Latest

My Ralph Outlet

April 06, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.  A recent conversation with Ivy revisionist Berkeley Breathes led to me a revelation. The relationship between Prep and Ivy, I epiphanized, is that of birds and dinosaurs. 

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Take My Ivy, Please

March 23, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.  A few years before my excellent state graduate school destroyed the promise of accessible public education and raised tuition to the same levels as the privates, my hou...

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Book Review: Simon Crompton's Bespoke Style

March 09, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   Simon Crompton’s Bespoke Style is a shout from another period into the void that has been this past year. For the past decade, Crompton has been an infuriatingly disar...

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Basic

February 23, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   It’s embarrassing to admit it, but to this day coffee, especially ground, unbrewed coffee, smells somehow sophisticated and elegant to me. It’s been that way since I w...

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Newness and Dearness

February 16, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   150 years ago, Alexandre Dumas introduced two minor characters to dinner at the Count of Monte Cristo’s, dressing them perfectly for the occasion in brand-new clothes ...

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Reckoning

January 26, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   It was time. Like some death cart from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which my morbid ass had reread at the beginning of confinement, I made the rounds, ...

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Untrueisms: The Convenience of Custom

January 12, 2021

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   Has the current age finally dulled this old saw generations of uncreative hacks repeated? Since the 1980s, mainstream men’s clothing magazines would run the very occas...

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Woodstock's (Sugarplum) Dream

December 22, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   To quote the great Takeshi Kaga, “If memory serves me right, Christmas is just around the corner.” And with it, a tightening of the tension between cocooned self-indu...

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