This ‘blazer’ is one of my favorite items of clothing — so much so that even given the pricing (roughly $1,000), I own three of these blazers and still want more. If you look at this blazer online before you read about it, you’ll likely not get what makes it so great — you’ll be distracted by what looks like a rather traditional blazer.
But that’s a mere illusion. A part of the magic of what makes the Sid Mashburn Ghost Blazer so amazing to wear is that it looks pretty normal, while wearing exceptionally well.
This is a shirt jacket, which will pass as a ‘suit jacket’ to the more uninformed around you. It’s one of the most perfect items of clothing I own. So let’s do it.
Material and Construction
There’s no single material this jacket is made from, as it is offered in a range of fabrics. The most classic of which (and the first one you should buy) is the wool high twist fabric which has a few colors (pick Navy to start). It’s a wonderful fabric that breathes well, looks sharp, and so much more. From there, the buttons are custom brass, which don’t have a sheen to them. The pockets are patch, with flaps you can cleanly tuck away when not wanted.
The jacket is butterfly lined, so there’s only a lining at the shoulders, and in the sleeves. When you hold a high twist Ghost Blazer up to the light, you can see through the back of the jacket. It’s not thin, but it is highly breathable. The High Twist is also durable, and holds up well to travel and being packed. (In all the images of the jackets laying flat, both the Navy and Lovat pictured are as they looked after being folded in my duffle for a week while we moved, no steaming done to them, just hanging in the closet.)
The construction of these jackets is top notch all around.
Note: Sid Mashburn tends to do seasonal fabrics, including Hopsacks. But High Twist is the right move to start.
Style & Sizing
This is a classic unstructured mens sport coat. Or, to put it how a salesperson at Sid Mashburn did to me once “it’s basically constructed like a shirt, but made to look like a blazer”. I think both nail this correctly, and because of that you can wear it with denim, or with chinos. You can pair it with dress trousers, or even perhaps make a casual (very casual) suit out of it. This is through and through classic menswear, and it’s executed exceedingly well.
The fit on these is outstanding, but that’s because the tailoring to get the fit correct is included in the price (assuming you can physically get to a Sid Mashburn store). The sleeves come unfinished, so there’s no wearing this jacket out the door. It comes in Short, Regular, and Long lengths. The sizing is Italian, so you’ll need to convert that for US jacket sizes.
A lot of companies focus on making the best blazer a guy can toss on and never worry about. Something they can comfortably travel in, lounge in, and go to an important meeting in. Those always end up looking like some cross between a track suit and a suit-suit. But the Ghost Blazer is exactly what all those attempts strive to be. The odd twist is that instead of making the perfect easy jacket out of some highly technical, and thus less appropriate fabric, it’s made in classic menswear suiting fabrics — executed for a strict vision to become your most worn jacket.
A classic jacket, executed well to modern standards. Perfection.
Wearing & Why
If there is one thing you buy this year from reading this site, then this is what I think it should be. Yes, $1,000 is what we are talking about, but it’s money well spent to look better, dress better, and feel amazing.
When you put the jacket on, the first thing you are going to notice is how well the entire jacket moves. The cut of the sleeves allows for a lot of articulation in the arms, as well as the tailoring Mashburn will do to perfect the fit. I regularly (read: almost always) travel in a Ghost Blazer on an airplane and find it exceptionally comfortable and have had no issues at all.
And when you fly in a Ghost Blazer, the next thing you notice is how few wrinkles you gain over the course of a trip. These jackets will wrinkle, but it takes more effort to get a wrinkle and they generally fall out rather quickly. It’s a smart jacket in High Twist for this very reason.
Next, you’ll be thankful for all the pockets. There’s two inside breast pockets, and patch breast pocket on the left for your pocket square, and two hand pockets on each side of the front. Those stowable flaps, when deployed for travel, make for a touch more security on whatever you drop in the pockets. The two inner pockets make keeping things like a phone and wallet very handy while seated and wearing a seatbelt during your flight.
In other words, the perfect travel jacket, which doesn’t even remotely look like a ‘travel’ jacket.
I was initially worried that this would be a jacket I found hard to wear most of the time. Then I hit a point where I was wearing one of these jackets six days every week. What I found is that the solid colors pair well with a lot of pants, and are so easy to wear that you forget you are wearing a blazer, and instead you are wearing your favorite jacket.
The way to wear this jacket, is to think of it as a light jacket, and not as a blazer. If you do that, you’ll find that you have instantly upgraded your day to day look, while finding the blazer easy to pair with most of what you wear.
The Navy will likely be the easiest of all colors for most men. It’s a seriously easy style upgrade.
I mentioned at the start that I own three of these. I own one navy High Twist, one lovat High Twist, and one custom run which is a wool-linen blend in a brown flax looking body with blue and white windowpaning on it. I love the custom wool-linen jacket, as the coloring makes it almost universally work for me. But, if I were to cut back to only one, it would easily be the navy high twist. Having said that, there’s no love lost for the lovat, as that jacket receives more compliments from other men than any other single item of clothing I own.
The Ghost Blazer process is not easy or fast if you live away from a Sid Mashburn store. You first need to find it in your size (which likely means going into a store to try them on), then purchase it (which is not actually that easy as they are constantly running low on stock), and wait for it to arrive (2-3 days). Once it arrives, you need to take it into the store (if it was shipped to you instead of a store) and have the master tailor at the store look you over wearing it to see what adjustments need to be made. At a minimum they need to finish the sleeves by installing the buttons (pay for them to be fully functioning, the cost is worth it), but they may also take in, or let out different spots to nail the fit. Then you leave the jacket there and wait 2-3 weeks (average), to head back to the store to try it all on and make sure it’s perfect.
Only then can you walk out with it. And while I admit that this is a lot (and even more so if there’s no store near you), what you end up with is a jacket which there is no real equivalent from any other brand out there. And, it’s been fitted to you, so there’s truly nothing else like it.
And it’s fucking perfect. Now, I need that tobacco hopsack model to come back in stock in my size…
Buy here: Lovat High Twist, Navy High Twist.