I follow a lot of menswear stuff on Instagram, and thanks to a relatively reliable algorithm, I tend to get fed just what I want. Point being, a few days ago I was scrolling through my feed and came across perhaps the coolest looking suit I’ve seen: the trousers dangled on the edge of being considered bellbottoms; pin-striped jackets with audaciously wide lapels, yet remaining accessible even to the modern-man-who-isn’t-Mick-Jagger; and a slew of colour combinations that felt daring yet aggressively familiar, all at the same time.
Enter Husbands, or, Husbands – Paris. Their founder, Nicolas Gabard, looks like the kind of guy who speaks eleven languages, owns signed copies of Sartre’s early work, yet also admits to enjoying Die Hard. And despite having the privilege of youth, I would feel really insecure standing next to him at a club.
Their made to order pieces featured on their Instagram account look as if a Saville Row tailor had been abducted by a spaceship that only had Roxy Music’s album For Your Pleasure booming on repeat, with the 1967 classic, Le Samourai, playing on a constant loop with the sound off. If said tailor was then given a cigarette and a croissant and dropped back in Paris, for my estimation, you would get Husbands.
The universal male uniform, aka the suit, has seen many a rendition over its centuries old lifetime, but few brands have managed to put such a provocative yet elegant twist on something so ubiquitous.
The late painter, Francis Bacon once said, “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence – a re-concentration… tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.
” Husbands have done just that – reinvented something that we know as fact.
Their lone flagship store is, predictably, in Paris, and one can only assume it breathes life into what their Instagram account manages to convey in the palm of one’s hand.
