Monaco during the Grand Prix week is not what most people expect.
The race is almost incidental. What is actually happening is something closer to a convergence, a week in which a specific kind of man appears from several directions at once, from London, from Dubai, from Cape Town, from Zurich, and occupies the same small principality for four days. He is not there purely for the motorsport. He is there because this is where he goes in May, and has gone for years, and will go again.
We were there this season. Watching, mostly.
What we noticed was not what people wore to the paddock. It was what they wore everywhere else. To breakfast at the Hotel de Paris. On the tender out to a yacht anchored off Fontvieille. In the lobby of a building where a meeting was happening that no one was discussing openly. In those moments, the men who read as belonging were not the ones dressed most expensively. They were the ones who had clearly made their choices before they arrived and were no longer thinking about it.
The Protocol Collection came out of those four days.
Protocol is CB's response to the room that asks something of you. Not a suit collection. Not tailoring in the traditional sense. Pieces that hold their structure without announcing it. A jacket that works over the Standard Oxford at a dinner where the dress code says smart casual and means something by it. Trousers that travel without creasing and arrive looking like a decision rather than a concession.
It is available now. Sized for the man who already knows where he is going in May.
Calton Brown. Covent Garden, London.