrise of true manhood, and thereafter, they’ll fit perfectly.

As you know, I didn’t feel that all of Armitage’s Brunello Cucinelli fit perfectly.

Yael Farber introduces the main event at the premiere of The Crucible on Screen. Robert Delamere, Yael Farber, Richard Armitage, unknown person. December 2014, London. Source was Twitter but I don’t remember who.

 

I thought it was interesting that something I had a problem with — the way that double-breasted suit fit when Armitage put his hands in his pockets — is actually something Caramanca praises about it:

And the way the double-breasted blazers are styled — fastened at the top, with the bottom yanked behind the hand in the pocket, as if it were trying to win a race around your waist — suggests insouciance mixed with purpose. You’re an able juggler, it screams, getting things accomplished while still having fun.

I thought it looked frumpy above, but I think Hariclea liked it (although I can’t find her post at the moment). That said, I think if I look at this picture of the same outfit, I get what he’s saying:

Samantha College, Richard Armitage and Robert Delamere at the premiere of The Crucible on Screen, London, December 2014. Source: Ilaria Urbinati

I did like this Brunello Cucinelli suit better than the double breasted one, but I don’t think it makes Armitage look like a man of substance. Rather, I liked it because it had so much style although it appeared casual and sort of light on its feet:

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This jacket doesn’t look all that great below. But now it strikes me that we never got a very good picture of the whole outfit. In some of the pictures of that event, his trousers looks really good. Still, maybe I was reacting to my euphoria around that moment more than to the look of the suit itself.

Richard Armitage at the Walk of Fame ceremony for Peter Jackson, December 2014. Photo credit on photo. I tried three different ways of embedding it without any luck.

I did realize, however, that we’d seen Armitage in Brunello Cucinelli one time before. I was neutral on the photos themselves, although Guylty commented positively on them several times. The suit does look good, I think:

Richard Armitage, photographed by Blair Getz Mezibov for Esquire, December 2013. Tuxedo by Brunello Cucinelli.

One thing that photo definitely proves is something else that Jon Caramanca comes back to again and again: the price.

£217 for a bowtie? In the end, Caramanca recommends treating the store like a museum.

Now that we’ve got the benefit of some cool distance from our first impressions, what do you think? I like the tuxedo better than I did when I saw the first time, the double-breasted suit about the same, and am uncertain about the blue suit.

~ by Servetus on April 6, 2015.