Long Live Heavy Tweed Jacket

It has been a long week. I am sure that I am not the only one feeling worn down from the work week and that many of you can relate. However, I am sure that many of you are wondering, “What does this mean to me?” It means that I slacked off this week and do not have anything truly new to share, but what I do have is some classic material to pass along.

I am sure that most of you are familiar with the other blogs that fill the traditional American clothing niche such as Ivy Style, The Daily Prep, MaxminimusThe Weejun, The Trad , and a few others. However, there is one blog that in my opinion stands head and shoulders above the rest and that is Heavy Tweed Jacket (better known as HTJ).HTJ Featured

HTJ has a wealth knowledge about all things trad and writes about it at a depth that is unrivaled in the blogosphere. Not only can he school you on the evolution of the Brooks Brothers OCBD, but he can also delve into the finer the points of what makes for a good Grateful Dead set. There is one hitch to his blog. He frequently abandons it only to return months (or years) later.

Currently HTJ is retired again and his blog is nowhere to found on the internet (and we teach kids that the internet is forever!). Will he pop in again and leave me looking foolish for posting about his absence? If I were a gambling man I would say yes, but this won’t stop me.

For your reading pleasure here is a link to an RSS feed for (sadly, the link no longer worked). This link does not provide access to the entire HTJ archive (it contains about two years worth of posts), but hopefully it will be accompanied by a long drink and provide a little well deserved R&R to all of my readers who are still recovering from their week at work like me.

If anyone has a copy of the full website or other RSS feeds I would be grateful if you would send them to me. I would love to have a complete archive of the site. I hope to see HTJ return in the near future, but if not at least I have this link…for now. The most important lesson to learn from this post is that nothing lasts forever. Not even the internet.

oxford cloth button down
Jerrod Swanton is a simple man interested in simple, classic, and traditional style.

8 Comments on "Long Live Heavy Tweed Jacket"

  1. Dave says:

    I just don’t understand why he wouldn’t just leave up the blog for people to look at. It takes no effort at all to just leave it alone…and I begged him to leave it up.

  2. Joel says:

    Still go there once or twice a week just to find that it’s still down 🙁

  3. Halby says:

    Agreed. Considering all the work that went into HTJ, to take it all down from time to time is absurd. I’d gladly donate to pay for however much bandwidth it takes to keep it up and running. As a source of 1970’s-present trad and preppy clothes and culture, it’s invaluable.

  4. Billax says:

    To Dave,
    The information he gathered, organized, and wrote about belongs to him. Like all writers, he didn’t write it for you. He wrote it for himself, and he merely shared it with you. He didn’t sell it to you, and you didn’t buy it.

    To me, the world has far too few creators, and way too many whining bloodsuckers. I suspect you’d disagree with me.

    Halby, I like your attitude. You acknowledge that there are economic costs that might have mitigated HTJ’s decision. I can’t speak for HTJ, but I’d guess that, having never sold his work, he may have felt that it was time to take his work product and fade away. The disappearance of ANY PART of our written/visual history diminishes us all. At the moment, the only recollection of his efforts lives in our minds….

  5. oxford cloth button down says:

    Billax – I agree with you (except I don’t believe that writers write for themselves. At least published writers) and I had hoped that he left his Blogspot domain for many of the reasons that you stated for his own domain that he owned. You are correct that he owned the content, but if your site is on a Blogspot domain you give the Google the following permissions:

    “license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”

    I would never give this type of permission to Google I hope HTJ does come back, but on his own domain where he has sole control over his content.

  6. Johnny says:

    Jerrod, I could almost kiss you!

    For anyone who’s interested, the free software HTTrack is phenomenal — it allows you to download an entire site, such as a blog, to your hard drive. Then you have a copy of it in case it’s ever taken down, and you can look at it in your browser off of your hard drive, and it looks exactly the same as if you were viewing it over the internet.

    http://www.httrack.com

  7. Moss says:

    Thank you very much for posting this. I too visit his site once a week to see if its back up.

  8. SFSteve says:

    Yeah, so I’m a little late here but this link may have some of what you are looking for in the way of HTJ archives (assuming you aren’t already well aware of this):

    http://tweed232.rssing.com/chan-6217567/all_p1.html

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