The name “No Man Walks Alone” was borrowed from a line by Humphrey Bogart to Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina. It is a nod to the idea that there are many men who, like you and us, reject the uninspiring conformity offered by the fashion industry, and instead value original design, thoughtful...
After receiving this newly published book, a survey of selected French men’s luxury brands by Hugo Jacomet, the blogger and marketer known as Parisian Gentleman himself, I told myself I would not write a review. Jacomet and I had vastly different approaches to writing about clothing, I thought, and reviewing him...
It’s the pop psychology self-help trope of our time: stay in the moment (rather than abstracted into smartphone hypnosis); appreciate whatever positive aspects there are in the time of being (however tiny a part they form of the immediate experience); think of what future events we can look forward to...
If Gaudi had ever built a shrine to umbrella-making, it would look like Mario Talarico’s workshop. It’s located in Naples’s Spanish Quarter, surrounded by cobblestone streets and the laundry lines hung across them. The one-room shack doesn’t seem to have been built so much as it seems to have sprouted,...
Coincident with the widespread realization in Europe and the United States that almost everything they consume was made elsewhere came a movement to buy domestic production. More recently, as the bourgeoisie of those same areas have found themselves increasingly distanced not only from the means of production but the means...
The American government’s recent rush to offer billions to farmers harmed by the trade war that same government has threatened reminded me, as do all things, of #steez, of the zoning protection that London’s Savile Row tailors keep pleading for and the recklessly rising rents that are causing Savile Row...
I am in my favorite city. Its name, for the moment, does not matter. Favorite cities generally aren’t the ones we actually live in. We save favorites for places that we pass through infrequently and superficially enough to be a tourist, not a resident. Tourism means indulging in all of...
International tragedies have a way of making me sympathetic to the works of Hugo Jacomet. Perhaps his works somehow anticipate the direction the world moves. Recently, as the world sinks further into darkness and chaos, he has come out with Souliers d’Exception, a tome even more luxurious and humongous than...