Paige Hunter Blog

Buying clothes is easy; buying inspiration is hard. So come shop with me. Not to Blue in Green or the Real McCoy’s — we’ll get to them later — but let’s start in Midtown, at Kinokuniya, hot spot for Japanese printed matter. Down in the basement, plop down in the bustling magazine section, right by the full rack devoted to the men’s wear bibles.

These aren’t your American men’s fashion magazines, which are 50 percent celebrity-dude-hangout-ery, 30 percent style tips, 10 percent National Magazine Award baiting and 10 percent actual style. These offerings — Lightning, Popeye, Free & Easy and so many more — are loving sartorial catalogs, atlases of fashions and microfashions, sprinkled with real-guy style porn.

Take the special edition of Workwear, which features what appears to be a logger on the cover — red plaid blanket jacket, dirty reinforced jeans, a helmet half-scraped of its color. Inside: old photos of bros in henleys and fedoras on a break from some forestry work, vintage workplace manuals and Filson ads, and maybe 1,000 or so product shots. It’s an index of style at the granular level, and a playbook.

Now you have the information and are ready for a real-world assault. Start at the Real McCoy’s, which has been open for a few months on an unfriendly stretch of Greene Street in SoHo. The Real McCoy’s is a heritage brand of ostentatious quality, and the store is intimidating, austere and cocksure.

On the back wall is the denim, Sanforized and not, in a range of cuts that replicate vintage Levi’s ($285 to $436). I tried on the narrowest fit, which was still wide enough to hide ankle weights. A salesclerk said that he once drew blood trying them on, and it was by no means clear if he was joking.

These jeans are smarter than you are, designed with rough labor and nonsense-averse boots in mind, maybe even the cordovan engineer ones by Buco, which look as if they would have steadied many a soldier during the world wars. (They’d also be very effective in an episode of cop fetish play.)

The price is worth lingering on: $2,860. It’s a comical number, an amount for which you could buy a reasonable winter wardrobe, with money left over for extra Timberlands. But the goal of these boots, and the goal of most of the clothes at the Real McCoy’s, is to hide your money in plain sight, evident only to your fellow cognoscenti.

That’s why there are plain-looking luxury sweatshirts (yes, they feel beautiful) in three different weights, for the different seasons. That’s why the simple-seeming down vest is actually made of deerskin ($1,138). That’s why the vintage varsity jacket knockoff ($898) is convincing enough to dupe the occasional shopper into thinking that, yes, he went to Rockwood High School.

And then there are the military jackets, authoritative reproductions of the L2B, the MA-1, the G1 and more. Not sure which one to buy? Head back to Kinokuniya, where upstairs you can buy a book titled “American Flight Jackets: A History of U.S. Flyers’ Jackets from World War II to Desert Storm.”

If the Real McCoy’s is the M.I.T. of Japanese clothing, preoccupied with technical details, then its next-door neighbor Blue in Green (the two share an owner) is the Hampshire College, trying out any number of odd paths without sacrificing quality.

Before it was spun off, the Real McCoy’s was always among the more stoic brands at Blue in Green, which offers several meticulous and highly desirable labels, Japanese and otherwise. It, too, has a wall of denim, but in cuts far more varied than those at the Real McCoy’s — try the ones by Somét, which have give at the waist but taper cleanly near the calf for a natural sag and peak footwear flexibility.

There’s less of an emphasis on simulacra here, and more on modifying the classics, be it the high-end proletariat work jackets by Brown’s Beach ($545) or the organic cotton sweatshirts by Loop & Weft ($225) or the indigo rope-dyed crew-neck sweater by Eternal ($289), which was too elegant not to buy.

Blue in Green also carries a wide range of Kapital, a brand made by the world’s most detail-oriented, least carefree hippies. If everyone in the world had to live in Berkeley, this would be the clothing of the elite. One denim shirt had colorful embroidered cats, and there was a phenomenally formless coat made of melton wool that was able to be worn at least four different ways ($1,120), at least during the five minutes I indulged in wearing it around the store.

And then there was Low Hurtz, the Blue in Green store brand, and a test of will. I stumbled upon, and stammered over, a jacket made of leather so thin it seemed as if it might be tissue ($1,635). I would start a Kickstarter for this jacket. I slipped it on, almost as a dare to myself, and suddenly I was a guy in a Free & Easy photo spread. Everything else I was wearing felt different than it had before. My shoulders straightened. I couldn’t be sure, but my hair seemed to be gelling automatically. I had studied hard, and passed with flying colors.