The Receipts: Max Wastler Wants a D.O.C.-like Stamp For Menswear
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In The Receipts franchise, SPY interviews influential people about how their cultural intake and background informs their consumer behavior — and what they’ve learned about themselves from the things they’ve bought.
Max Wastler is a man with a mission. If you don’t know him by name, you may recognize his style and writerly voice on anything from his blog, All Plaid Out, to any of the campaigns he’s worked on, from Patagonia to Land’s End. As a writer, consultant, and all-around believer in well-made things, Wastler can uniquely speak to where guys should spend their money to yield the best results — whether that’s a briefcase that’ll last a lifetime or getting behind a company with the right attitude. He spoke with SPY about everything: supermarket razor blades to the Royal Seal of approval.
SPY: It seems like you’ve spent a career professionally being a nice guy with a good vibe. In the beginning, though, when you were just embarking on a career in style, what would you have told yourself?
Max Wastler: I’m 42 now, proudly, and I did spend a lot of time seeking out the best quality. I think that, for me, when I was writing about this and experiencing it, I couldn’t help but want to make it my job as well. If I were to go back to my younger self and give him any advice, it’d be the Marc Maron quote, “Don’t go ruining your hobbies by trying to make them your career.” My first few jobs out of college I was in product development for a sporting goods company, and then at a preppy catalog company. While I was there, I learned a lot about margins and making things look nicer than they actually might be.
SPY: Although you went on to run a blog, consulting business, and small vintage shop, among other things…
MW: I think I got a little jaded and I found it disingenuous to put something out that looks like it’s solid brass, but it’s actually an alloy that’s been spray-painted. I started looking for the real thing. I started to seek companies and products that have a provenance where they come from — where you understand how they were put together. Whether it’s the L.L. Bean boot, which, I traveled to Maine and wrote about the experience on my blog at the time. I was kind of off to the races after that I started getting approached by American manufacturers to come hang out for the day, take pictures of their factory, meet their people, tell their story.
SPY: What did you see around the manufacturers of heritage brands like that?
MW: I got kind of pigeonholed into this Captain America role, documenting American-made brands, but I have a deep fascination with and appreciation for heritage brands of all kinds from around the world. I also really was taught to look for a guarantee. Brands at the time were good about talking about repairing or replacing something for you — making the garment seem like it was for life. I looked for that.
SPY: Was there something that spurred that change in you when you were younger and getting started?
MW: After reading Let My People Go Surfing, I went to work for Patagonia. I believed in the mission so, so intently, so vehemently — I was such a brand advocate and a cultist.
SPY: So what were the things you first started buying?
MW: I was working in my late 20s as a creative director/designer/salesperson for an American shirt manufacturer called Gitman Brothers. A lot of my early investments came from that experience. I was also given a really nice Omega watch that I keep up, and I am actually wearing it as we speak.
SPY: In addition to your work with brands, you also sell a few vintage pieces and things close to you on your website. What, in your eyes, makes something small and cheap worth celebrating? For example, you’re selling Ace combs.
MW: Combs are such an essential — they’re a central item to my life and my story, because every year, on my first day of school, my dad would give me a new black plastic comb. I’d carry that comb in my back pocket for the first day of school.
As I grew into my 20s and started seeking out good things, I was working as a traveling salesman. I would go and get a haircut at the local barber shop. I’d pick up these combs along the way. When I started to make stuff myself, the comb just felt like something identifiably mine.
SPY: For people coming of age today, what’s something you’d recommend them investing some money in?
MW: The company I was working for, Gitman Brothers, is part of a larger conglomerate. While I was working in that organization, I would sit in these meetings about how guys would want to invest in their first custom suit. (This is at the nascent stages of Indochino, and Suitsupply, and fast fashion custom suit manufacturing.) What we came up with was a lower-priced, 100% hand-cut and hand-sewn suit that was made in America. We were trying to get them for under $1,000.
SPY: So you’re investing in craftsmanship.
MW: I was taught that there are far more important things in life than surrounding yourself with the latest and greatest. It’s about investing in yourself, investing in your relationships, and especially investing in — if we’re talking about things — things that are going to be around. When the economy fell apart in 2008 and 2009, there was this effort to buy things that you weren’t going to have to replace after a season of wear. I thought that, if I’m gonna have less stuff, I might as well have better stuff. I’m still seeking out artists [who make] hand-crafted, high-quality goods — if it’s somebody that just started making this stuff in their backyard, I’m 100% in their camp.
SPY: Like D.O.C. allocations, but for menswear…
MW: I’m not really a royalist or anything, but it’s like when you look for the Royal Seal in the U.K. Barbour famously has the Royal Seal on it, by appointment of the crown. Range Rover. Hunter Wellington boots. Those sorts of things receive a royal stamp of approval. Those matter, I think, in a big way.
I will say that, time immemorial, the part that matters to me is, is this thing being made in the best way possible given the circumstances? Or, are they cutting corners? You can tell pretty quickly once you start doing the research — who’s telling the truth, who’s skirting the truth, and who’s just flat-out lying.
SPY: What’s a favorite recent purchase of yours?
MW: Oh, man. My favorite thing is a blue-clay chore coat. That was literally the only one left in a store in Spain from this brand called the GG. It’s cut like it’s a manufacturer — like a suit — so it’s got sleeves, but otherwise, it’s unlined wool. The store was all streetwear otherwise — they had crazy Vans and Nike collaborations and stuff like that. And then just one rack had this one jacket on sale. I purchased it right before the pandemic and I’m almost wearing through the elbows.
SPY: Do you have a favorite cheap-but-great thing you use regularly?
MW: I recently went back to the simple Mach III Razor. I shaved for a dinner the other night and had to wear a freakin’ tie for the first time and probably Since 2010. (That’s a joke.)
Gillette Mach3 Razor
Sometimes a simple, supermarket razor is all you need.
SPY: What’s your favorite splurge item?
MW: Shortly after I moved to London, after I graduated from college, I bought a Sunday Times and saw an obituary about this man named RM Williams. He was an Australian Outback cowboy boot maker. That day, I went to the RM Williams showroom and tried on a pair. I think they were like 300 pounds. Around when I met my wife, she asked me a similar question: “Is there something that you’ve been wanting that you’ve never bought for one reason or another?” I said, “I’ve never bought these boots that I’ve wanted for 15 years.” That Christmas, she had a pair waiting for me under the tree.
R.M. Williams Signature Craftsman Boot
RM Williams’s heritage boots are full heirloom status.