Tag 'RJMan'

There are things we always want to reclaim from our past, even from its most confused, bittersweet moments. In my case, the thoughtful moments driving home late at night down Santa Monica Boulevard decades ago from an essay-writing extension class at UCLA.

As Troy McClure said about playing the human in a musical adaptation of Planet of the Apes, reviewing this book is “the role I was born to play!”

Against the frenetic unpredictability of fashion’s changes, even the twenty or so years I’ve pursued my personal style give me a fair claim to a sort of eternity. But no style has a permanence that allows it to exist completely outside of fashion.

In a cheesy import superstore, there it stood in all ridiculousness among the rattan furniture and foreign candy: Omar Khayyam Champagne.

On a tip from the Instagram stories of my friend Paul Fournier, I picked up Nishiguchi Essentials 100, a bilingual compendium of the 100 articles of clothing and accessories that totemically compose the intrepid Shuhei Nishiguchi, the photogenic men’s fashion director of Japan’s directional department store, Beams. It is the sort of thing I love, a diverse collection of objects, each with their own particular stories and their own particular uniqueness.

A recent conversation with Ivy revisionist Berkeley Breathes led to me a revelation. The relationship between Prep and Ivy, I ejaculated, is that of birds and dinosaurs.

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 housemate, complaining that he wanted an experience that I had already had, transferred to Yale. Said experience, one I had never put a name to, was “the Ivy League experience.”

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 disarming voice of intelligence and reason describing his various orders and experiences with makers of custom (and otherwise spousally unpardonably expensive) clothing and accessories.