The little black dress of menswear

I AM not, personally, a great advocate for the capsule wardrobe. If you don’t believe me, ask my wife—she has long given up trying to get me to dispose of any items of clothing. Being asked to put together a list of 10 items without which a gentleman cannot consider himself properly dressed is, therefore, a daunting task of reduction. I suppose there is a sort of Zen-like quality about having a wardrobe of the barest of essentials, but I leave that to the Zen masters.

After much searching of what passes for my soul, I have chosen 10 items that I believe to be essential—but I could easily have added another 90.

The tweed or Saxony suit

Speaking from personal experience, the tweed suit is an indispensable garment: a day’s racing or a country weekend is unthinkable without one. Many years ago, I developed a tweed for COUNTRY LIFE—we worked with the old Hunters of Brora mill and the four-piece suit was tailored by Terry Haste, then the tailor at Hackett. The mill went out of business in 2003, coming back a few years later as Hunter’s Tweed, but