Bashed-about wool-cashmere blazer

Had a hard life, the birdseye wool-cashmere of the three-button blazer. Before it’s left the mill, it’s been scrubbed, scoured, and, in the mill’s own words, “bashed about a bit.” But it’s character-building, this upbringing, and it’s all very much part of the finished article’s charm.

Tough treatment, then — the above-mentioned scouring and milling to loosen fibres, plus a going-over on the teasel-gig — makes for a cloth both warm and stupefyingly skin-friendly. These qualities are also down to the top-quality cashmere yarn, which is interwoven with one black and three grey yarns to create the distinctive birdseye pattern.

Such is the quality of the birdseye, you could fashion from it a garment of binbag-esque sloppiness and get away with it. But that wouldn’t do. The blazer is based on the horizontal cord blazer released in February. Though well received, blazers being blazers — their exactitudes a most recurrent of menswear concerns — months have been spent at the drawing-board, and the outcome a blazer with all-round better balance: hanging more naturally, dragging less at the arms, and dropping more smoothly on the shoulder.

The finished garment is, as blazers go, a fairly relaxed affair. Unstructured, loose-fitting, and with distinctly dropped, near workwear jacket-like shoulders, the blazer provides more ease of movement and better layering potential than that of yer bog-standard blazer.

The lapel, which conceals a button on one side for an under-collar fastening, has a narrow fishmouth shape, and both lapel and collar have slightly rounded tips. Other small but important-to-note details include: the sleeves, which are self-faced at the ends so they can be rolled up a couple of times without showing any lining; internal seam-binding, which keep the inside of the garment looking clean and tidy; and the real horn buttons, which are dark tortoiseshell in colour and Middle England in provenance.

As with every other cut-and-sewn garment released since spring, the blazer has been made and finished in North London, and is available now in short supply in the shop.