For nearly two years, Jake Grantham, the manager of the Armoury, an elegant clothing shop in TriBeCa, has been introducing, or reintroducing, classical tailoring to a range of men looking for something that is at once new and old.
“A lot of guys are asking for high-waisted trousers,” said Mr. Grantham (shown outside his store). “The zeitgeist is catching up to what we’re doing.”
The Armoury’s founders (Mark Cho, Alan See and Ethan Newton) established the shop’s first outpost in Hong Kong in 2010. The TriBeCa location opened in December 2013. “We’re not chasing a skinny tie this season and a blue suede shoe the next,” Mr. Grantham said. “What we do is perennial.” JOHN ORTVED
Your inventory is not like anyone else’s. The jewel in the crown, in terms of what we offer, is Antonio Liverano. He’s a guy in his late 70s, one of the last practitioners of the Florentine style. It’s still soft, which you expect Italian tailoring to be, but there’s a rustic quality.
You do a private label, too, your own Armoury brand. We’ve done some interesting sweaters, in Scotland. This is genuine camel hair, which people associate with an old, fusty material. For us, it’s classic. What we’ve done is slim the proportion just slightly, and we’ve shortened up the length. We like to wear our trousers a little higher.
Your trousers are up around your navel. What gives? The navel is about right. The classic, in terms of wearing a suit jacket, your buttoning point should rest just about on the trouser.
Everywhere else you shop these days, you see ties that are quite narrow, two or two and a half inches at their widest point. Yours are considerably wider. They’re all eight centimeters, or 8.5. We rely on classic proportions. We wear a more generous lapel — nothing outlandish — but what we determine to be the correct width, and with that width you’d want to have the correct shape of collar and width of tie. It’s not enormously wide. It’s relevant.