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" 10 The Atomic Snoop Daddy Alpine Skis It used to be that the skis couldn&amp;#039;t make the skier. Only years of hard-earned progress and a clench-jawed denial of ACL damage could do that. But then parabolic skis came along and made us all a little better. Atomic&amp;#039;s Snoop Daddies, the snap-turning, ice-biting, butterfly-floating fatties developed in Austria&amp;#039;s Pongau Valley, take it one step further. They&amp;#039;re everything we&amp;#039;ve come to expect in an all-mountain ski--edgy on hard pack, brawny in crud, rock solid at speed--but they&amp;#039;re also unapologetically obese in the tip and tail for the powder. And with old-school graphics--a dervish of Arabic-inspired calligraphy and more wood paneling than a &amp;#039;66 Ford Country Squire--they&amp;#039;ll make you look good wherever you are. $855; atomicsnow.com.  9 The North Face Blackcomb Parka The trouble with most technical sports clothing these days is that for all its groundbreaking properties, it really belongs in the back of a four-wheel drive, slightly damp and whiffing faintly of golden retriever. You just can&amp;#039;t mix it all up anymore. As men begin to smarten up their look at the office again, other specialized clothes have been confined once more to their original functions. Not a bad thing, necessarily. But the North Face is bucking the trend with its new Premier Outerwear Collection. The Blackcomb down jacket, for instance, has all the technical wizardry--Gore-Tex fabric, laminated pocket hems, narrow seam taping, and PrimaLoft insulation--you&amp;#039;d expect from one of America&amp;#039;s foremost outdoor brands. Yet it&amp;#039;s also designed with the better-dressed townie in mind, with decidedly nonsportswear colors like olive green and battleship gray. Just the thing to layer over a good suit when the thermometer drops below freezing. $800; thenorthface.com.  8 The Fairfax Shirt and Tie From all outside appearances, it would be easy to figure Fairfax for a classic shirt and tie maker, a storied brand from London, Paris, or Rome. There&amp;#039;s a rakish tilt to its oversize collars that suggests Italy, and the kind of slightly mishmashed color combinations shout London&amp;#039;s old-school Jermyn Street makers. So it&amp;#039;s somewhat ironic that Fairfax is actually a Japanese clothier with a name inspired by a slightly dowdy Washington, D. C., hotel. A self-professed obsessive for the wonders of quality, Fairfax founder Michihiko Keii started with ties in Tokyo in the late seventies before expanding into shirtmaking. Thirty years later, Fairfax prides itself on the classic look of its shirts, with high, structured collars and an ergonomic fit using the kind of body-conscious cutting normally associated with custom suits. The shoulders, for example, are pitched forward to mimic the forward roll of a man&amp;#039;s body. Cotton shirt ($195) and silk tie ($115) by Fairfax; barneys.com.  7 The Vellus Aureum Suit This suit is worth its weight in gold. Literally. In its effort to create ever finer clothes for the better-dressed men of the world, Italian wool specialist Ermenegildo Zegna holds a competition in honor of Australian wool growers, who provide 40 percent of the world&amp;#039;s market, to find the highest quality single fleece each year. The prize (to the harvester, not the sheep, sadly) is the fleece&amp;#039;s weight in gold. This year the winning fibers were just 11.1 microns, or eleven one-thousandths of a millimeter, thick. That&amp;#039;s finer than the best vicu\u00C3f\u00C2\u00B1a and cashmere. Zegna intends to continue to save the best fleece each year for the next four years, until its centenary, then produce just a few samples of the finest wool suit ever made. In the meantime, we will have to content ourselves with this cloth--enough for just fifty Vellus Aureum (&amp;quot;Golden Fleece&amp;quot;) suits--made from this year&amp;#039;s closest runners-up. Three-button wool suit ($1,395), cotton shirt ($265), and silk tie ($40) by Ermenegildo Zegna; zegna.com.  6 The Gucci Duffel Bag Even without the wholesale renaissance of Gucci in the mid-nineties under Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole, chances are the brand would still be a household name around the world. Founded in 1921 by Guccio Gucci, it was synonymous with the good life in Europe even before World War II. Gucci had worked at London&amp;#039;s Savoy Hotel and returned to his native Florence filled with envy--and ideas--for the high-living travelers who passed through it. Postwar, Gucci&amp;#039;s workshops went into overdrive for a new generation of international travelers. The company made a virtue of the shortage of leather by turning decidedly nonluxury materials, such as canvas and bamboo, into must-have luggage adorned with trademark detailing. This ingenious approach was readopted this year by Gucci&amp;#039;s new creative director, Frida Giannini, who created a special eighty-fifth anniversary collection of limited-edition bags. They include this men&amp;#039;s ivory canvas duffel, which features such classic details as oversize steel horse bits and a lattice of bridle leather. $2,550; gucci.com.  5 The San Domenico Palace Hotel, Sicily Italy is a promise that&amp;#039;s hard to keep. To get there before it&amp;#039;s overrun with tourists. To take the wife on a second honeymoon. To return after the hook has been set in Venice or Rome or Tuscany. Harry Truman made the promise after the war, and one of the country&amp;#039;s grandest properties spared nothing in preparing for his imminent arrival. Even more than most locals, the San Domenico Palace Hotel had reason to show its gratitude. In Taormina--rugged Sicily&amp;#039;s most hospitable town, Italy&amp;#039;s most underrated destination--the magnificent hotel built from a fifteenth-century monastery had suffered as ignoble a fate as any. Slavering at its white-marble entry, Hermann G\u00C3f\u00C2\u00B6ring himself handpicked the property to serve as Luftwaffe headquarters in Sicily. The decision eventually brought Allied bombers to Taormina, then British troops, who stormed the ancient city on the cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. Quickly rebuilt, Taormina is once again a cobblestone maze of blind alleys packed with tiny caf\u00C3f\u00C2\u00A9s and hidden businesses all leading to a wide checkerboard piazza--a vision of &amp;quot;pure&amp;quot; Italy as few places in the brochure-ready mainland remain. Too bad Truman ended up canceling his visit. The hotel has, however, kept his room ready, even down to the name. The Truman Suite&amp;#039;s windows look out over one of the most dramatic Greek amphitheaters still standing and a classic Italian garden, for all those still willing to keep the promise. Starting at $1,000 per night; 011-39-0942-61-31-11; www.thi.it.  --CHUCK THOMPSON 4 The Harris Tweed Jacket Harris Tweed is the fortuitous result of a culture left behind by mechanization. Even after the industrial revolution came to Scotland in the nineteenth century, local wool spinners and weavers on the remote islands of the Outer Hebrides continued their age-old practices of carding, spinning, dyeing, and weaving in their own homes to make cloh mhor (&amp;quot;big cloth&amp;quot;), as tweed is known in Gaelic. With time, the unintended anachronism became something of a virtue. Now Harris Tweed is prized for its generally unmessed-with originality. That authenticity is protected by a 1993 act of parliament that decrees that to be Harris Tweed, the cloth must be woven by workers in their own homes from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides. There are certainly cloths more luxurious, less scratchy, softer, lighter, and more comfortable. But there are few that claim such rustic authenticity and such a deep link with a particular place. Three-button Harris Tweed jacket ($595) by Southwick; 800-634-5312.  3 The Four-Door Coupe When Mercedes released the CLS last year, it didn&amp;#039;t just celebrate the car&amp;#039;s sleek lines and sloping roof. It claimed to have invented a whole new class of automobile: the four-door coupe. That proclamation may have sounded hyperbolic at the time, but now it seems prescient. The CLS (right) has become an instant classic, the model for a whole new breed of style-conscious four-doors, including the upcoming Porsche Panamera (below, 2009), the Aston Martin Rapide (2008), and the Audi A7 (2009), all of which borrow heavily from the Mercedes&amp;#039; plunging roofline. In all of these new cars, the dictum that more doors equals more utility is turned on its head; the art of the shape takes precedence over its function. Aston hasn&amp;#039;t made a sedan since the ungainly Lagonda went out of production in 1989. Porsche has never made one. Until now. The Panamera, reportedly slated to reach into the 500 hp range with a Cayenne-derived V-8, should have the performance to do its nameplate justice. For years, the question &amp;quot;What would a four-door Porsche sports car look like?&amp;quot; was purely rhetorical. Now we have an answer: It looks like a Mercedes. 2007 Mercedes CLS550, around $70,000; mbusa.com. --EZRA DYER 2 The Chiffre Rouge Watch Generally, when it comes to buying a watch, we advise sticking with a specialist watchmaker, preferably one with a century or so of history. Fashion designers don&amp;#039;t tend to cut it in the mechanical-timepiece department, a point underlined by the fact that most brand names stay safely in the attractive-yet-affordable quartz sector. The Chiffre Rouge, Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane&amp;#039;s contribution, is an exception. At first blush, it appears standard issue, until you get up close. Then everything&amp;#039;s a little off. There&amp;#039;s a toothed bezel that reaches round three quarters of a turn. Each push button on the chronograph has a different shape and finish. Even the case itself is oddly lopsided. The design, as intended, is a distillation of a number of great men&amp;#039;s technical watches--as if someone had disassembled a Rolex, a TAG Heuer, and an Omega and mixed their disparate parts to build something entirely new. The latest incarnation is the Black Time AO5 Chiffre Rouge watch, made in carbon-electroplated steel with a red glass case back. $3,950; dior.com.  1 The Burberry Custom-Made Trench Coat Custom tailoring is fast catching on among men who want to go the extra mile for the perfect fit for their suits. But a custom raincoat?Well, if any brand was going to offer it, Burberry would be the one. The British clothier&amp;#039;s greatest contribution to male style is indisputably the trench coat, which the company launched in the early 1900s. It was founder Thomas Burberry&amp;#039;s invention in the 1880s of a tightly woven, long-staple Egyptian cotton, proofed against wind and rain, that made this introduction possible. He called this cloth gabardine, after Caliban&amp;#039;s cloak in Shakespeare&amp;#039;s The Tempest. Burberry&amp;#039;s new Art of the Trench program is the modern answer to its custom service that dressed half a million Allied officers in trench coats during World War I. In six U. S. cities, customers can order made-to-measure coats from a choice of six basic styles, three fabrics, seven colors, several liners, and authentic detailing options like pads that protect the shoulder from rifle recoil and belts with brass D rings, which were once used to clip on map cases and grenade pouches. Starting at $1,150; burberry.com.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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