Common Threads

Three Menswear Obsessed Friends Road-trip to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in Search of Whisk Y, Wild Landscapes, and Harris Tweed.

- David Coggins

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I called from the back of our Range Rover as a rhythmic rubber slapping started up beneath my seat.

The three of us were driving on a narrow, indifferently maintained road along the northern edge of Loch Ness, my friend Matt Hranek at the wheel, doing his best to keep to the left while our pal Jake Mueser, in the passenger seat, navigated with his phone through a thick mist that obscured the late-afternoon sky above the Scottish Highlands. We’d all been chatting easily, as you do when you let your guard down after hours in a car together, about our shared passion—some might call it a pathology—for classic menswear. Jake, who owns a successful tailor, J. Mueser, in Manhattan’s West Village, claimed to have lost track of how many shoes he owned after he passed 60 pairs (we’re talking proper leather bench-made shoes, and, at any rate, many more than his wife has). Matt, photographer and Upstate New York boy turned tailoring obsessive, refers to his extensive Barbour coat collection as an “archive,” while I am a men’s style writer whose tiny Manhattan apartment can barely contain my accumulation of knit ties. Our conversation was cut short when our car cratered into a pothole, which was followed by the inexorable drumbeat of a flat. Matt pulled over just beyond some orange road-construction markers.