The Sartorial Travel Guide: Where Style, Craft and Place Meet
Wildstead Library No. 002
Author: Simon Crompton
Why It’s Here
Some of the most interesting things we discover while traveling are not landmarks at all. They are the small shops, workshops and makers that could only belong to the place where we find them.
The Sartorial Travel Guide earns its place in the Wildstead Library because it approaches men’s style through that larger idea. Simon Crompton spent years traveling to meet tailors, shoemakers, clothiers and independent shopkeepers whose businesses reflect the character and traditions of their cities. The result is ostensibly a guide to finding exceptional menswear around the world, but underneath that is something more interesting: a reminder that what we wear still has a geography.
About the Book
Simon Crompton is the founder of Permanent Style, an independent publication devoted to classic menswear, craftsmanship and thoughtful analysis of clothing. His work has taken him into factories, workshops and tailoring houses around the world, and The Sartorial Travel Guide distills roughly a decade of that experience into a compact volume.
The book concentrates on ten cities—London, Paris, Florence, Naples, Milan, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Stockholm and Melbourne—along with a selection of noteworthy shops in other cities. Rather than simply compiling addresses, Crompton looks at the tailors, shoemakers, clothiers and independent retailers that help give each destination its particular sartorial character. There are maps and practical recommendations, as well as advice about packing and traveling from people who spend much of their lives doing both.
Perhaps most revealing is Crompton’s reason for creating the book in the first place. He believed that small, independent menswear shops—often run by people intimately involved with the products they sell—received too little attention compared with large brands and department stores. The Sartorial Travel Guide was, in part, an attempt to correct that imbalance.
The Wildstead Perspective
There is an enormous difference between buying something while traveling and traveling well enough to discover something worth buying.
The latter requires time. It means wandering beyond the obvious shopping district, finding the workshop that has occupied the same narrow storefront for decades, talking with someone who understands why a particular cloth hangs differently or why a pair of shoes is constructed the way it is. Even when nothing comes home in the suitcase, the encounter itself can become part of the experience of a place.
That is what makes this book particularly relevant to Wildstead Lane. Clothing becomes another way of understanding culture. Florence is not London. Naples is not Tokyo. The differences are expressed not merely through fashion, but through materials, climate, traditions, local tastes and generations of accumulated knowledge.
Global commerce has made it remarkably easy to buy the same things almost anywhere. Books like this make a persuasive case for seeking out the things that remain stubbornly connected to somewhere.
Who Will Enjoy It
We recommend The Sartorial Travel Guide to readers interested in classic menswear, independent makers, tailoring and craftsmanship, but its appeal extends beyond the particularly well-dressed traveler.
Anyone who enjoys discovering a city through its independent businesses will recognize the pleasure behind Crompton’s approach. The book is especially useful for travelers who would rather return home with one memorable object and the story of where it came from than a suitcase filled with souvenirs.
It is also the sort of guide that can change an itinerary. A shop or workshop becomes the excuse to explore a neighborhood, which leads to a café, a conversation, another street and perhaps the part of the day that wasn't planned at all.
Why It Belongs
Wildstead Lane has never been particularly interested in consumption for its own sake. We are interested in why some things deserve to be bought, used, maintained and eventually worn out.
The Sartorial Travel Guide approaches clothing from much the same direction. The independent businesses Crompton champions survive because somebody still cares about cloth, construction, fit, provenance and the accumulated knowledge behind making something well.
It also sits naturally at the intersection of two subjects central to Wildstead: craftsmanship and travel.
A good journey changes the way we see a place. Occasionally, it also changes the way we see the things we choose to bring home from it.
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