Life in Squares: Bloomsbury Group menswear style inspiration

The new BBC series Life in Squares, starting Monday 27th July, takes another look at the already microscopically examined lives of the Bloomsbury Set including Duncan Grant, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Maynard Keynes and others. With it artistic characters, gay and straight sex and bucolic Sussex landscapes, this is a topic bound to grip its audience. 

The cast of Life in Squares, BBC. Their clothes have a modern workwear feel to them.

I was struck by the mens's costumes. With a crumpled,  comfortable workwear/corduroy/vintage feel, such clothes have strongly influenced current menswear styles. Relaxed tweed suits, cotton twill, waistcoats, stout boots, luxuriant beards, occasional nudity and hats sums up the style which was clearly an artistic reaction to the starched stiffness of Victorian and Edwardian England.

So, you want to recreate Bloomsbury style? Here are a few ideas:

For suppliers see below

Suppliers from top left clockwise:

SEH Kelly strip herringbone linen jacket

Albam Montmartre blazer

Private White VC cord workwear jacket

Joseph Cheaney & Co Barnes II walnut and burgundy elastic boots

Universal Works suit pant, navy Lancashire twill

Triplstitched sky candy stripe buttondown shirt

James Norton as Duncan Grant in the BBC series Life in Squares

Cravat Club Axel cravat

Also try:

Old Town Clothing

Thomas Farthing (for tweeds)

Sir Plus Clothing (waistcoats)

Drake's for silk Paisley ties and classic knitwear

Pantherella (for British-made socks)

And of course you can scour your local charity/thrift and vintage clothing shops for that genuine early twentieth century style.

Cycle Style by Horst A Friederichs - celebrating bicycle style and culture

I've talked before about the influence of cycling in my search for style as an older man. I've thought for a while that there's a gap in the market for a book celebrating the increasing diversity of cycle styles that there are in London. Cycle Style by Horst A Friederichs (recently published by Prestel) goes some way towards this filling this gap, celebrating the richness of London's 2012 cycle culture and reflecting the huge increase in bicycle use over the last five years or so.

I love this book as a record of the diversity of cycling style. As a source of ideas for the lycra-tired cyclist it's invaluable; tweed, wool, pretty floral frocks and smart suits can all look good worn on a suitable bicycle. The variety of machines used on our streets, modern and vintage, mass-produced and custom-built, is well covered. Although the book focuses on London, similar cyclists will be found in all the World's major cities.

My one reservation about this book is that the pictures are so carefully posed. I still feel the need for a more spontaneous street-photography-style record of a great city's cyclists. A photographer could stand for two hours anywhere in central London and fill a book with a fascinating record of a burgeoning culture; extemporaneous shots of cyclists in mid-journey, their hair, clothes and bikes not quite so tidy and shiny, would be an alternative and possibly truer reflection of our cycle style. However, I have no regrets about buying the book, which I will dip into whenever I need a cycling fix.