Who dresses better: Europeans or Americans? - Page 3  

This thread is asinine, a perspective on style at SF completely relies on conjecture and subjective opinions shared amongst anonymous posters.

edit: m_wave, you are either very young, sheltered or poorly informed. That isn't your picture in that avatar is it?

Hahahaha!

I know Paris a bit too, so I have visited a few of those places and they are wonderful. England and Italy have their fair share of niches boutiques too. But if you go to New York you can easily find Brioni, Kiton etc in many department stores. High end labels are all over the place, and you cannot but help run into them without having to look for some obscure boutique. Even Filenes Basement in Boston was full of Oxxford, and Luciano Barbera on sale. From I have read on this website, NYC has more bespoke tailors than Paris too, even if you exclude the numerous visiting tailors from abroad.

My somewhat diplomatic answer is as follows: There are good and bad dressers everywhere. We can and should all learn from each other.

a case study, perhaps -

America -


France -


England -


Spain -



that's all for now.

+1

Could you possible suggest a few of the most egregious things for Yankees visiting Europe to avoid? If I ever get over there again before I go the Celestial Haberdashery I do not want to look like a rube.

Pretty sure the answer varies depending on where you live and what you're normally accustomed to. For me, from Canada, travelling Britain/France and doing some schooling in London, I would say the Europeans around downtown London were much better dressed than I was accustomed to. The Americans and I would wear polos, short sleeved button ups, etc all w/ sneakers (these were smart well-off kids attending Harvard, Yale, etc who were really nice (and very rich) and paid most of the rounds @ the clubs) and the Europeans had their blazers/sports jackets and fancy clothes and such. I didn't even know sports jacket were for casual wear until I went there and noticed people wearing them.

This debate is farcical....Americans or Europeans do not have the monopole of elegance or what we do perceived as sartorial elegance..

We do have certain cultural sensitivities but a fashionista from New-York or Boston has nothing in common from a trailer park redneck and they're both Americans...
A Parisian or a Mayfair dandy has nothing in common with a chav or other tracksuited monstruosity...

My shoes and shirt are French,my suit is Italian and i do live in England....if you see me walking in Mayfair ,you do not know that in reality i'm as English as a camembert...
People travel ,live abroad ,mix more than ever ,making this debate even more idiotic...

apples and oranges people, apples and oranges.

Asians!

+1. Very well said.

The big cities with more concentration of profesionals and hip fashionistas have more well dressed people.

In Europe, at any big city you can get all what you say Sator. and it will be worn by the profesional or quality conscious people.

But most people of other places don't care.

Here in Zürich you can see it. You go to the city centrum and you'll see a high concentration of well dressed people, they even frown at you if you come up the tramway on a track-suit.

You go to the land where farmers or simpler people live, you'll not see many suits and ties. But the people here keep some level in their way of dress. much more that you'd see in other countries in Europe and America.

There are many chavs too, people that dress like the hip-hop culture and the other trend nowadays that I call the "Mario-Bros" trend, the guys are dressed just like Mario but their caps, work-clothes, and sneakers are way expensive anyway. And the girls dressing as sexy-chavettes.

I've been in America and I can tell the people in Manhattan, and as jpierpoint signaled, the black people dress very well.

But I also have been to a "no-name" town in NJ or FL and I haven't seen many people well dressed.

From that totally subjective and incomplete point of view, I can tell that you'll see more well dressed people on a no-name town here in Europe than in America

I agree that the question as it stands is pretty much unanswerable, if not meaningless. But as an American who now lives most of the year in Europe, I can add a few observations:

I think the price/quality ratio of most things in America is still way better than in Europe. So for a given amount of money spent on clothes, Americans get better quality gear. In part because America is more unified than Europe (it is a single country, after all, with pretty much a single language), customers there benefit from economies of scale and have more access to more choices. Americans are also more accustomed to buying/selling/discussing products online, (witness forums like this, or ebay, etc.) and benefit from that, too.

On the other hand, European men's clothing seems to fit a lot better than Americans'. I don't mean the .0001% of the population that wastes our time on StyleForum, I mean the great majority of men we see on the street, at work, in the clubs, etc. American RTW from Target on up does not seem to fit well, and most of my American friends do not even seem to understand how clothes should fit, even in theory.