Author Archives: Mike Hillman

About Mike Hillman

Mike Hillman is the founder, editor, and webmaster of Curiata.com. He was the editor of his high school and college newspapers. Mike lives in Harrisburg, Pa., with his incomparable wife, Carrie, and their dog, Beaker.

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Suit up! First step to looking part of gentleman

For many men, a lack of fashion sense is a point of pride. Relegating clothing decisions to an afterthought is ostensibly equated with a demonstration of manliness. The Modern Urban Gentleman knows better.

The world of fashion is a foreign land to many men. And traveling to an unknown place introduces insecurities. The easiest way to deal with an insecurity is to pretend the underlying subject just doesn’t matter. But fashion does matter. Fashion is confidence, and confidence breeds success.

The Modern Urban Gentleman does not hide from his insecurities, he eliminates them. The gentleman does not ignore his points of weakness, he strengthens them. And the best starting point to strengthen the gentleman’s knowledge of men’s fashion is to discuss the suit.

The story of the suit

Single vs. Double Breasted

The suit is the backbone of the gentleman’s wardrobe. It is such a vital element to the Modern Urban Gentleman that it cannot be sufficiently dealt with in just one column; come back next week for the second installment.

Unfortunately, the wearing of a suit has come to be viewed as a necessity rather than an opportunity. As a result, the suit is treated the same as a t-shirt and jeans: purchased haphazardly and worn without pride. The suit demands the opposite.

The suit is a work of art, coaxed into existence by a craftsman out of hundreds of years of tradition and innovation. The suit is a set of garments cut from a single piece of cloth, most commonly wool. It consists of two pieces, a jacket and pants — or three, by adding a vest, also called a waistcoat. The suit, worn effectively, is complemented by a collection of clothes and accessories to express differing degrees of formality and expressions of style.

The suit has evolved through the centuries from the embroidered and jeweled formalwear of post-Renaissance Europe to the common “lounge” suit of the modern American workplace. As history demonstrates, the suit has been repeatedly redesigned for comfort, making today’s suits a pleasure to wear.

In bygone ages, a man would choose a piece of fabric and his tailor would cut and sew each suit to the customer’s measurements. Today, a suit crafted through that method is called a “bespoke” suit, and the price tag runs in the thousands of dollars. Instead, most men purchase suits “off the rack.”

This development is lamentable, because it creates a disconnect from the craft and the majesty of suit-making. Consequently, the off-the-rack revolution has moved suits from tailor’s shops to department stores, altering the man’s psychological connection to the garment. Now, the suit can be treated as a disposable commodity instead of a revered investment.

But in practical terms, the off-the-rack suit makes dressing well accessible to those who are willing to make an effort to wear it right. By understanding the basics of choosing a style and finding the right fit, the gentleman, with the help of his tailor (a topic for another column), can dress to impress any time he dons the suit.

The elements of the suit

Three lapel types

The most common suit style in contemporary America is the single-breasted, as contrasted with the double-breasted that has historically been common in England. This terminology refers to the rows of buttons that fasten the jacket: single-breasted has one row, close to the edges of the jacket; double-breasted has two rows that cause the faces of the jacket to overlap when closed.

Suit jackets also feature a turned-over piece of fabric around the color and along the breast of the jacket, called the lapel. There are three main styles of lapel: the notch, the peak, and the shawl. The notch is the least formal, and the shawl the most, usually only appearing on tuxedo or dinner jackets. Lapel widths have shrunk since the 1970s, and must be matched to the width of the necktie (stay tuned for more on this subject).

Suit pants can be cuffed or uncuffed, a matter of personal taste. The pants also can be pleated or not pleated. I say “can be,” but they never should be pleated; this universally looks bad.

When to wear a suit

The suit has been the standard uniform for men in white-collar careers for decades. Recent years have seen the rise of “business casual,” “blue jeans Fridays,” and even “tech casual.” It is tempting to lament how loosening dress codes are ruining America, but the Modern Urban Gentleman lives in today’s world and understands it is unseemly to be a premature curmudgeon.

Instead, the gentleman applies a simple principle: dress five percent better than those around you. This calls for subtlety — do not wear a three-piece to a Super Bowl party, but do wear a suit to a dinner party, and wear it better than anyone else.

