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"  We&amp;#039;ll admit we went in with an agenda. We wanted Patrick Grant, Creative Director of Norton &amp;amp;amp; Sons on Savile Row and our pick for the World&amp;#039;s Most Stylish Man, to define how to best dress like his kind: a true British gentleman. The answer was a bit surprising. Grant explained to us over a glass of Chivas Regal, from a bottle for which he personally designed the new Made For Gentlemen Edition tin, that the world is instead a better place when we embrace the regional specificity of our clothing; when the English dress like Englishmen, Americans dress like Americans, and when the Chinese don&amp;#039;t force themselves to &amp;quot;look like Mr. Bean.&amp;quot; We obviously agree, and if that was all the wisdom Grant offered we&amp;#039;d have happily walked away better men. Thankfully Grant is Scottish, and only one glass of Chivas just won&amp;#039;t do. Here are a few more of the stories and lessons we learned from him on a fall afternoon in New York. I was a very neatly dressed young boy. Always. Even to the extent that I gave myself a haircut the day before I first went to school, because I wasn&amp;#039;t sufficiently neat and tidy enough for my liking. I was always very fastidious about the way that I dressed, and that has never changed. Kind of how I still am today. My father was well-dressed, but I don&amp;#039;t remember ever looking at him and thinking I&amp;#039;d like to follow his example. I always thought that it was normal to take all this care with clothing. It wasn&amp;#039;t that long ago that I realized I was slightly weird, and that my friends didn&amp;#039;t really give a shit about how they dressed. I had one friend who would walk ten yards behind me because he was so embarrassed by what I was wearing. People find it strange when I&amp;#039;m not in tailored clothes. But I don&amp;#039;t live in a suit. I love suits, but I also love vintage American Army pants that I get at a store here in Brooklyn. They&amp;#039;re these beautiful 1950s Army pants that are just perfect, and I love them and I wear them with a pair of massive old hiking boots. I love all clothes. What is nice about the way men are dressing now is that all those lovely little elements \u2014 ties, tie bars, cufflinks, handkerchiefs \u2014 they are different notes to play in this symphony of clothes. It all adds layers of complexity, but it takes some skill as well. It requires practice. Even knowing how to tie your tie knot that looks right is a practiced art that says something about who you are and how you like to dress. I read a long time ago that every generation shakes off the most formal part of the previous generation&amp;#039;s clothing. We saw the frock coat disappear in the 1900s, and then the morning coat disappear in the 1920s. Then the top hat and the bowler hat both eventually disappeared. Now the tie, sadly, is disappearing. You can see half the diners in this room are wearing a shirt with no tie. Glad to see that you are. Wearing a shirt and jacket with no tie just doesn&amp;#039;t look right. All of that engineering is designed to hold a tie, and without one it just looks drab. It looks unfinished. But then the pocket-handkerchiefs are having a massive revival, so it&amp;#039;s funny.   It&amp;#039;s good to have a few white shirts, a few nice pale-blue shirts, and always some really good basics that you can buy reasonably inexpensively. Find something that works, like a grey flannel suit and a navy overcoat. Don&amp;#039;t buy a lot, but buy a few really good things, and then occasionally add one great piece: one great overcoat, or an amazing pair of shoes, or a game-changing pair of pants. Buy good things and keep them and over time you have a big wardrobe full of beautiful stuff. Being a gentleman in the modern age is about protecting the craftsmanship that goes into these beautiful things, and about living in a considered way. It&amp;#039;s about being an interesting human, about being inquisitive, about understanding things and knowing about the things you&amp;#039;re surrounding yourself with in life. And it&amp;#039;s also about allowing yourself to get drunk at lunchtime and have a great afternoon. How you go about living your life is what sets you apart as a gentleman, rather than necessarily the things that you wear. I think anyone can wear these clothes. Culturally we go through cycles, and we&amp;#039;ve gone through a very dressed-down decade. But it just got a bit tired. People want newness in their lives. They want to push things forward. They want to feel like they&amp;#039;re adopting something that&amp;#039;s new from what their forbearers had done. It&amp;#039;s a natural pendulum swing from one form of dressing to another, and it will doubtless swing somewhere else in the future. The homogeneity of men&amp;#039;s clothing is stunning. If you wound the clock back two-hundred years, a Russian would be wearing something Russian, and the Chinese guy would be wearing something Chinese, and if you assembled the leaders of the time you would see the world in their clothes. Today you see an identikit navy blue suit. I&amp;#039;m more interested in the places that don&amp;#039;t wear suits than the ones that do. If you fast-forward, you get to a point where everybody in the world is wearing almost exactly the same thing. You end up with one mega-factory that makes all the textiles for the world, and one mega-factory that ends up with all the clothing, and it just gets distributed via teleporter. Everyone&amp;#039;s wearing the silver jumpsuit. It&amp;#039;s going to happen. And I think we&amp;#039;re better off celebrating the differences in clothing. I would like to see Americans dressing like American gentlemen, not Englishmen. New York&amp;#039;s adoption of all of the great men&amp;#039;s details was much stronger than in London. I think they could take some lessons from the way New Yorkers dress. There was a long time when Britain loved the American version of Englishness more than we loved our own kind. And we, like a lot of countries, have always been really obsessed with Americana and the idea of American work wear. The jean has taken over the whole world. I read a statistic that on the average day, more than half the world&amp;#039;s population wears a pair of jeans. That is your great gift to us all.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a26112/patrick-grant-made-for-gentlemen-chivas-regal/>