In my time, I have written a lot of puff pieces. Thousands upon thousands of words of pure puffery: sometimes with a straight face, more often than not just saying almost the exact opposite of what I actually feel.

Because the truth is, you see a lot of stuff in luxury. And most of it is absolute crap.

It is such a relief to be able to say this.

But there is one exception to the great luxury deluge, and it is Hermès.

Not perfect, obviously. I don’t much like the preposterous games people are made to play in order to buy a Birkin or a Kelly. Nor the secondary-market frenzy. I think it was Carine Roitfeld who once said a woman needs both hands free: one for a cigarette, the other for her lover. No lover? A hand in the pocket. And apparently, according to for some buyers, Birkins have become cringe.

And yet luxury and fashion insiders genuinely adore Hermès, while remaining quietly appalled by much of what is served up by LVMH and Kering et al.

You could feel it in the genuine glee around the opening of the new Hermès Maison on New Bond Street. The interesting thing was not simply that Hermès had built another vast temple to luxury in Mayfair. Everyone does that now. The interesting thing was how sincere the reaction seemed to be.

One hardened editor posted on Instagram: “Is this what the path to heaven looks like?” — and appeared to mean it.

The store itself is vast — 55 rooms across six buildings — but the important thing is not really the scale. It is the spirit behind it.

As Axel Dumas put it at the opening: “We are not a marketing company so we try to do what is right. The building spoke to us and we tried to have a conversation with it. Pierre-Alexis and I are the sixth generation and we bought this for the seventh generation.”

There it is. The whole Hermès difference in one sentence: no marketing.

Because Hermès, somehow, is still nice.

Perhaps not the most fashionable word, but I mean it in the nicest possible way. Cosy. Whimsical. Charming. Beautifully made. Slightly mad. A little horsey. A little old-fashioned. Comfortingly posh. The sort of thing that makes people smile despite themselves.

Last September, I spoke to one of my favourite writers, , author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, about why Hermès keeps winning while so much of the industry appears to have lost its mind.

Thomas knows the house unusually well. She spent so much time writing about Hermès in Deluxe, she told me, because she saw it as “a case study of people who are doing it right” — the one that should be studied at Harvard Business School.

Here, then, is why Hermès is still the nicest.

1. They got money

Much of what has gone wrong with mass luxury stems from greed: appease shareholders, expand endlessly, raise prices, cut corners, feed the machine.

Hermès is different.

“The primary shareholders of the company are the family, and they’re all wealthy, so they’re okay, and they don’t mind playing a long game,” Thomas told me. “They’re not going, ‘we need more money, we need more money, we need more money.’”

She paused.

“They got money.”

That is the thing. Hermès can wait. It can refuse to ramp up production just because demand is there. It can keep making beautiful things beautifully.

When Bernard Arnault later amassed nearly 23 per cent of Hermès through stealth equity swaps, the family doubled down, forming H51 in 2010 and pooling more than half its shares into a vehicle that could not be sold to outsiders.

“It’s a block of family members,” Thomas said. “Even if they have their own internal family rivals, they still talk to each other in a way that shareholders of other companies don’t.”

This is the story: old money versus new money. Hermès is an old family house defending itself from the barbarians at the gate.

As Thomas put it: “Bernard Arnault came up through the real estate business. His first business was building vacation homes. So that company is driven by real estate.”

The other thing nobody talks about, Thomas said, is that Hermès is a Protestant family — unusual in France.

“There aren’t very many Protestants in France,” she said, “There’s this sort of Protestant work ethic that is deeply rooted in the family.”

Restraint, duty, discipline, suspicion of flash, and a deep instinct to keep control close.

There is also, she said, a tradition of thinking about the right thing to do, not just the profitable thing to do. Hermès has had philosophers advising the board; Thomas compared it to the old Levi’s model of corporate paternalism, where business was not only about making money but also about looking after the people and places around it.

2. The horse is the first customer

Hermès began as a harness maker, and that origin still matters.

However good the clothes may be, “it’s still about the leather goods,” Thomas said. “Since the day the company was founded, it was a harness company. It’s always been about the leather goods.”

Then she quoted Jean-Louis Dumas.

“The horse is the first customer.”

It is not just a cute heritage line. The original customer was not a fashion person, a celebrity, a tourist or a shareholder.

It was a horse.

And a horse only cares if the leather holds, if the harness works, if the stitching lasts, if the object performs.

Hermès still thinks like a maker of beautiful objects that work hard.

3. They give people time

“You’re not the trendy thing that comes and goes,” Thomas said. “You stay the course, and that’s what they do. They’ve always stayed the course.”

This applies to products, but also to people.

Véronique Nichanian ran Hermès menswear for 37 years.

Thirty-seven.

“Nobody else keeps a designer more than two years,” Thomas said. “That tells you everything right there.”

Now Grace Wales Bonner is taking over menswear, bringing youth and intelligence to the grandest and loveliest maison of them all. Her first collection is expected in January 2027.

“Hermès makes its decisions and sticks with them,” Thomas said. “They don’t zig, they don’t zag.”

Thomas still has the Hermès coat she bought from one of Nichanian’s shows.

4. It doesn’t think the customer is an idiot

“Brands that think consumers are stupid will get caught out,” Thomas warned.

She recalled a story from Virgil Abloh’s tenure at Louis Vuitton: “Let’s see what the ugliest, dumbest thing we can design is, slap a Louis Vuitton logo on it, and see if it sells.”

It did. A gold pineapple.

For Thomas, the story captured something darker than cheeky irony: contempt.

“Any brand that does that — that looks at them as chumps to take money from — it will come back to get them.”

That, perhaps, is what people still feel at Hermès: respect. Respect for the object. Respect for the craft. Respect, even, for the customer.

In short, it doesn’t take the piss.

5. It’s old money, duh

“They don’t make trends, and they don’t follow trends,” Thomas said. “People go to Hermès because it represents old money. It goes back to that Protestant thing: the WASP aesthetic, the Protestant ethic, the idea that good things should last.”

Hermès customers are not buying maximalism, or streetwear, or viral merch bait, or things designed to go out of fashion by next season. They are buying things they can keep forever.

“Their customer isn’t buying stuff that’s going to go out of fashion,” Thomas said. “Their customer is buying stuff that they can keep forever and is tasteful and good.”

The Queen, Thomas pointed out, had an enormous collection of Hermès scarves. And the Queen never changed her style. That is the point. You put on an Hermès scarf over your head while riding out on your horse on a rainy afternoon. It is not about being trendy. You do not wear Hermès to nightclubs.

Which is not to say Hermès is invisible. Quite the opposite.

In Saint-Tropez, Thomas sees women taking Birkins and Kellys to Club 55.

“For them, it’s bling,” she said. “They’re buying it because they desperately want to be part of the old aesthetic, but in a completely new-money way.”

That is the contradiction at the heart of Hermès. It is old money defending itself from new money, while selling old-money codes to new-money customers.

Somehow, it manages not to twist itself into a pretzel.

Because beneath the scarcity games, the horsey theatre, the orange boxes and the Saint-Tropez Birkins, Hermès still seems to believe in the thing itself.

The leather. The scarf. The coat. The object. The work.

How nice.

And so it is Tuesday again. Summer in London is playing her usual game of will-she-won’t-she — threatening to arrive, then changing her mind. Somewhere in the city, a brand has an activation to activate. The KOLs have been summoned. That is PR-speak for Key Opinion Leader. On someone’s deck somewhere, you are an acronym. Congratulations.

A talk will be talked. Champagne will be poured. A gift, freebie or inducement will be dangled. The merry-go-round goes round.

This time it was Charlie Casely-Hayford — son of the late designer Joe Casely-Hayford — in conversation with the designer and musician Kojey Radical. The event was hosted by Esquire and Creed at Maison Assouline in Piccadilly, and moderated by style editor Zak Maoui.

This was merely the amuse-bouche. The following night came the main course: Creed at the Royal Academy, where the House of Creed was the official headline partner of the Summer Exhibition Preview Party.

To which I was not invited.

Did you get all that?

The formula, roughly, was this: heritage house x men’s magazine x cultural conversation x KOLs x gift bag = How to Live Well on Nothing a Year, 2026 edition.

