Georgie Young

Most people know Birmingham in the UK as the soot-blackened backdrop to period crime drama Peaky Blinders – or the birthplace of leather-clad rockers Black Sabbath. But two centuries ago, Birmingham was known as “the workshop of the world” or “the city of a thousand trades,” thanks to thousands of small workshops specializing in all manner of handmade goods – from guns and jewelry to buttons and pens. Although many of these workshops have since been swallowed into the soot, a handful have survived, and one of the city’s few remaining gunmakers is Westley Richards. William Westley Richards opened his first shop in 1812, overlooking what is now the Bullring Shopping Centre in the center of Birmingham.

Ever since the luxury Italian menswear house Corneliani was founded by Alfredo Corneliani in the 1930s, it has created high-quality suits and coats, initially for a professional clientele, but more recently for what it describes as the “modern metropolitan nomad” – men who travel, and who have reasonable need for a versatile jacket to take with them. Corneliani calls this a travel jacket. But Corneliani doesn’t just make travel jackets. It has also inaugurated an art project of the same name, commissioning photographers around the world to shoot a Corneliani jacket on themselves or a friend in their natural environment. The idea is a series of travel photographs that interpret the brand through different lenses in different places and now covers 25 projects over five continents.