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Timeless, not classic

I wanted a list of menswear worth investing in, and not only the pieces everybody already knows. So I asked Claude in a chat:

I know stan smiths, chucks, burberry coat etc... but I need more.. more ideas, they dont need to be brand names, e.g. wool or linen pants... everything that is timeless and worth investing

The answer was good and very long: a wall of text with price tiers and makers. Late that evening I pasted the whole chat into a coding session:

here's the transcript from claude desktop for something I always want: timeless pieces. I need you to build me a visual library (the sites linked are only the general vendor site) so go online and find me imagery matching these results and then build me a visual tool to browse these timeless pieces and ideas.

What it is

One page, one file of data. Every piece has a category, a maker, the year it appeared, a price tier from € to €€€€, one or two sentences on why it lasts, and up to five photos. Filters cut it down to the starter set, to pieces that can be repaired for decades, to animal-free ones, or to the ones worth buying used. Search takes things like loafers, navy or 1950s.

The catalogue filtered to Shoes, 17 pieces in a grid of grey tiles. J.M. Weston 180 penny loafer, 1946, €€€. G.H. Bass Weejun penny loafer, 1936, €€. Gucci Horsebit 1953 loafer. Crockett and Jones Connaught cap-toe oxford. R.M. Williams Comfort Craftsman Chelsea boot. Below them a cordovan longwing, a Red Wing moc-toe boot, a Clarks desert boot, Dr. Martens 1460 and a Paraboot Michael
Shoes: 17 of them, each tagged with the year it first appeared.

The photos were found by the agent itself, through an image search in a real browser, five per piece. It came back with 674.

Eras

The first version was a faithful copy of the chat. Then I asked for more, with one condition:

feel free to extend it, adding looks that might not be completely timeless but in a sense timelessly represent certain eras or so... it's a bit weird that I don't see adidas samba or stan smith so... yeah... make sure not to get lost and confuse timeless with "classic"

The Samba and the Stan Smith were there all along, under Sneakers. The eras were not. They are their own category now: a look, the person who wore it, the year, and the pieces in the catalogue that rebuild it. The page puts the rule under the heading: looks that defined an era and still read right today, nothing that would read as costume.

The Eras category, 25 looks in a grid, each with a year and an archive photo. 1953 Hyannis Port, John F. Kennedy on a sailing boat. 1955 The rebel, James Dean in jeans and a jacket. 1958 Ivy, sharpened, Miles Davis with his trumpet. 1959 The grey suit, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, next to the suit on a mannequin. 1960 The Rat Pack, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and friends in cardigans. Below: Mastroianni in sunglasses, Alain Delon in a white shirt, mods on a London street, a 1965 college campus, Delon in a trench coat and fedora
Eras, sorted by year. The archive photos still carry their agencies' watermarks; they were found, not licensed.

After that first round:

keep working on timeless... I quite like what we have and let's see what other gems we can uncover doing this... you especially nailed what I wanted with dean martin etc..

That night added fourteen more: Agnelli's sprezzatura, Le Samouraï, Gainsbourg, Three Days of the Condor, the Thin White Duke, Japanese black, terrace casuals, Basquiat painting in Armani, Hedi Slimane's Dior Homme. There is also a small category called Now, eleven recent pieces with a decent chance of lasting a few years, every one of them flagged as a trend: the Salomon XT-6, the Birkenstock Boston, the Mexico 66, the double-knee work pant.

pieces
135 in 13 categories, including 25 eras and 11 for now
photos
674, found by image search, kept on the laptop
made of
one HTML page and one data file of plain JavaScript; it opens straight from disk
built
14 October at half past eleven at night to four in the morning on the 15th, three commits

Why it sits inside Mirror Mirror

Timeless started as a detour. Mirror Mirror is my virtual try-on tool: paste a picture of an outfit, and an image model renders it onto a photo of me. Next to the catalogue it got a feed to dump reference images into, and every piece in Timeless has an "Add to my feed" button. So the path from that loafer, from 1946 to what would it look like on me is two clicks.

The catalogue also inherited the try-on tool's one small trick: a B&W button. It was asked for as a black and white filter that can be toggled so one can check the fit before thinking about colors, and on a page of tailoring it does exactly that.

The Tailoring category in black and white, with the B and W button switched on. Navy blazer, charcoal suit, grey flannel trousers, dinner suit, wool fresco trousers, then linen trousers, a grey herringbone tweed jacket, dark denim and chinos. Without colour, the cut of each piece is what you look at
Tailoring with B&W on: shoulders and trouser breaks, no colours.

Still rough

There is no link to it, and there won't be. The photos are vendor shots and press photos that an image search turned up. They are fine for browsing on my own screen, but they are not mine to publish. A public version would need its own pictures, or none. The prose comes from a single chat with a model and has not been checked line by line against the makers. The want and have marks live in the browser and go nowhere. Mirror Mirror itself is still in its design rounds; the latest one has no verdict yet.