Massimo Alba Baglietto Jacket

A tailored jacket is usually a piece of engineering. Canvas, padding, and lining combine to impose a shape, and the wearer's body is the thing being corrected. Take that machinery out and you are left with cloth, seams, and whoever is inside it, which is a considerably harder garment to draft and a far more honest one to wear. This is that kind of jacket. Single-breasted, in a virgin wool with real softness in the hand, in a brown deep enough to be called Caffe and warm enough that it never reads as a suit orphaned from its trousers.

What it buys you is range. A structured wool blazer belongs to an occasion and announces the occasion whether you wanted it announced or not. This one goes over a knit and a pair of cords on a Tuesday and does not look like a man dressed for something. It is the jacket you keep on indoors because it is comfortable, which is not a sentence anyone says about tailoring, and it is the entire reason to own it. Brown is also the better choice here than navy. Navy would have been the safe one.

Most tailored jackets get worn four times a year and resented the rest of the time. We were looking for the opposite of that: a jacket with no occasion attached to it, which gets worn weekly because nothing about it asks for a reason. This is the one that answered it in wool.

The Baglietto is where Massimo Alba's soft tailoring is at its most conventional in outline and least conventional in construction, which makes it the easiest of his jackets to live with first.

One hundred percent virgin wool, made in Italy. Single-breasted. Colour: Caffe.

Softly constructed jackets read closer to the body than built ones, because there is less between the cloth and your shirt, so expect it to feel more like a heavy shirt with authority than like a blazer. It will take a shirt, a fine knit, or a polo underneath comfortably. A thick crewneck under it will crowd the chest. The shoulder is the part to judge in person: with little structure to disguise it, this is not a jacket to buy on a guess. Try it on if you can, and call us if you cannot.

Over the Genova shirt with the Ionio2 trousers is the considered version. Over a crewneck with denim and boots is the Santa Fe version, and it is the one we see more often. Caffe sits well against indigo, against grey, and against every one of this house's dust and stone colours.

Wool wants brushing far more than it wants cleaning. Hang it on a shaped hanger, brush it down after wearing, air it, and take it to a good cleaner only when it genuinely needs one. A lightly constructed jacket has fewer places to hide a bad pressing, so choose the cleaner carefully. Our general care guidance covers the rest.

The Bali Jacket answers the same silhouette question in cashmere, and the Florida Jacket answers it in wool, silk, and cashmere. The Ionio2 Trouser in Caffe is the trouser in the same colour, the Winch2 Trousers are the corduroy, and the Liam Sweater goes underneath. Everything we carry from Massimo Alba is listed together.