The Discerning Gentlemanifesto

Thank you all for supporting Discerning Gentiluomo in our first 6 months as the freshest menswear and lifestyle blog in the game. Now that we’ve put our foot in the door, we believe the time is ripe to expound our principles explicitly, and put it in our mouth.

We at the Discerning Gentiluomo believe in the man’s man. We long for the days when a man could sport jaunty a cravat, fritter a mid-morning away rambling through the Arcades of Paris, engage in a lusty afternoon session of canne de combat, swindle an Iroquois of his pelt, cockeye a rival during whist, purchase a railroad share and still come home to a nice glass of brandy and a hearty, home-cooked wife beating.

What has happened to men’s style? It has simply become men’s fashion. We at DG lament the fall of the “dapper” in favour of the “cool”, “trill” or “dope”.  We believe it is time for man to once again step-off from effeminizing influences - especially that of females. For lack of a better term for this burgeoning era of male domination, we have decided to call our ideal a Masculocracy. With the following four we are looking to put the “man” back into “manifesto”. Boys, stay home and play hopscotch.

Article the First – Real Gents Dress Like Luggage.

 If you are a man and do not wear browns, grays, and blacks, if you do not have a cobbler, blacksmith and haberdasher, if you do not stink of leather, if your toilet paper is not made of suede, well, then you are simply, as a drunken ringmaster once called me, a boobie. A realman can camouflage himself in an estate sale and, if necessary, pass himself off as a Louis Vuitton trunk-set to avoid detection by bigger, stronger jocks looking to stretch some long jonathans.

Article the Second – Real Gents Use Straight Razors.

Style starts in the bathroom, Johnny! Do you want to be caught in the wash-closet one day by your girl, hacking away at your hairy upper-lip with a cheap plastic razor like some Croatian transvestite? Or would you rather have her walk into a scene straight from the Five Points, 1860? She’ll see you, a foamy, masculine figure in nothing but overalls and chest-hair, brandishing a sharp blade and whistling a cheerful Irish murder ballad. That is, if she isn’t knocked-out cold by the various pomades, lotions, and flesh preserving formalin solutions that make up the proper gent’s toilette. Sprezzatura? Gesundheit.

Article the Third – Real Gents Smoke.

Now this is a controversial one, we know. And we’ve all heard about the dangers of smoking, the tragedy of so many youth hooked onto this overpriced poison that decimated an entire generation of men and women just because it “looks cool”. But… Don’t your 1950s sex idols, your Sir Alec Guinness’s and your Peter Lorre’s, just seem so naturale when they are hacking a dart? People talk a lot of humbug about peer pressure, but in this case, we believe it really can make a difference. But whatever you do, don’t smoke cheap. If you take up cigars, rolled cigarettes, pipes, hookahs etc. then cancer is like, way less likely to strike, because stylish people can go right to the doctor and explain the whole situation; it may sound judgmental but most doctors will just totally uncancer you if you are cool.

Article the Fourth – Real Gents Believe in Timeless Style Over Trends.

This is the big one. It is so easy for guys to get caught up in the whirligig of specific trends, of completely tangential historical period pieces instead of the timeless, eternal style of the true gent. Why bother with camo hoodies or Js when you could be sporting the outfit in which God sent Adam from the Garden of Eden? I mean of course the navy blazer, the selvage denim, the brown shoes and the “crisp, clean white shirt”. Note that the shirt must be “crisp, clean white” – if it is wrinkly, soiled, or egg-shell, you are already into the mode of historical contingency. Take a look at history’s greatest - how was Napoleon dressed a Waterloo? That’s right: navy blazer, denim jeans, “crisp, clean white shirt”. Wear nothing else, gent.