The Washington spring lasts about three weeks. By the second week of May the humidity has begun to lean in, and by the time Memorial Day arrives the city is in full summer – the kind of summer that makes a man look at his closet at 7am and wonder why he owns a suit at all. There is, in most wardrobes, a quiet four-month retreat into linen and seersucker that lasts from late May through September, and then a sheepish return to the worsteds in October.
It is a long stretch in which the man who wears a suit for a living becomes, briefly, someone else.
There is a cloth that closes the gap. It is wool – which is not what most clients expect to hear in May – and it is the cloth we recommend more often than any other for a Washington summer that takes itself seriously. Drago calls it Bluefeel. We have been ordering from the line for several seasons now, and it has earned a place in the shop that is hard to displace.
What Bluefeel actually is
Drago is the mill in Biella that has been making worsted cloth for more than a century – long enough that “Italian wool” as a phrase, in suiting circles, often means whatever Drago and a handful of its neighbors happen to be doing in a given year. Bluefeel is Drago’s answer to the year-round work-suit question: a Super 130s high-twist tropical weave designed to hold its line in heat without surrendering the carriage of a real worsted.
The terms are worth unpacking, because most clients have heard them and few have had them explained. Super 130s is a measure of fiber fineness – the number refers to how many hanks of yarn can be spun from a pound of fleece, and a higher number means a finer, softer fiber. A 130s is fine enough to feel beautiful in the hand and substantial enough to wear like a proper suit. High-twist refers to the yarn itself: the strands are wound tightly, almost springy, before they are woven. That twist is what gives Bluefeel its breathability and its remarkable ability to recover from creasing – a tightly wound yarn does not crush the way a soft one does.
Tropical weave is the third term, and the most often misunderstood. A tropical isn’t a special fiber. It’s a particular construction – an open, plain weave that lets air pass through the cloth instead of trapping it against the body. Hold a Bluefeel swatch up to the light and you can see the structure. Hold a winter-weight worsted up the same way and you cannot.
What it does in the wearing
The first thing a man notices in a Bluefeel suit is what is missing. There is no swampy weight at the small of the back at noon. There is no creeping clamminess through the lining at 3pm. The cloth simply moves air the way a proper summer suit should, and it does so without looking or feeling like a summer suit – without the slight droop, the slight casual register, that lighter cloths sometimes carry.
The drape is the second surprise. A high-twist wool is, by reputation, supposed to be a little dry and a little hard in the hand – the trade-off you make for the breathability. Bluefeel holds the breathability while feeling closer to a 9-ounce twill on the body. It hangs cleanly from the shoulder. The trouser breaks the way it should at the shoe. The jacket sits on the chest the way a Super 130s ought to sit, which is to say like it was made for the man and not for the rack.
It travels remarkably well. Pack a Bluefeel suit flat in a garment bag from National to a wedding in Charleston, hang it for twenty minutes in the hotel bathroom while the shower runs, and it will look pressed. Pack a 9-ounce twill the same way and you will spend the next morning hunting for an iron. Recovery is the quiet feature of Bluefeel, and it is the one that wins clients over by the second wearing.
The other thing Bluefeel does – and this matters in a city that holds events outdoors from late April through October – is hold its line in sun. The high twist creates a natural barrier against UV, which sounds like a marketing line until a man has worn the same suit through a 4pm garden party in late June and an 8pm dinner the same evening, and arrived at the dinner looking the way he looked at the garden party. Drape that does not wilt at 5pm. Recovery that does not ask the wearer to apologize for the heat.
A library, not a single cloth
The other reason we order so much Bluefeel is that it is not a single cloth. It is a line. The solids run through the navies and the charcoals and the mid-greys that anchor any working wardrobe – first-suits, the kind a man buys before he buys anything else. The chalk stripes and the Glen plaids do the second-suit work, the work of giving a man something to wear when the navy is at the cleaners or when the room calls for a slightly more interesting cloth than a solid. The windowpanes – quieter than they sound – are for the man who already has the basics covered and is looking for the third or fourth suit in the rotation.
The point is that almost any wardrobe slot can be filled inside the Bluefeel line. A client who needs one summer suit can take a navy solid and be done. A client who needs three can take a navy solid, a charcoal chalk stripe, and a mid-grey Glen plaid, and have a complete summer rotation that travels well, sits well, and looks of a piece. That is rarer in a single cloth book than it sounds, and it is one of the reasons Bluefeel earns the shelf space it does in the shop.
It is light enough for August and substantial enough to carry into early fall – one suit, worn year-round without apology.
The wear-year argument
The honest case for Bluefeel, plainly stated: it is light enough for August and substantial enough to carry well into October. A Bluefeel suit is wearable in DC for something close to seven months of the year – May through October, comfortably, with the right shirt and the right shoe – and that changes the cost-per-wearing math in a way most clients do not initially appreciate.
A winter-weight worsted in this town is honestly a five-month suit. Late November through March, with a shoulder-month allowance on either side. Bluefeel, by contrast, lives in the rotation from spring into mid-fall, and it lives there as a primary suit, not as a compromise. A client who travels – and most of our clients do – gets more wearings out of a Bluefeel commission in a calendar year than out of almost any other cloth in the book.
A note in closing
Bluefeel needs to be felt before it fully makes sense. The difference between “tropical wool” on a swatch tag and what the cloth actually does in the hand and on the body – the spring of the high twist, the closeness of the weave, the surprising substance of a Super 130s yarn – is the kind of difference that does not come through on a screen. The catalog photographs are honest as far as they go, but a man holding the swatch on the bench at the shop in Tysons makes the decision in about four seconds.
If you are putting together a summer wardrobe – or rebuilding one that has aged out – come look at the Bluefeel book. We can talk through which weights and weaves suit your calendar, what construction makes sense for the cloth, and how a single Bluefeel commission fits with what you already own. The place to start is our custom suits page, and the better place is on a Tuesday afternoon at the shop, with the swatches in front of you and a cup of coffee in your hand.
– Brett