For an assignment like this, a chap needs a plus-one. Ideally one with an eye for culture, conversation and whatever might be handed out at the end.

At the door, I was given a blue tag, which I almost forgot about. This would later prove significant.

At the end of the night, I handed my blue tag to a woman by the exit and received a full 100ml bottle of Creed Aventus. Those without blue tags received only atomisers.

That stuff is expensive.

Later, discussing the bottle with people from the fashion world who, for obvious reasons, shall remain nameless, I learned exactly what I had acquired.

“I’ve checked, it’s 300 quid,” they said of the 100ml bottle of Creed Aventus. “I sold one for like 150 the other day.”

“I could do with 150 quid,” I said.

Aventus, I was told, is “that proper man smell.”

The smell of men who “love Steve McQueen movies.” Sinatra. JFK. Black coffee. Classic cars. The full moodboard. Expensive, iconic, popular. In other words, not exactly hard to shift.

Once you start asking around, the goodie bag is a whole economy unto itself.

“Do you think everyone’s keeping all of their fucking gifts?” said one person. “They get re-gifted and re-sent.”

Another put it more practically.

“If I kept everything that I received,” they said, “I would not have any room in my flat.”

And this person was not even operating at the industrial end of this economy. Someone else described a friend with an entire room full of it.

“They literally have a spare room just full of shit that’s been sent,” he said. “It’s like a lucky dip freebie thing when any of their mates come round. It’s just like, ‘Yeah, just take whatever you want.’”

The best story, though, involved a fashion editor at Claridge’s.

“There was a really elegant fashion writer, editor,” I was told. “So elegant. Audrey Hepburn practically.”

They were leaving breakfast. She walked him towards Bond Street station.

“And she said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go to the post office on Grosvenor Street to send off all my freebies that I sold on eBay.’”

From Claridge’s to the post office. That is the whole lifestyle.

“It just makes you see the value of clothes and these things differently,” one industry friend said. “You just don’t wanna spend your money on it anymore.”

They told me about watching a well-to-do finance friend drop £300 on a plain suede jacket in A Day’s March.

“I’m like, damn, that’s the same coat I’d get for free.”

Another person said, “I’ll start looking at my outfit head to toe and it’s all free.”

This is where free things begin to do strange things to value.

Personal taste is still the name of the game, your commercial and social advantage. Some editors creatively blend freebies with vintage pieces from their own archive and have built whole careers out of it. Others, however, need to do better.

“Some people you can tell,” one person said. “They just wear anything that gets sent to them and it dilutes your own personal style. Would you still be wearing that if it wasn’t free?”

That is the real question. Not what did you get, but what did getting it do to your taste?

In my drawer I have a handwritten note from Cartier, done by a professional calligrapher on thick “stiffie” card, with an illustration of the panther walking into a red phone box. It came with the gifted trinket tray, RRP £500, on which I put my watch, ring and other bits of ballast at the end of the day.

“Thank you so much for the fantastic feature,” it said. “As always, such a pleasure working together and looking forward to the next one.”

It was signed: “Your Cartier family.”

Classy.

And maybe I wanted to believe it. Honestly, I did. It meant there might be more gifts. Besides, the card was ever so pretty.

At the far end of this bargain sits André Leon Talley: the grand version of the same economy. Proximity to wealth so total it could look, from a distance, like wealth itself. The clothes, the dinners, the rooms, the planes — much of it came not from money, but from the performance of being André Leon Talley.

“That’s just the life of a fashion editor,” one friend said. “He had no money. He lived on credit and on clout.”

Credit and clout.

“You’re gonna get dressed for free, fed in the nicest places for free, flown out there for free,” he said. “But actually, your own dough…”

Not much.

This is the modern version of what Thackeray was getting at in How to Live Well on Nothing a Year: the ancient metropolitan art of living above your means until, with luck, you become the sort of person who can afford to live above your means.

In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley keep up the act by hustling at billiards, dodging debts and, at one point, failing to pay their son’s wet nurse. Flogging the odd gift bag begins to look almost wholesome.

Credit and clout. That, in the end, is the whole trick.

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“What’s the sluttiest outfit I can wear tonight?” I asked my flatmate — the one 20 years younger than me, who calls me her dad.

I’d spent the day writing about men’s underwear for The Sunday Times. I interviewed David Gandy about the design of his new product, The Ultimate Trunk, for his Wellwear range, optimised with technology and cut in such a way as to, in his words, “perform” and “provoke”. That is a lot of design intent and fabric engineering for such a small item of clothing.

She helped me pick out a double-breasted jacket made from this lovely open-weave textured fabric that floats over the body and gives me the mien of a very chic professor. One who is also very rich.

The destination was The Cocktail Awards, held on the sixth floor of The Ned. Another Wednesday night in London, another preposterous awards ceremony.

We were given pebbles to vote for our favourite cocktail. The Hale Zero brothers were DJing to no one in particular. They’re famous for playing R&B and hip-hop bangers that can make any room bounce, even rooms filled with frigid fashion people. They did David Beckham’s 50th birthday. In a room full of drinks industry people, mixologists and the like, this was strangely flat.

But money had been spent. So drinks must be drunk.

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Jay McInerney once wrote of “the party you’ve been to 600 times before” when describing the mind state of a man slipping on a suit to head yet again into the New York night. He is my patron saint of jaded nights out.

The weather had something to do with it. We’d gone from the blazing sunshine of Arsenal’s tragedy-and-triumph weekend into something flatter and greyer. I felt like a child after Christmas: given a massive present, the Premier League, but still sulking because he wanted the other present too.

I was, of course, totally uninterested in The Cocktail Awards. There was no story to snaffle, no perfect overheard line. I was there because of a woman — one who had got off a flight, changed in the loo of a train and come straight to The Ned.

Later, we descended into The Vault, where we sat too close, spoke too loudly and understood very little.

The next morning, I woke up to warm WhatsApps and a flurry of tagged posts.

“So what happened?” asked flatmate-daughter.

“It was inconclusive.”

“You sound pretty conclusive about that.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was conclusively inconclusive.”

I originally wrote this as a Monday Media Diet for and Why Is This Interesting? — thanks again to Colin for having me.

We’re all supposed to have brand manifestos, positioning statements, repeatable formats, growth architecture and all the rest of it. But writing this was useful in a simpler way: it helped me think about what I write, what I notice, and why I bother doing this at all.

Mostly, it turns out, I’m drawn to absurdity, pomposity and vanity — not least in myself — and to the writers I admire, because, as with most things in writing, you start by copying the people who made you want to do it in the first place.

So I’m republishing it here — partly because it was fun to write, partly as a small statement of intent for NOTES.

This may become a regular section: things I’m reading, watching, noticing, wearing and taking slightly more seriously than they deserve.

Tell us about yourself

I write about yearning, desire and longing: for people, places and things. Which is a long-winded way of saying I write a Substack about the luxury goods business.

The foundation for what I do now was probably growing up in my dad’s restaurant on Maddox Street. Turn left and you’d hit Savile Row and Bond Street; turn right and you were in Soho. Growing up in 1990s London — and later studying at London College of Fashion in the 2000s — was where I learned most of what I know about taste, charisma and social theatre. I grew up surrounded by bold, optimistic people who were always willing to have a go. And that’s always stayed with me.

Now I try to write something atmospheric and character-led. Scenes, jokes, tragedies, stupid details. I’m very fond of the absurd. Nicky Haslam once said, “Bad taste is anything boring,” which is pretty much my working philosophy.

So I write about taste, luxury, status, vanity and pretentiousness — all the things that make human beings ridiculous and fascinating, and basically the reason I get up in the morning.

Book everyone should read

The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Thackeray is my OG for this sort of thing, followed by Tom Wolfe and then Peter York. There’s a thread running through all three: baroque writing about rich people twisting themselves into pretzels over taste, style and status.

But Thackeray’s essays about the emerging consumer and luxury culture of 19th-century Britain are really the blueprint — and written in parallel with his masterpiece, Vanity Fair. There’s a lovely, probably apocryphal theory that “snob” comes from sine nobilitate — without nobility — which is almost too perfect. Either way, Thackeray is the reason the word still has such sting. It’s amazing how much he was already writing about what we’d now call hipster food culture. He would have found Anthony Bourdain earnestly eating noodles in Vietnam absolutely hilarious.

