Ernest Hemingway
As significant as his writing was, Ernest Hemingway is remembered just as much for the life he lived beyond the page. Everything about him was oversized—war service in Europe, big-game hunting in Africa, all-night benders in Paris. Hemingway embodied a full range of traditionally masculine experiences few others have. He even had a dictum that summed up his approach: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk.”
His appetite for adventure only persisted later in his life, which ended tragically in 1961. If Hemingway’s literary output slowed during this final postwar decade, his celebrity spread far and wide. He wrote dispatches on bullfights and marlin fishing for popular magazines, and was the subject (sometimes willing, sometimes not) of numerous awed profiles...
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Kamakura Shirts
It could be argued that the oxford cloth button-down shirt is the bedrock upon which modern day American menswear is built upon. When John E. Brooks, the grandson of Brooks Brothers founder, designed the first OCBD a shirt he spotted on English polo players in 1896, he wasn’t merely developing another garment to add to his family’s reputation, he was making history. It became the workhorse of the Ivy League Look in the 1960s. But history became legend. Legend became myth. And for forty years, the minutiae of the original oxford cloth button-down shirt, specifically the roll of the collar, slowly faded with the men who loved it. Measurements were updated, factories changed, and details diminished. It would take a Japanese man to resurrect it...
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Boston Ivy
An American musician (D.S.) and an architect (Durga) joined forces in 2007 to make handmade colognes. What began as a hobby making aftershave for friends (they quickly realized none of their friends shaved) turned into small batch perfumes and colognes. The Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife duo bring romanticism back to fragrance. They reference the classics but with a modern sensibility...
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