Latest

Time Capsules

April 07, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.  We can find inspiration in everything, as Paul Smith wrote. During these times of sheltering in place, we may have to. The mind has limits, though. A colleague recommen...

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From Inside the Velvet Mask

March 24, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   We cannot outrun history’s arrow. d’Artagnan and his boon companions the Three Musketeers learned that over 5,000-odd pages of Alexandre Dumas’ rambling historical fic...

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Vive la différence

March 10, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   An old, old joke about a bunch of chauvinist French scientists at a convention. The keynote speaker cautiously begins by announcing that there is only a small differen...

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Bobson Dugnutt, Or, In A Name

February 25, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   I have to hand it to my friend Hari Sakka, a member of long standing of the Pairov Institute, for reminding me of the ridiculous list of baseball player names made up ...

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Book Review: Dandy Lion

February 11, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.    There are so many different kinds of dandyism. Most books on dandies attempt to suggest they are all of many conflicting concepts of the word, so that the very least ...

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Alternative Style Icon: The Bourgeois Revolutionary

February 04, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   Today’s Alternative Style Icon hails from Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People: The Bourgeois Revolutionary. What can he teach us? To answer...

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Atavism

January 21, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.  In this tie, and in my reasons for tracking down and buying it 20 years after it was made. Atavism is, loosely, a reversion to ancestral traits. What do you do when y...

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On Sustainability

January 07, 2020

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans.   The theme of sustainability and ethical consumption has now reached the #menswear magazine and blogging world. In brief, it manifests as a call to buy better and to bu...

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