Massimo Alba Gstaad Jacket

The stand collar on this jacket has a name in Alba's own vocabulary. He calls it a guru collar: a narrow band that rises straight from the neck and stops, with no lapel, no notch, and no roll. It comes out of military dress by way of the Nehru jacket, and what it does is remove the one detail that tells everyone a garment descends from a suit. A lapel is a lapel wherever you put it, and it drags the entire grammar of tailoring along behind it. Take it away and the jacket stops being formal or informal and becomes a shape. The horn buttons are the other decision worth naming. Cut from a natural material, they vary from one to the next and darken slightly with handling, which on a jacket this plain is most of what there is to look at.

Alba draws this collar every season and it is the shape that separates his outerwear from everybody else's. We wanted the version of it that stands closest to where it came from.

The autumn version of the Gstaad is made with a wool-silk blend. Forty percent acrylic, twenty-nine percent polyester, twenty-seven percent wool, four percent silk, made in Italy. Single-breasted with a stand collar and horn buttons. Colour: Blu.

A stand collar sits close to the neck, so whatever goes underneath has to be open or low at the throat. A spread-collar shirt will fight it; a crewneck will not. With no lapel to break the front, the jacket reads as a single vertical plane, which suits most people and is unforgiving of a shoulder that is wrong for you. It is a jacket to judge in person if you can.

Over the Genova in Bianco or the Larry crewneck. With the Winch2 in Alluminio or the Oceano jean. Blu against grey and Blu against indigo are the two obvious readings, and both of them work.

This cloth holds four different fibres and they do not want the same things, so treat it as the most delicate of them would: cool, gentle, and nowhere near direct heat. Never press it hot. A hot iron will glaze the surface, and a glaze does not come out. Our care guidance for mixed cloths covers the rest.

The Bali Jacket is the cashmere, the Baglietto Jacket is the virgin wool, the Catch2 Jacket is the linen, and the Winch2 Trousers are the corduroy underneath. Everything we carry from Massimo Alba is listed together.