There are other times when the gentleman invariably wears a suit. He does wear a suit (or a tuxedo) to a wedding. He does wear a suit to a cocktail party. If the gentleman goes out for drinks after work, he does not go home and change “into something more comfortable”; the suit will improve his chances at both free drinks and proffered phone numbers. The gentleman absolutely does wear a suit to a funeral — and it is the only time to wear a solid black suit.

Choosing the suit

There are many styles and colors of suits, from the stuffy to the outlandish. Because of the cost associated with a suit, a gentleman’s suit closet must be filled over time. The charcoal suit is the most versatile and is a great first purchase for the new professional.

“Unfortunately, the wearing of a suit has come to be viewed as a necessity rather than an opportunity.”

From there, the gentleman can branch out to the pinstripe and the navy-with-gold-buttons. Several years in, he explores new fabrics to fit the seasons: tweed in fall and winter, khaki in spring and summer. As mentioned above, save the solid black suit for end-of-life memorials.

Once the gentleman has five or six reliable suits in his rotation, he can move to novelty pieces: first, the tuxedo, then seersucker. The Modern Urban Gentleman will give tips on these items in the future.

J.Crew has set the standard for the suit of Modern Urban Gentlemen everywhere. The Ludlow suit is effortlessly stylish, worth purchasing one at the upper end of the Modern Urban Gentleman’s budget at $546 to serve as the go-to showstopper. Banana Republic offers a variably priced line that will turn heads as well.

With suits as low as $399, Suitsupply is changing the online suit-purchasing game. They offer a wide selection, including smart double-breasteds for the well-established gentleman.

If none of these options appeal to the gentleman in you, don’t discount a purchase from the menswear department at the mall. As long as the gentleman understands the principles of cut and fit, to be discussed in this space next week, he can find the diamonds in the rough of any suit rack.

 

The gentleman who follows these rules immediately sets himself up for success. He will look good. He will feel good. He will project a swagger that attracts the attention of potential romantic partners and impresses potential business assets. He will be well on his way to becoming a Modern Urban Gentleman.

red-coat

Russian skater in red calls out Olympics, Putin

Russian figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaia is taking the 2014 Winter Olympics by storm. At 15 years of age, she has positioned herself as a favorite for the gold medal in this year’s ladies’ singles free skate competition, and she seems poised to be the greatest female figure skater in the world through at least the 2018 Games.

Today, in the ladies’ free portion of the team event, making its debut in Sochi, Russia, Lipnitskaia took the ice in a brave and provocative performance. As Russian president Vladimir Putin settled into his seat in the Iceberg Skating Palace, Lipnitskaia stood at center ice, clad in a red leotard while the strains of John Williams‘ score to Schindler’s List came to life.

Steven Spielberg’s 1993 historical drama tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German man who saved more than 1,000 Polish Jews from execution in the Holocaust. The film is presented nearly entirely in black-and-white, and one splash of color creates a stark image: the red coat of a young girl as she tries to hide from the Nazis who are “liquidating” the Jews of the Kraków ghetto. Later, Schindler sees a body clad in a red coat among a wagon of dead bodies being carted off for disposal.

Not everyone is impressed with Lipnitskaia’s performance choice. Critics pan the idea that the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust should be “trivialized” in a figure skating routine. That is the wrong perspective.

Lipnitskaia’s choice to portray that girl on the ice today is a bold statement that echoes the fundamental principles of the Olympic Games, namely that “[t]he goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” The girl in red also challenges the leader of her country, directly to his face, to reconcile the Russian president’s desire to host these Games with his disregard for human rights.

It is true that the Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany in World War II; the USSR was not complicit in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the hands of the Russian Empire are not free of the blood of genocide.

The policies of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created a famine that killed millions in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Today, Ukraine is still fighting to exorcise the ghost of the long Soviet presence in its borders as the nation determines its identity in a new Europe.

In fact, Sochi itself may have been the site of the first modern European genocide: beginning in 1859, Russian emperor Alexander II engaged in a campaign to relocate the Circassians by massacring the North Caucasians in their native villages.

While the act was not perpetrated by the Russian government, the Caucasus Mountains were also the setting for the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. Even today, the Caucasus is a hotbed of separatist movement and brutal government crackdowns. The terror threat at the 2014 Games is directly connected to the unrest in this region, including Chechnya, at the edges of Moscow’s grasp. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing suspects had ties to radical Islam in the Russian republic of Dagestan. This unrest underlines the sense throughout the region that oppression has been a way of life for centuries.

