Oxxford Clothes: A Living Museum

I spent today in a fitting training at Oxxford Clothes in Chicago.

Founded in 1916 by Jacob and Louis Weinberg, Oxxford remains the lone true production facility making hand-cut, handmade garments for discerning gentlemen.

The company has somehow survived every upheaval in American clothing: the Golden Age of Hollywood, postwar manufacturing, corporate acquisitions, the rise of fast fashion, the decline of American tailoring, and the modern era of disposable everything.

Yet there it remains: not preserved behind velvet ropes, working to make the finest clothes in the world.

The old machines are still there: Union Special; Singer; Dürkopp; AMF-Reece; Wolf forms; Dandux canvas bins; tools, techniques and worn wooden tables passed from one generation to the next: as are the company’s stories.

Clark Gable; Cary Grant; Humphrey Bogart; Joe DiMaggio; Gary Cooper; Gregory Peck; Walt Disney; even Al Capone.

For more than a century, men who could afford almost anything chose Oxxford, not because it was trendy, not because it was loud, because it was right.

The most telling thing I heard all day came from Oxxford President Chris Brueckner.

“Perfect does not exist.”

That might sound odd coming from someone who has spent a career pursuing highest quality excellence.

Brueckner continued, “You have flat cloth on a curved body.”

Tailoring is not perfection. It is problem solving: balance, compromise, observation, craft.

The same, I suspect, can be said of a good life.

Nothing is perfect: not our clothes, not our businesses, not our homes, not our relationships. The goal is not perfection. The goal is fit.

And the best craftsmen spend their lives learning the difference.

Master Tailor Stanley Morawa and Sales Director Zach Lathram demonstrate a method for measuring an armhole.

Before I left, Sales Director Zach Lathram shared a great lesson in sales:

At the start of any fitting, he doesn’t begin by asking a customer to buy an Oxxford.

He simply says, “Do me a favor. Try one on.” Place an Oxxford Garment on anyone and watch their entire demeanor change. The soft, fluid movement of a handmade, handset garment is unlike anything anyone will have ever worn.

That’s confidence: not in a salesman; not in a pitch… in the product itself.

The garment does all the convincing necessary.

In an age obsessed with shortcuts, scale, and speed, Oxxford remains a reminder that some things still reward patience.

A handmade jacket.

A carefully cultivated relationship.

A well-lived life.

A century-old craft practiced by people who still care enough to get it right.

Not perfect.

Right.

Originally published in The All Plaidout Almanac on Substack, June 9, 2026.