Downtown Rochester still has its nineteenth-century Main Street, well preserved, at a time when most towns of its size lost theirs. Walk it and notice what actually survived: mostly plain brick commercial buildings with regular windows and simple proportions. The elaborate things went first, everywhere, and it wasn’t a coincidence.
Why the plain ones lasted
Because a plain building can be adapted. A shop becomes a restaurant becomes an office and the building doesn’t argue. A building with a strong, specific character is wonderful until its moment passes, at which point it is expensive to keep and awkward to use.
Menswear does exactly this
The distinctive suit is the one a man loves for two years and cannot wear at all by the fifth, because it is too obviously of a moment. The plain one goes to everything indefinitely and is never quite wrong.
Which is not an argument for boring
It’s an argument for putting the interest into cloth and fit rather than into cut. A navy with a subtle texture, cut properly to the man, is far from dull at close range and completely unremarkable at a distance, which is the correct order for those two things.
Also for Rochester: 8.9 Miles of Trail, and the Jacket at the End of It. More on style consulting, or plan your visit to our Oak Park showroom.