The socio-cultural focus of these Games from the American perspective has been on Russia’s ban on “homosexual propaganda.” Putin himself has said the nation must be “cleansed” of homosexuality. That language is chilling, and one can only hope this is a subpar translation of Putin’s Russian. If it is not, the global community must be on alert and be ready to take action.

All of these elements make the decision of the International Olympic Committee to award the 2014 Olympics to Russia difficult to understand. The IOC seems to pay lip service to the supremacy of human rights while granting financial reward and international prestige to a government that has not valued those very same rights.

The Olympics judges at the Iceberg are equipped to struggle with assessing the technical skill and artistic beauty of Lipnitskaia’s skating. And at 15, Lipnitskaia may not even comprehend the full weight of her performance. But it is the duty of the rest of us, the viewers of these Games, to recognize the moment of reflection that has been created by Lipnitskaia and her team to portray such a stark moment in such a vital film.

Kraków, Poland, is one of five applicant cities to host the 2022 Winter Games. If Kraków, a city that has overcome such a terrible chapter in human history, should be awarded the Games, the IOC will have presented an opportunity to showcase the triumph of the human spirit instead of shilling for a regime that does not demonstrate a concern for the very principles on which the Games were founded.

Here’s hoping the IOC has the wisdom to make as powerful a statement then as Lipnitskaia did today.

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Introducing the ‘Modern Urban Gentleman’

“A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”

These words of George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, give voice to the purpose of my life.

That is not the sort of statement a person makes without serious reflection. It has taken me 30 years of introspection to reach the point where I can make such a declaration. In those 30 years, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about what really matters.

I’ve learned that sorting out our lives is a process. We spend our teen years answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” by talking about our imagined future careers. In our 20s, we meet the hard realities of those careers and have existential breakdowns about “where I should be by now.”

As I enter my 30s, I’ve realized the question we’ve wrestled with all along — what do you want to be? — isn’t about a career at all. Careers don’t define us. We are defined by something more. We are defined by the impression we leave on the people and places we encounter.

I know now that I want to improve the lives of those I meet. I want to better the world, not just occupy it. I want to leave a legacy. I want to put more in than I take out. I want to be a gentleman.

Of course, the status of “gentleman” was once only attainable by noble birth. That would certainly disqualify me from the moniker right at the start. Fortunately, the word has come to represent something more, something achievable, something honorable.

Today, a gentleman is, by the book, a man who treats other people in a proper and polite way. The definition also touches on the notions of chivalry and courtesy. But for me, “gentleman” in the modern context encompasses a broader concept.

I would like to explore that concept in this space. To that end, this is the first entry in a new column on Curiata.com about what it means to be a gentleman in the modern-day, global city we all inhabit.

Today, I introduce to you the “Modern Urban Gentleman.”

The Modern Urban Gentleman is a men’s lifestyle column that celebrates the qualities of 21st-century manliness. The modern urban gentleman understands that being a man takes more than anatomy: it takes cultivation. A gentleman of today is rooted in tradition, embraces the here and now, and leads the way boldly into the future. He is a complete man, inside and out, always striving to better himself in every way.

The modern urban gentleman makes and leaves an impression on everyone he meets. His fashion is classic with a contemporary twist. He is impeccably groomed and tastefully accessorized. He understands that the way he presents himself reflects the respect he has for himself and for those he entertains.

His aura of confidence is backed up when he opens his mouth to speak because he is well-read, engaged in the community and the world, and true to his word. He develops an interest in as many diverse areas as he can in order to provide stimulating conversation to each person he encounters. He learns and practices useful skills that improve the world around him, connect him with other people, and perpetuate our rich cultural history. He respects the earth and understands his instinctual connection to and dependence upon it. He is self-assured but always humble.

The modern urban gentleman is not restricted by location or by antiquated expectations of what it is to be a “man.” Instead, he is the one who defines his own identity. The modern urban gentleman is, at heart, a man on a journey of self-improvement.

Self-improvement is, by its nature, always aspirational, never attainable. It is littered with many failures and much perseverance. I fail in meeting the standards of the modern urban gentleman every day. But that’s the whole point of “improvement” — we can always be better.

I want to invite you to join me on my journey. I hope I can motivate you, and I expect writing to you will motivate me. My wish is that the Modern Urban Gentleman will provide a spark and prove a resource to create and support my fellow gentlemen.

Being a gentleman is a lost art. Maybe it is one that never really existed at all; nostalgia can be a tricky thing. But that’s no reason not to strive to be one today and every day.