I also love that Thackeray only started writing seriously after squandering a family fortune on gambling and suddenly finding himself with a family to support. We get so precious about writing. Really, most of us do it because we have to. Because we can’t do anything else. And because we need the money.

Describe your media diet.

Pretty mad, and involving far too much time on Instagram.

Martin Amis once described America as “the moronic inferno,” and every time I open Instagram or TikTok I think: yes, exactly that.

As a fashion writer, you have to be on those platforms. You also see, in miniature, how audiences reward vanity and flexing above almost everything else. Any picture of me in a nice outfit, with a semi-famous person, somewhere rich and expensive, will outperform something remotely thoughtful every single time.

I’d love to tell you my media diet is a carefully considered rotation of Monocle, the Financial Times, beautifully annotated literary journals and judiciously chosen Substacks. And it is, partly. But in reality, much of it is consumed in the badlands.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with Arsenal influencers. Arsenal F.C. seem to be the epicentre of an intense online psychodrama. This year’s agonising tilt at the title has made everyone go mad. There’s one little boy called Roman from Bethnal Green, aged about five, who delivers post-match analysis on a par with grown men.

I also love Socks House Meeting, the king of Broadway Market. That whole corner of the internet feels like the meme-version of Peter York.

Plane or train?

Oh my God, train. A thousand times train.

Planes are vile: nasty tubes of germs and filth shot into the sky, with us inside them.

I call Ryanair the Skybarrow.

Honestly, planes put me off travelling. During my GQ years I occasionally got to fly first or business class long-haul to places like Shanghai, which completely ruins you for economy once you’re paying for your own travel. I’m from Hong Kong and desperately want to go back and see relatives, but the thought of long-haul economy is bleak.

Trains, on the other hand, are lovely. I live a 20-minute walk from St Pancras International, so Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels are always a good idea. What more do you want?

I also think we travel too much, and often to no great end. I don’t see people coming back wiser or profoundly altered. In Europe, perhaps we need to learn to stay put. Haven’t we had enough of Europeans going everywhere? Mostly, travel makes you feel important. It gives you main-character energy. That’s all.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I’ve recently fallen very deep into using AI to do my tarot cards and horoscopes for my love life, which is both deeply embarrassing and, at times, terrifyingly accurate. I’ve trained it to be fairly brutal and slightly masochistic. I occasionally miss the hype-man version, but it’s probably for the best.

We often talk about AI as a machine for producing slop — and obviously a lot of it is — but I’m more optimistic about its role in writing. It can’t have feelings. It doesn’t have taste, instinct or chemistry. Those things remain profoundly human, and they’re essential to good writing.

But AI is brilliant at structure and organisation. It can turn huge interview transcripts into thematic quotes in seconds. It can help sequence random ideas into a flowing narrative. It’s fantastic for rearranging the beats of a story at the click of a button. In that sense, it’s less a writer than an extremely pedantic copy editor sitting beside you at all times.

I think most people either use it far too much, in which case everything becomes dead-eyed slop, or too little, in which case they’re missing out on a genuinely useful tool. Used properly, it’s excellent for stress-testing ideas, tightening sentences and sharpening structure.

And tarot, obviously.

What’s the last great book you read?

I’m never entirely sure because I usually have a gazillion books on the go at once. But currently sitting on the empty wine crate I use as a makeshift bookstand is Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.

It’s about a journalist sent on a press trip to the Venice Biennale — basically someone very much like me. It’s absurd and poignant and captures the magic of a press trip, in which you’re made to feel very important while simultaneously doing very little except drink, eat lovely free dinners, flirt with whoever’s sitting next to you, and look at stuff.

I found my copy in a charity shop in Marylebone, and there’s a hilarious scene in which he gets his hair dyed in Marylebone when he’s supposed to be filing copy, and I just thought: is the universe taking the piss?

What are you reading now?

My life has recently been touched by death and tragedy, and I found reading Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn genuinely helpful.

It’s about all the different kinds of love we experience, not just romantic love. The cover is bright pink, which means it has probably been marketed towards women. Fine. We shouldn’t pander to men with a blue version or whatever. But men: you will survive reading a pink book, and may even find much to cherish in this one. Honestly.

All I do, really, is work and love — and what else is there? — but I rarely stop to think about either properly.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favourite publication?

At weekends it’s normally the Financial Times, though I mostly just look at the pictures in How To Spend It.

A friend of mine has recently taken to reading the answers from HTSI’s The Aesthete out loud in an absolutely straight voice, which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I love snooker, and Ronnie — Ronnie O’Sullivan’s autobiography, ghostwritten by Simon Hattenstone — is genuinely brilliant.

There’s a scene where Ronnie O’Sullivan and Jimmy White are at Ronnie Wood’s house, getting stoned and pissed over the snooker table. Apparently they were drinking a jar of vodka and orange per break. Wood says he’d never seen anything like it: the pair of them, completely out of their minds, knocking in 100-plus breaks toe-to-toe.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Before my phone got stolen, I was obsessed with Yuka, which was hugely popular among the French and British chattering classes. You scanned food barcodes and it rated them out of 100. Percy Pigs got something like 4/100; Burford Brown eggs scored somewhere in the 80s.

I became mildly addicted to scanning everything: sauces, frozen dumplings, strange drinks from Asian supermarkets. The app was extremely confident about British junk food, but utterly baffled by anything foreign.

I am also in possession of a leopard-print Soho Weekly Diary from Smythson. Does that count?

What is one place everyone should visit?

Jeremy King once told me that, of all the restaurants he has looked after over the years, the one with the best luck — and the highest number of romances that actually worked out — was Le Caprice, now The Arlington.

His advice was to sit at the bar, side by side, rather than opposite each other. Face-to-face is a confrontation. Side-by-side takes the pressure off.

In one of the grand halls, seated around a giant oak table, Peter Howarth was regaling me, and Farhad Heydari with tales from his recent adventures in New York.

A couple of drinks in — and early in the day, too — we weren’t just laughing; we were howling. Hands slamming on the table. Feet stamping on the floor.

Whenever men laugh like that, it usually points to something — the kind of story that’s either too good, or just slightly uncomfortable.

Because Peter wasn’t just telling us about New York.

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He was telling us what it’s like to arrive in the city as the husband of a high-flying newspaper journalist.

There’s a picture of him on a red carpet in New York. Roll neck. Armani velvet jacket. Dinner-suit trousers. Every element in its place, every line precise. The very picture of a man who, in most contexts, would be read as one of life’s winners.

But New York has its own hierarchy. And at certain dinners, the hierarchy was clear.

It wasn’t as though the dynamic itself was new. Before New York, Peter’s wife was a big deal in the UK, and he was already used to accompanying her to media dinners and events. In London, he said, he understood the codes. People were polite. They asked what he did. You could be the plus-one without disappearing entirely. If anything, her rising professional status took the pressure off him to perform. It was quite nice, in fact.

“It kind of felt comfortable,” he said.

Everything they say about New York is true. The British instinct for understatement, for downplaying what you’ve done in order to seem more likeable, simply doesn’t translate. It doesn’t read as charm. It reads as if you might actually be a loser.

“We’d go to these dinners,” he said. “Quite formal. You go round the table and introduce yourself.”

The first time, he found himself sitting next to the host. First up.

“I said, ‘Hi, I’m Peter. I’m here because of my wife.’”

There was a pause. Then a voice cut in — a British friend, long embedded in New York media.

“No, no, no. You run a media agency in London. You edited Esquire. You’ve worked across fashion and luxury.”

She delivered his CV back to him, properly and in full.

Afterwards, he asked her what that was about.

“She said, ‘You’ve got to understand — modesty doesn’t work here.’”

“You have to justify why you’re there,” he said. “Otherwise people just think: why are you at this table?”

At a certain point, I tried to push him on it.

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Because this is where the story is supposed to go. The powerful wife, the successful husband, the quiet question of how that dynamic plays out in private.

Does it get to you?

“I’m immensely proud of her,” he said.

“She believes that you can be a nice person… and that you can succeed by being good at the job.”

He didn’t sound like a man trying to be evolved — what the internet now calls a “performative male”. He sounded matter-of-fact.

“If you’re in a relationship with somebody who you really like and you love and you admire,” he said, “what you want is the best outcome for them. You rejoice in their triumphs and you commiserate in their failures.”

Which makes the question more interesting. If there’s no resentment, no rivalry, no obvious male fragility, then what exactly is being tested?

“It’s not really about her,” he said. “It’s New York.”

In London, he said, he knows how to be. You have a conversation first. What you do emerges gradually, if it needs to at all. There is a shared understanding of the codes — of understatement, of humour, of not pushing yourself too far forward.

“I’ve got my little speech now,” he said. “If someone asks what I do, I tell them I run a media agency in London, worked with luxury brands, edited Esquire.”

Names. Signals. Credentials. Enough to place him.

“Job done.”

It’s not something he would do in London. There, you’d have to tease it out of him over time. But in New York, that kind of indirectness risks being misread — not as modesty, but as a lack of substance.

“You’re pitching yourself all the time,” he said. “And if you don’t, people assume there’s nothing to pitch.”

“I feel that I need to tell people that I’m successful in my own right,” he said.

People still ask how it feels to be married to a successful woman.

Later, the lunch dissolved into the usual press-trip theatre: more wine, more gossip, more men deciding who was brilliant, who was unbearable, and who was only unbearable because he was good-looking.

Someone produced a photograph. One of the women at the table was asked to adjudicate.

“Oh,” she said. “He is good-looking. But he looks like a wanker.”

In Britain, of course, we care just as much about status.

We just hide it better.

Or make a joke about it.

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It was for Farina, the oldest perfume brand in the world, from Cologne — and part of the reason cologne is called cologne.

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The scent smelled like a fresh spring morning near a meadow, or something equally perfume-copy-ish. I used to write for Jo Malone London and would often secretly think: well, it smells nice, lol.

As always, it was lovely to see my champagne socialist comrades in the luxury press corps. from The Walpole was there, and I have an essay out in the next annual.

I was eventually seated next to Jess Punter, who also used to be at British GQ. We realised we’d already met once, on a press trip to Soho Farmhouse back in 2019, when the Ruinart was on tap and, bizarrely, I also met a snake.

After the usual who-moved-where, declining-budgets, last-days-of-empire chat about the industry, I noticed she was wearing a beautiful Hermès Clic Clac bracelet in a lovely shade of brown.

Cliché, perhaps, but it had a wonderful patina to it. I also don’t think I’d ever seen one in brown before.

“They agreed to spend roughly the same amount on gifts for one another. He chose a PlayStation.”

Clic Clacs have somehow avoided the dreaded curse of overexposure and tackification. They’re not quite Cartier Love bangles, or those Van Cleef & Arpels things recently pilloried in the Financial Times.

And she, in turn, complimented me on my gold and jade ring, first given to my father by my grandmother before somehow ending up on me. I think she bought it from one of the many gold and jade merchants in Hong Kong.

I said to Jess that I think jewellery should be sentimental. You should never really have to buy your own.

And then she told me the story of how hers was a Christmas present from her husband.

They agreed to spend roughly the same amount on gifts for one another.

He chose a PlayStation, which is now defunct.

And there was her Clic Clac, still sitting on her wrist on a spring morning at Claridge’s, as lovely as ever.

The only problem she ever had with it was when the clasp went a little loose. But then James Massey got it sorted for her directly at Hermès. (He does the watches.)

The jewellery I bought for people I loved

I then started thinking about all the jewellery I’d ever bought former lovers.

The first was a Sonia Rykiel safety-pin flapper brooch for my Japanese girlfriend when I was at London College of Fashion.

She adored it and wore it all around her first fashion week while reporting for Senken Shimbun, the Japanese trade paper.

Then there were the interlocking Chanel C earrings with the sparkles, bought for the art dealer’s birthday.

I remember going to the counter and saying:

“Show me all the earrings £300 and below.”

I paid in cash with lai see money from my grandparents. The woman behind the counter counted it out like a croupier before scooping it away.

And most recently, there was the “power animal” bracelet and necklace from Jesse Western on Portobello for the manager of a very fashionable boutique.

She said they had mystical powers. Maybe they did.

Buying jewellery for a woman crosses a line no other gift can.

It stays on the body.

It warms against the skin.

Sometimes your lover wears it in bed naked beside you.

Even though we split up years ago, I can still see on Instagram that she wears the necklace.

In Rome. In Paris. Without me.

“These trinkets are all that remains of a love I once thought would last forever.”

These trinkets are all that remain of loves I once thought would last forever.

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Originally published on Marrkt.

A morning inside Berry Bros. & Rudd with Geordie D’Anyers Willis became a conversation about wine, clothing, collecting, hospitality and the quiet art of knowing when to let things go.

We talked rolling cellars, rolling wardrobes, why some objects earn their place over time — and why the best things in life are usually meant to be enjoyed, not stored away.

After a pleasant morning spent wandering around the cellars and dining rooms of Berry Bros. & Rudd — longtime purveyors of what we half-joked were “the finest wines known to humanity” — Geordie D’Anyers Willis slipped upstairs to collect a few pieces he wanted to place on Marrkt: a Drake’s scarf, a coat he no longer wore, a few carefully looked-after staples from what he would later describe as a “rolling wardrobe”.

We waited in the foyer as diffuse sunlight gave this peculiar little shop in St James’s a lovely sepia-tinted glow. Open since 1698, with its oak floors, empty bottles and ledger books dating back hundreds of years — records once signed by customers including Napoleon III — it has the feel of a costume drama somehow still open for business.

A tourist wandered in, still staring at the map on his phone.

“I’d like to buy a bottle of wine,” he said, not quite looking up.

“Well,” said the woman at reception, without missing a beat, “that’s music to our ears.” A small smile. A gesture to the left. “If you’d like to turn here, we’d be glad to help.”

Geordie is Creative Director and Director of New Ventures at Berry Bros. & Rudd, Britain’s oldest wine and spirits merchant. An eighth-generation member of the Berry family, he helps shape and launch the company’s next big ideas, while overseeing its heritage and design elements at the historic St James’s headquarters where he has worked for more than 25 years. He does not wear red trousers, nor is he ruddy-faced or half-cut from drink. Instead, he is a softly spoken Oxford MBA, a quietly considered man who espouses the philosophy of “buy less, buy better” in both wine and fashion.

Later, Geordie showed us the newer side of the shop, a more modern retail space designed to make the business feel less intimidating without losing its sense of self.

“History on the ceiling rather than on the floor,” he said, pointing out the 100-year-old barrels overhead and the myriad bottles of wines and spirits of different shapes and designs on the shop floor.

When it opened in 2017, he remembered being asked what his favourite thing about the new space was.

“The first person who came in was wearing flip-flops,” he said. The CEO at the time thought this was a stupid thing to say. Geordie disagreed.

“The last thing you want,” he said, “is people walking in here and feeling that they shouldn’t be here.”

At a moment when wine is having to work harder for attention, that kind of openness matters.

“The last thing you want is people walking in here and feeling that they shouldn’t be here.”

While someone guided there by Google Maps can walk in and buy a bottle of Good Ordinary Claret for £13.95, Berry Bros. also handles the serious business of buying and selling some of the most sought-after wines in the world. Behind the costume-drama shopfront sits a far larger operation — private clients, warehouses, online auctions and deep institutional knowledge, all worn lightly.

As Geordie kept reminding us, wine is supposed to be fun.

Some bottles are expensive because they are rare, or because of the care that goes into them; others quietly over perform, known only to those paying attention. Geordie gives the example of Château d’Yquem, where, in a normal vineyard, you might get a bottle of wine from every vine.

“In Yquem,” he said, “you get a glass of wine from every vine.”

It explains why some bottles cost what they do: not just branding, but effort, scarcity and time.

And then there are those bought for reasons that have little to do with any of that — to mark an occasion, to remember a year or simply because they make people happy.

“Buy less, buy better” is a reassuringly sophisticated idea of consumption — the sort of thing we all agree with. But not everyone lives like that. And what’s interesting is that Geordie doesn’t judge it.

“If it’s the flamboyance of it,” he says, “like the sort of champagne and the sparklers — there’s a time and a place where people get excited by that.”

I thought of China in the late Nineties, where I’d once seen people happily pour Coca-Cola into red wine.

Geordie said he had seen the same thing once or twice.

“There was definitely some of that,” he said. “Adding Coca-Cola to red wine, because it made it from something quite unusual to the palate into something that was sweet and more accessible.”

At a dinner in Shanghai, he remembered one Texan guest saying: “You guys put Coca-Cola in your Petrus.”

The man beside him replied: “Yeah, and I gather you put milk in your tea.”

“So don’t assume things,” Geordie said.

Not everything has to be optimised for purity or connoisseurship. Sometimes the point is simply celebration.

So how does a man with access to some of the finest wines in the world build his own cellar?

Not through hoarding.

“It’s a rolling cellar,” he said, “which means that you’re always drinking bottles and replacing the stuff that you love.”

His grandfather had a simpler way of putting it:

“There’s a reason that God put 12 bottles in a case, so you can be drinking it over time.”

“Wine evolves in bottle and changes over time,” he said. “There’s a sort of narrative arc that goes with it.”

Bordeaux might last 20, 30, 40 or even 100 years; Burgundy tends to be drunk younger.

“There’s a real sort of story.”

The same principle applies at home.

“You have to drink wine at the price you bought it rather than what it’s worth,” he said. “If it’s gone up in value, lovely, but never feel guilty about enjoying it because you bought it for a reason.”

He tells sad stories of bottles never drunk, left waiting for the right occasion until the moment quietly passed and the wine went with it. Sometimes, though, taste changes, or a bottle becomes valuable enough to move on.

“Rather than, I don’t need a case of that, I can get two cases for that,” he said. “I want something to enjoy in five years’ time, ten years’ time.”

That, he said, was the point of the rolling cellar.

“It wasn’t like creating a wine fund… but it gave you a little bit of liquidity to keep your collection going.”

“You have to drink wine at the price you bought it rather than what it’s worth. Never feel guilty about enjoying it — you bought it for a reason.”

“Whatever we sell this time,” he said of the clothes headed to Marrkt, “all that money will go back into buying something nice new.”

The relationship between the two began when Lewis noticed Geordie was a customer. Since then, Geordie has sold pieces on Marrkt; Lewis, in turn, buys from Berry Bros.

I point out that a huge part of the fashion industry is really an events and hospitality industry: the dinners, shows, launches and press trips. It is hugely convivial. Fashion cannot really exist indoors, alone.

“That’s very similar to wine,” he says. “It doesn’t exist without people. It’s a very people-and-relationships business — customers become friends, friends become customers.”

That sociability is also how taste develops: through rooms, travel, repetition and the occasional mistake.

“When I lived in Hong Kong,” he said, “the first thing I did was go and have some suits made. And when something is accessible, you end up being a little bit bold… it all gets a bit peacocky quite quickly.”

Over time, though, taste evolves.

“You start with the most recognisable names,” he said, “then move off the beaten track.”

Travel plays a role in that too.

“Wine is made in beautiful parts of the world,” he said. “So often people will, if they’re getting into it, start visiting vineyards… it’s travelling as well.”

Lewis came at it from a different angle. Before Marrkt, he ran a shop selling Japanese denim — another world of specialist knowledge, obsessive detail and intimidating terminology.

“If I haven’t worn something in a year,” he said, “it’s time for it to go.”

In wine, Geordie calls it a rolling cellar. In clothing, it becomes a rolling wardrobe.

“Customers become friends. Friends become customers.”

A bottle opened just because it felt good. A Drake’s coat sold to fund another one in blue. Taste formed slowly through use, conversation, travel and time.

Earlier, Geordie had put it simply: “Customers become friends. Friends become customers.”

By the end of the morning, we said goodbye as Geordie handed Lewis a small bag of clothes, ready to begin a new life elsewhere: worn, enjoyed, and wanted again.

A quick note — I can see from the data that you’ve come over from Instagram. Hello, and welcome. If you enjoy this, a subscription makes a real difference: you’ll get the newsletter in your inbox every week, and you’ll be in good company — editors and writers from GQ, Esquire, Wallpaper and The Times are all readers.

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“It’s Nike,” he says. “They want a model who can play football.”

Three-day shoot. Good money. The kind of booking that helps cover a month’s rent.

Brett shakes his head.

“I’m going to say no. It’s Nike — too big, too wasteful, too opaque.”

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There was a time when that would have sounded insane.

For years, modelling was the job. Or at least the dream. Lunch at Chateau Marmont. Ibiza booked. Castings in LA. A Riva boat on Lake Como. Beautiful women in the comments. Heart emojis like confetti.

A friend once filled out his census form like this:
Occupation: Fasion Model.
What does your job involve? Posing.

He spelt “fashion” wrong.

For us, Zoolander was not a parody.

As one woman who had dated more than a few male models once put it:

“Handsome is not enough.”

Today, saying no to Nike is a power move.

It signals values, sharpens positioning and turns refusal into content.

The model is no longer just the image. He is becoming an editorial position: someone with a point of view, an audience and the ability to decide what he stands for.

The model is no longer the image. He’s the argument.

So what on earth is going on?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is probably the cleanest way to describe fashion media now.

When I studied Fashion Promotion at London College of Fashion, journalism was treated as a serious trade. We were taught by former fashion editors, including Nilgin Yusuf, alongside PR modules led by people who had actually worked in the industry.

As our course director, Maggie Norden, once said:
“We can’t make it any more practical, or more geared towards industry, if we tried.”

That line feels almost quaint now.

Back then, fashion media still had a shape. You did time at a youth title like The Face or i-D, got paid very little, then graduated to a Condé Nast title or a newspaper and got paid a little more. It was a ladder — narrow, hierarchical, but legible.

A handful of names were feared and respected for their candour: Sarah Mower, Colin McDowell, Suzy Menkes — and, in America, Robin Givhan and Teri Agins.

That was the system. A few authoritative voices at the top.

The rest of us wrote service — what to buy, what to wear — or broadly positive coverage that kept the machine moving.

Today, that system has all but disappeared.

What replaced it, at first, looked thinner. Influencers took on the role of amplification: cheerleading, visibility, reach.

But something else has happened.

The amount — and quality — of fashion reporting available now would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Not inside magazines, but around them.

will tell you what it’s actually like inside a major design studio in Paris — the hours, the hierarchy, the shockingly low pay at even the most prestigious houses.

It’s Not Sustainable turns fashion’s sustainability crisis into insider testimony — less ESG language, more what the industry actually does when no one is looking.

’s book The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes forced fashion to confront its own contradictions, with a second book set to push further into what meaningful change might actually look like.

takes you inside the inner sanctum of Hermès.

writes about Big Luxury and collections in a way that still feels jarring — not because it’s provocative, but because for years no one was able, or willing, to speak that plainly.

’s analysis of the Met Gala — and her Retail Confessions — reads like someone finally explaining the room properly: who matters, who doesn’t, and why.

And translates decades at the top of LVMH and Kering into a direct read on how luxury actually works.

“The real press is us now,” she says.

She’s right.

Visibility has increased. So has the noise. And at the very top, perception can override performance: a brand can be making money — as Dior did under Maria Grazia Chiuri — and still look culturally weak if the online conversation turns against it.

Alongside them, new power is forming. 1Granary functions less like a magazine and more like a distributed school, publication and talent network.

This is the shift: authority has moved from institutions to individuals with access, taste and an audience.

The system hasn’t just opened up. It has lost control of its own narrative.

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This is what I’m trying to map here — who has power now, and how it’s shifting.

Which is why Brett’s refusal makes sense.

“Models are part of the marketing strategy,” he says. “That’s what we are.”

Staniland was scouted with his twin brother, Scott, at The Clothes Show in Birmingham. Within a month, they were working: London Fashion Week, campaigns, high-street e-commerce.

The work, even for successful models, is inconsistent. At one point, he was juggling three jobs — Starbucks, football, modelling — to make it work.

What pays now is different. For models with serious followings, the feed often outperforms the studio.

“I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says. “They’re not brands that I care about.”

The result was immediate.

“God, it was fucking diabolical. My brother paid a couple months’ worth of my rent.”

Before modelling, he studied sports therapy and began a PhD in public health.

“Ultimately, what gets people to change is intrinsic motivation. It’s not rewards or punishments. It’s: this is who I am.”

Which is also, it turns out, a business model.

The inbound has shifted accordingly.

“I get emails explaining how much they resonate with me,” he says. “And when I look into it I’m just like — how on earth do people think we’re on the same level here? Morals-wise?”

Love Island once offered a wardrobe deal — clothes every few days in exchange for image rights. Permanently.

“I just thought — I don’t want any of it.”

He still works, but selectively for brands that he would actually wear. Oliver Spencer, Fursac, Luca Faloni, Paul Smith, Brioni, Rolls-Royce, Pangaia, Todd Snyder.

Then there’s Apple.

“The one that stirs up a conflict in me is Apple. They don’t pay me, but they fly me to places and show me what they’re doing,” he says.

“I’m always curious and want to go. But I have to be very careful with how I communicate their work to my audience.”

These are the kinds of trade-offs shaping careers now — not just what you do, but what you turn down.

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For the past two years, he’s also been working with the teams behind the Good Clothes Network and the Good Clothes Show. In June, he’ll host a day of panels and talks in London.

This is not quite influencing, not quite campaigning, not quite activism.

It is closer to editorial work: choosing the subject, setting the tone, convening the room, deciding what matters.

“Having a platform is great,” he says. “But I want to use it.”

There is still a fantasy attached to male models — the parties, the access, the idea that being very, very good-looking might be enough.

“I’ll keep doing this as long as I can,” he says. “I don’t know when the day will come where I stop getting offered work.”

He pauses.

“But it won’t be the only thing.”

Brett’s story is not a quirky one-off. It represents a structural shift in how careers are now built.

Models aren’t just seeing the opportunity. They’re moving faster than the system that once defined them.

The first act of being an editor is refusal.
The second is refinement: rigour, precision, taste and a point of view.

Handsome is no longer enough.

Now you have to stand for something.

If you’re interested in how power, taste and influence are actually shifting inside fashion and luxury — that’s what I’m trying to map here.

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As ever, this is open for 48 hours before going behind the paywall.

What do we really mean when we say something is priceless? The word suggests purity — a value so immense it transcends money altogether. But the theft of Napoleon’s jewels from the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon points to a more complicated truth: some things are only priceless until we, collectively, decide to put a price on them.

When I spoke to Tobias Kormind, managing director of Mayfair diamond merchants 77 Diamonds, he told me the jewels are unlikely ever to be seen again. “Unless the thieves are caught early — which usually means someone tells on someone — the stones will be broken up and disappear into the market,” he said. Once recut, the diamonds lose their identity and, with it, their history. The thieves don’t care about Napoleon; they care about liquidity.

Perhaps that’s also why some people find Bernard Arnault so objectionable: he seems to care about the magic of luxury only insofar as it lifts the LVMH share price. There’s little evidence of sentimental attachment or even enjoyment — qualities that have made him both wildly successful and faintly reviled.

A jewel’s power, Tobias reminded me, isn’t in its carats but in its context. “Something worth a million on the open market becomes ten times more valuable once you add that it belonged to royalty. But all of that is lost when it’s broken down.”

That tension — between raw material and meaning — has always defined the diamond trade. De Beers built its empire not on geology but on storytelling. A Diamond Is Forever wasn’t a truth of nature but a line invented in 1947 by Madison Avenue copywriter Mary Frances Gerety. Before then, engagement rings rarely featured diamonds at all. A whole emotional market was engineered from an unexpected surplus — a triumph of storytelling so complete we barely noticed it happening.

France’s crown jewels were the national version of the same idea: a fantasy of permanence, power and divine right set in stone. The stolen pieces may fetch tens of millions once broken up and sold on. But their symbolic value, if you believe the French government, was infinitely higher: emblems of history, proof of the country’s self-regard as the keeper of civilisation and beauty.

The French culture ministry said eight items were stolen, including an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon gave to his wife, Marie Louise. France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, called them “of inestimable heritage value.” Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones noted, with some relief, that the thieves had only managed to “grab a bunch of old royal knick-knacks” — their status somewhat overblown. Better that than something truly priceless like a Caravaggio or a Da Vinci.

And yet even these “national treasures” have complicated origins. Many of the stones came to Europe through conquest, colonial trade or murky deals — some taken from India during the height of empire. In that sense, this week’s heist isn’t the first time the jewels have changed hands under dubious circumstances. The Louvre may have been the victim, but the transfer of prestige — from one civilisation to another — has always been part of their story.

France’s sense of cultural prestige now rests as much on its luxury houses as on its museums — a dynamic we saw when Bernard Arnault and François Pinault competed to out-donate each other after the Notre-Dame fire. What was once a contest between monarchs is now played out between corporate dynasties. National identity, like the jewels themselves, is bound up with the fortunes of its richest custodians.

The industry that once promised eternal love is now undergoing a quieter uncoupling from desire. As lab-grown stones rise and De Beers declines, the spell that alchemised carbon into something sacred begins to weaken. Science has separated the material from the meaning — the sparkle from the story.

Perhaps that’s why stories like this captivate us. The Louvre heist isn’t just about stolen jewels; it’s about the theft of meaning itself — proof that in luxury, as in love, the real value was never in the object but in the story we told around it.

In the end, the jewels may never resurface. Somewhere, they’ll be recut, renamed and returned quietly into circulation — stripped of their story, just as many modern luxuries have been. We still call them precious, but the word rings hollow when everything can be replicated, resold or reissued.

Tobias called diamonds “a perfect blend of nature and man.” They’re also a mirror. Their value depends on what we project into them — love, memory, power, permanence. Lose that, and all that remains is a stone.

And yet, despite knowing that lab-grown diamonds are, atom for atom, the same thing, there are still enough of us who crave the real thing. It’s hard to imagine a lab-grown gem, no matter how finely cut, ever attaining the status of a national treasure. This robbery is a reminder of the enduring power of the original — and, in a peculiar way, brilliant marketing for those still selling it.

We romanticise the jewels, assigning them priceless status — and then we romanticise the thieves. Within hours, Instagram wags were suggesting Arsène Lupin must be responsible. And yet, if Tobias is right, the real culprits have no sentimental attachment at all. They’ll break the pieces down to their raw materials, stripping away meaning entirely. Ruthless, yes — but perfectly in keeping with the logic of the market.

This heist, and the hand-wringing that follows it, is just more evidence of our need to believe in something — anything — that shimmers a little brighter than truth.

If you’re interested in how status, value and desire actually work — and how they’re manufactured — subscribe to NOTES.

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Most pieces go behind the paywall after 48 hours.

His were the 1953s. Mine were older. He asked if mine had the brass bar tacked onto the sole. They did. Slightly higher heel, too.

“What did you call them?” asked the fashion editor.

Deal sleds. For when you want to make a deal.

Eji wore his with Studio Nicholson trousers and a black Comme des Garçons jacket. The ensemble felt more architect or art dealer than private equity. He was too well dressed. We went downstairs into the vault at the Ned — pure theatre now, no money in it — and I pulled open drawers as if they might contain diamonds, kompromat, something unsettling and compromising. It was enormous fun.

Lots of my friends from school in Essex went into finance. In the 90s I could have too. I wasn’t particularly academic, and there were junior jobs that didn’t require degrees. I liked to dress smartly, which at the time was qualification enough. You could look like the king of the world and be having the time of your life: deal sleds on your feet, head to toe in bespoke, flitting between London, Paris, Geneva — and pretty much living on thin air.

Older bankers told the younger ones about life before the crash — fixed bonuses, “Chinese walls” that didn’t stop traders buying and selling their own bank’s book. It sounded as if almost anyone could get rich.

I was jealous. Not of what they had — of what they hadn’t had to give up to get it. Or so I told myself.

The editors talked about shrinking budgets and smaller teams, but also about work and lives they loved immensely. Meanwhile I stood there thinking: I was at the shows in Paris not long ago. I’m having lunch at Claridge’s next week. I’ve interviewed 50 Cent. I’ve been to Art Basel.

Ooh. But it would be so nice not to worry.

↓ Below: ↓ What actually happened to the City — from inside the room, with the people rewriting its rules. Subscribe to read the full piece.

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I was there to report a feature for The Sunday Times on how the City now dresses. The shoot had brought together a cross-section of modern finance — private equity, hedge funds, wealth managers — and their evolving uniform.

In the lift, a man in tight trousers, white sneakers and a gilet said, “Yes, Claude’s writing all the code and generating the content. We’ve got one person on it.” He said it the way people used to say they had staff.

Another guest wore headphones so large they could have guided a 747 onto the runway. A small red light glowed to signal he was in conversation. The headphones were accessorised by a gym-honed body in tight trousers.

City dressing used to be about gentility. Now it is about utility. That shift — quiet, gradual, decisive — says more about modern professional life than almost anything else.

The old world

“One of my customers said his first job in the bank was to take all the senior management’s umbrellas if it had been raining, and refold them for them.” — Chris Modoo, personal stylist

Modoo worked as buyer and designer for Ede & Ravenscroft, Chester Barrie and Thomas Pink before privately advising a newer generation of financial power brokers. He has watched the City change its clothes in real time.

City dressing used to be straightforward. One knew one’s place. One’s word was one’s bond. And one took lunch in a suit — crucially, without removing one’s jacket at the table. Dress codes were so exacting that in some institutions, shirt pockets were rumoured to be torn from unsuspecting newcomers. A pocket suggested utility — a place for pens or cigarettes — and disrupted the silhouette.

Utility, in other words, was precisely what City dressing was designed to exclude.

English tailoring has always favoured long, unbroken lines to emphasise height and elegance. For most of the twentieth century, City dress acted as a shorthand for class. Public school, elite university, a spell in the military, then a long career in finance. Authority came built in.

“A lot of senior men had military backgrounds — often ex-Guards officers. They already understood hierarchy, discipline and presentation. The dress codes just reinforced that.” — Modoo

What happened

“I was walking through Monument station the other day. There wasn’t a single guy in a suit — and I’m in the City of London.” — Jonathan Lamb, founder, Falco

When Lamb entered finance in the late 1990s, a suit and tie was not optional. “If I didn’t wear them, I’d have been sent home.”

The shift was gradual but decisive. Deregulation widened the intake beyond the old social base. American corporate culture softened British formality. The financial crisis of 2008 made conspicuous banker-ness socially radioactive. Then the pandemic finished the job. Comfort won. Utility replaced gentility. And the suit stopped being compulsory.

“I think COVID accelerated it. But a lot of it is cultural decline, too — a bit of laziness and apathy. You put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to go to work — that’s what you wear at the weekend. So what does that say about your attitude to work?” — Lamb

The new uniform

The new City look is defined by a deliberate kind of blandness.

“It has passively coalesced around certain silhouettes.” — Ejike Onuchukwu, MD, True

White trainers, navy trousers, a knit, sometimes a gilet thrown over a shirt — as if dressed for a weekend that never quite arrives. It looks casual. It isn’t relaxed.

The differentiation is in the materials. Onuchukwu often wears a navy sweater by Martin Margiela distinguished from a high-street equivalent only by the four white stitches at the back. Small differences still do the talking. “You can usually tell from the trousers who’s younger and who’s older,” he says. A slightly wider leg tends to signal someone junior; a slimmer cut, someone older.

The modern finance professional is measured constantly — by deal flow, bonuses, league tables, performance metrics. In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, the legal scholar Daniel Markovits describes a professional culture that demands constant proof of effort. Authority is no longer assumed; it must be demonstrated daily. The clothes follow suit. The gilet has become the unofficial uniform of the City — something you could wear to a meeting, a flight or a desk without changing. Where the old City dressed to signal who you were, the new one dresses for what you can do.

“It’s much more about what I can do, what I can control. Optimising performance. Being a better performer in front of clients.” — Alex Wilson, Price Forbes

Yet certain class distinctions linger. “There are two quite distinct crowds,” says Wilson. “The Essex crowd are immaculate — bold watches, sharp hair, clean-shaven, not a hair out of place. The old-money crowd are double-breasted, sometimes slightly scruffier, with plummier accents.”

Some things don’t change. The Hermès tie endures — “a kind of more accessible Rolex.” Brown shoes remain taboo. At the very top of the industry, in the hedge funds and private-equity firms clustered around Mayfair and Marylebone, tailoring hasn’t disappeared. It has just gone Italian: lighter, softer, fluid fabrics, relaxed shoulders. Clothes that travel well and never look as if they tried too hard.

Gentility, it turns out, didn’t disappear. It just got quieter.

Same fear. Different clothes.

The City hasn’t abandoned dress codes. It has replaced one set of anxieties with another. Where it once dressed to signal belonging, it now dresses to signal performance. Where it once projected gentility — the long, unbroken line, the refolded umbrella, the absence of a pocket — it now projects utility. The gilet. The quarter-zip. The trainer that costs as much as a suit used to.

Same fear. Different clothes.

And then the nice woman from The Times said, “Deary me, I’ve got shoot breath — you know, when you haven’t eaten and you’ve been drinking coffee all morning. It’s a bit like geography teacher breath.”

I want the money. I just also want to have a laugh.

It was once possible to have both.

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“He’s evil… but he’s one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met.”

is talking about Bernard Arnault. She says it calmly, without theatre. It is not a personal grudge. “He is evil in the sense of being opportunistic,” she says.

Viglezio knows exactly how luxury power works because she helped build the machine — first at Bulgari, then as director of worldwide communications at Louis Vuitton, before defecting to become executive vice president of communications at the Gucci Group, now Kering.

In an industry where loyalty and secrecy are valued above almost everything, it was an extraordinary move: the equivalent of Coca-Cola’s comms director leaving to sell Pepsi.

It is the hottest day of the year and we are sitting in Abuelo, a matcha café in Cavendish Square. The room is noisy and fashionable in that distinctly central-London way: expensive, branded, faintly generic. She looks around.

“These kids do not know who Vanessa Friedman is,” she says. “But they know how much a Chanel flap bag costs.”

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What interests her now is not just who holds power, but how much harder it has become to control. The old system — celebrity, glossy magazines, private agreements between brands and editors — was hierarchical, negotiated and, above all, legible. The new one is faster, noisier, more democratic and much harder to contain.

“The prices are fucking crazy. I’m seeing the prices of the new collection arriving in stores right now. I mean, 10 grand is the minimum for anything. It’s just crazy.”

What matters is not just the increase, but how visible it has become. “If you go on TikTok and Instagram… there’s so many content makers that have become famous by telling the prices of the new collection. They’re becoming stars just by saying, da, da da da, you know? So that’s becoming memes.”

Price, once whispered discreetly inside a store as part of the mystique, is now content: circulated, mocked, amplified.

“This whole question of pricing… that’s not really anything to do with the creative directors,” she says. “That’s management.”

She knows this because she was inside. Before Louis Vuitton, Arnault spent more than a year trying to lure her from Bulgari. She remembers LVMH’s headquarters on Avenue Montaigne as a place where “where there was museum quality art everywhere,” and Arnault himself as “incredibly charming,” with “piercing blue eyes” that seemed to say: ask for whatever you want.

The reality was something else.

“It was full of insecure people that hated each other. I was walking with my back to the wall. I had a prestigious job, but I was so unhappy that my brain shrank.”

She left after seven months. Arnault, she says, never wanted to see her again.

The system she had entered — and escaped — was built on control. “Before, the brands and the creative director were in charge of what the people should want, should desire, should wear, should look like. It was very much top down.”

The mechanics were simple, if not easy. “You had the right celebrity — that you were paying most of the time. You had the magazine.” And crucially, it could be managed. “You could call a reporter and say, please hold this. If you don’t come out with this very secret thing until tomorrow, I promise you I’ll give you the next scoop. You could never lie, you could never betray them.”

