Austin Reed: British menswear company

[Two Types]

P.S. I also like the very long collars on the casual shirts and the spearpoint collar worn with a bow tie 'for rendezvous'. This suggests a standard style shirt for more relaxed evening wear - something i would certainly prefer over the stiff shirt front, wing collar, look. I'm also rather keen on the mixing of striped shirt and striped tie - although whenever i try it, I find it a bit too much.

[Baron Kurtz]

A Touch of Class has quite a bit of colour illustration. Reed's employed/commissioned some very good artists for their larger poster ads. It can be had rather cheaply on Abebooks, or I'll give you my copy when I get back. I have no use for it really, so I'd like to move it on.

Modern Man doesn't have that many ads as it's an in-house publication, but it's interesting nonetheless.

[Two Types]

Cheers. I'll take you up on that.

[Baron Kurtz]

The cover of A Touch of Class uses this Tom Purvis (who was probably the artist for several of the ads you posted above) poster:

[Two Types]

Here are some advertisements from 1941:

Flannel trousers:


Military clothing:




Summit shirts:




Winter coats:


Summer sports shirt (in lovat, mauve, blue and grey):


and even their womens range:

[Baron Kurtz]

There's a great story about Austin Reed's concession on the Queen Mary. When the QM was stranded in New York at the beginning of WWII, Austin Reed decided to cut its losses and sold all their inventory to well known Boston discount store "Filene's Basement", who went on to sell the Sea Island Cotton shirts (I think exclusive to Reed's at the time) at 50 cents a piece or so. This was way below what Austin Reed would be selling them for!

This was quite a coup for Filene's Basement.

[herringbonekid]

three lengths of sleeve for every collar size... that's called rubbing it in !

[Two Types]

Austin Reed advertisements from 1942: