EXCLUSIVE: When is a jacket not just a jacket? When Michael Knowles teams up with Harrison Butker to make a smoking jacket

"A smoking jacket is a garment that, unfortunately, is not as prominent as it once was, but a smoking jacket serves a practical purpose in that it keeps the smoke off your other clothes," Knowles explained. The key to a good smoking jacket is the velvet, and to acquire the velvet for this jacket, Knowles worked with an Italian mill which makes the finest velvet and teamed up with Kansas-based men's bespoke atelier Shepherd's, a brand that still practices the old art of custom fitting gentlemen's suits.

The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), by Rene Magritte, in the collection of the LA County Museum of Art

"They're absolutely magnificent," Knowles said, "and the goal of Shepherd's is to allow men to look good again, to make men's sartorial sense great again." They don't come cheap, Knowles said, but they are accessible. The smoking jackets are in the $900 range, but it's a luxury garment that will stand the test of time. Knowles has a smoking jacket of his own and he's had it since he was about 19. "My godmother got me a really high-end smoking jacket," he said, "and I've loved it. This is a piece that I've worn for 15 years in many cities, on many cigar nights." He thought it was about time to bring the look back, and not just for smoking, but for formal events.

"A smoking jacket is supposed to be black-tie attire," Knowles said, "it's semi-formal, which today people think semi-formal means, y'know, the jeans with the crease, but really semi-formal means tuxedo in the evening or stroller suit in the daytime." (We didn't know either, we looked it up, it's a nice daytime suit, not a business suit, but something more distinguished). The smoking jacket is not just for smoking, it's for weddings, galas, fine dinners, and yeah, cigar lounges.

It's not just a jacket. It's a cultural shift to bring back formality, bring back a little luxury, bring back an appreciation of leisure. "The purpose of education is leisure," Knowles said. "People think education now is to make some more money or something, to learn a practical skill, but it's really for leisure—at least that's the classical understanding of it. Today we have a tragic circumstance where people work so hard but they don't know what to do with their leisure time. We mostly just doom scroll on our phones—I don't exempt myself from this," he clarified.

"This is about enjoyment," he said, as is Mayflower Cigars. "This is about forcing men to sit down for 45 minutes, either with a good book or with some good friends and to converse for the goodness of friendship and for the goodness of leisure. We live in an officiously casual culture, but you know exterior postures and adornments reflect interior realities."

In other words, stand up straight, men, look good, be proud, take stock of yourself. "A gentleman should know the occasion, and should dress in a way that demonstrates some dignity and self respect," he said. "Dress for the occasion."

"If I'm going to till the fields, I'm going to throw on some overalls," Knowles said. "But if I'm going to have a cigar with friends, or I'm going to have a celebratory occasion, I'm going to dress for that occasion too. And now those distinctions have been blurred and flattened."

"Mayflower cigars are as much about curating taste as anything else." Knowles wrote his college admissions essay on cigars, which he started smoking when he was just 15. He assured us that "is old by New York Italian standards."

Knowles doesn't think the jacket, the cigars, or the lifestyle considerations, for that matter, are a hard sell. "Men desire it already," he said, "I think that this is not a matter of needing to cultivate some new desire, it's about giving men the tools to do what they want to do and what they have been stymied in doing by modern culture."

"Not to be too philosophical about it," Knowles said, getting philosophical, which is really what sitting for 45 minutes smoking a cigar while wearing a perfectly tailored velvet jacket is all about, "but we're incarnate creatures. We live in an increasingly Gnostic age where we pretend that the body doesn't matter. Right now, we pretend you can be— that your body doesn't even have anything to do with your sex or your brain. But you are a body as well as a soul, and so the physical world matters. We come to knowledge through sensory experience."

As for Butker, Knowles said he's a bit busy with his day job at the moment, playing football for the Kansas City Chiefs, but "he's a seriously well-rounded person," Knowles said, "who has a deep faith and lives out his faith. And this influences everything." Butker was already working with Shepherd's, it is in Kansas, after all, and it's because, as Knowles said, "he knows quality."

The jackets are made to measure, and the duo don't expect to rake in the cash on this one, "even if we sell a zillion of them," Knowles said, "but it is a statement, like with Mayflower, to say I support this vision for the culture, and I desire this kind of lifestyle, and I want excellent things."

With that, he quoted Churchill, a photo of whom accompanied the definition of "stroller suit" when we looked it up. "I'm a simple man," Knowles quoted the famed British prime minister of saying "I'm easily satisfied by the best of everything."