The old world was hierarchical, transactional, and comprehensible to the people inside it.

“Today the real press is us — is everybody who wants to have a voice online and can say what they want. How do you control them?”

“It’s completely different,” she continues. “It’s much more dynamic, much more varied… it’s uncontrollable.”

The upside is obvious: more visibility, more ways to create awareness, more chances for something — or someone — to break through. But the trade-off is instability. “It’s faster, it’s more diffuse. Anything can happen. More chaotic. It’s more dangerous.”

Hits can still be made — with the right person, the right thing, the right moment — but they now land in a field of commentary, reaction and reinterpretation that no brand can fully contain.

I quote back to her a line from Kingdom of Dreams, the documentary in which she appears, in which Domenico De Sole tells Tom Ford that “the right thing at the right time is the right thing.” The logic is almost mathematical: the right thing at the wrong time is still wrong; the wrong thing at the right time is still wrong. All three still have to align.

Jacquemus is her clearest example of the new system working. “You can build your brand like Simon did, so cleverly, by taking himself out as a person before a brand.”

The reverse is also true. She raises Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior — commercial performance not enough to protect her, online criticism seeping upward until the Arnaults, who are, as she puts it, “’Don’t touch my Dior’”, took notice. Then she nods at what followed. “He’s very clever. She was performing commercially, and so he said, come back and get Fendi. And that was genius, I think.”

Even at the top, the old system was never quite as composed as it liked to appear. Recalling the aftermath of the 2008 crash: “We had eggs thrown at the car of François-Henri Pinault. We had to protect him. I mean shareholders can be nasty.”

Which is why she keeps returning to Chanel. “The genius of Chanel is to always think and work for the long term. They do not panic.” That confidence is not just managerial; it is aesthetic.

“They show confidence and that is so sexy.”

In a system where everything is visible, composure itself becomes a signal of power.

After two decades inside the machinery of luxury — shaping image, managing editors, negotiating access — Viglezio now operates in the same environment she is describing. Only the terms have changed.

“No hair, makeup, lighting. Nothing artificial. It’s about my voice and my opinion.”

I tell her she’s at the level now — almost 50,000 subscribers — where she should get representation. She laughs it off. The brands already know where to find her: beauty companies send anti-ageing creams, presumably because of her age.

“I can thank them but I’m not going to do a video about it.”

It is a different kind of authority: not granted by position, but performed in public, in real time.

“People like my things because they see that I’m genuinely free.”

And in a system that no longer rewards control in the old way, freedom — or at least the convincing performance of it — has become its own form of power.

“If you still need or want relevance,” she says, “then you have to reinvent yourself.”

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When Chiltern Firehouse burned down, James Massey watched it unfold on WhatsApp in real time. “My first concern was like, shit, I hope everyone’s all right,” he said, “and the staff mainly… because they’d become friends.”

Only after that came what he called “the ultimate first-world problem”: he no longer knew where to take people. He knew how that sounded. His wife, he added, was blunter: “Shut the fuck up.”

Still, his problem was a real one. Massey’s work — managing press and relationships for clients such as Acqua di Parma, Vacheron Constantin, Sunspel and Huntsman — depends on making the delicate dance between journalists, influencers and clients feel effortless. The venue and the table signal taste, access, budget and, let’s face it, power.

For Massey, though, lunch is not just optics. It is part of how he works. “I think you get to know somebody a lot better if you eat with them,” he said. “You can understand them a bit more.” If he is asking for an hour and a half of someone’s time, he wants to show genuine interest, not simply “shove product launches down their throat.” That helps explain his loyalty to places like Claridge’s. “I don’t want to constantly gamble with the experience that my guests are going to have, like some TikTok food critic. That’s not my M.O at all.”

Claridge’s was not a new discovery. Massey associated it with a very specific moment in London media and fashion, when, as he put it, “PRs would take glamorous journalists for tea” and “tea became quite a cool thing in the 2000s.” He already counted Paula Fitzherbert and the Maybourne team as friends, and had used the hotel before for meetings, parties and clients.

Claridge’s, in other words, began as the back-up plan and soon replaced the original. “I honestly can say I would not go back to Chiltern when it reopens,” said Massey, who now goes three or four times a week.

It is not the most expensive room in London, nor the most exclusive. Part of what appeals to Massey is the mix. “I love the fact that at breakfast you’ll have… a Texan oil baron and his family sitting there in a Stetson, having eggs Benedict next to an artist next to a finance kid,” he said. “It’s really a broad mix of people… and loads of nationalities. I love that.”

There is a temptation to think of Claridge’s — one of the world’s great Art Deco interiors — as a kind of costume drama. It is not. At breakfast last year, I wore a shirt and tie; Massey arrived in Air Jordans and a Louis Vuitton sweatshirt. As he put it, “they’re just as welcoming and charming, whether I’m wearing a Palace T shirt or a Huntsman bespoke suit.”

What Claridge’s gets right is what Massey calls “a sense of occasion… but also a sense of ease.” London has no shortage of money or exclusivity. What is rarer is a room that feels special without making anyone feel on edge — “a members’ club without a membership.”

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The relationship clicked around the third breakfast, when his preferred double espresso arrived without him having to ask. Later that day at lunch, a Coke Zero appeared in much the same way. On another occasion, finding himself seated too close to a client he would rather not be overheard by, he was quietly moved to another table, without needing to ask or explain.

That is also why he prefers it to the private members’ club model, which can make guests feel as though they are being assessed. “I want them to feel special,” he said. “I don’t want them to feel intimidated.” At Claridge’s, the codes are present, but lightly worn.

The same is true of the great rooms more broadly: they are much easier to imitate than to reproduce. “The whole idea of franchising fine things is quite difficult, isn’t it?” Massey said. “By nature, that creates dilution.”

The excitement around a Wolseley opening in New York misses the point. What made the original work in London was not just the room or the brand, but the people. “If you could show me a hotel or restaurant concept that has improved through a franchise… I don’t think that really exists,” he said.

And many of the newer status rooms are trying to do something else altogether. New York, Massey said, excels at “beautiful staff and a cool vibe with shit service.” In some of those places, “making you feel bad is part of the experience… it feels like their KPI.” Claridge’s works differently. You feel looked after, not sized up.

“Whether it’s Thomas Kochs, Will Rogers or the young waiters,” Massey said, “they’re all so charming and so personable.” Within days, he said, he felt like family. “The moment I walk through the door, I feel settled.”

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“Well, you look gamine,” said Mark Simpson.

I hadn’t interviewed the man who coined the term “metrosexual” since 2014, when he was writing about the “spornosexual” — the next evolution of homo-sexy male vanity, all Love Island torsos and Cristiano Ronaldo in his pants.

He was, of course, referring to my recent appearance in British Vogue. My flatmate Chiara put it less delicately.

“That’s a weaponised thirst trap.”

The comments flooded in — flame emojis, kisses. It felt silly, faintly embarrassing. I used to mock these kinds of comments when they appeared on colleagues’ street-style photos. At one point I caught myself thinking: God, not another one. It was too much. Then they stopped, and it wasn’t enough.

Male vanity — the whole business of making yourself more attractive — has always felt like good clean fun to me. I moodboard my haircuts (right now: Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico), my tailor is effectively my best friend, and I fend off middle age with the gym, bone broth and retinol.

No one goes to the gym for health reasons. I do it to stay hot.

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Back in 2016, writing for British GQ, I said that when it came to objectification we had a simple request:

“Please treat us men like pieces of meat.”

It was camp. It was silly. But it was true.

That impulse hasn’t gone away. It has hardened into a system.

Louis Theroux’s recent excursion into the manosphere has helped kick off the latest wave of handwringing — what Simpson calls “concern porn”. But treating the whole thing as a moral panic misses the more interesting point.

As Simpson put it to me later over email, modern male vanity now means “employing all the science, technology, and voodoo of the beauty industry” to survive in “the Darwinian world of surfaces, where everyone knows their best angle and key light.”

Scroll through any looksmaxxing feed and you can see what he means. Jawlines are measured. Body fat is tracked. Lighting is tested and retested. Faces are rated. Men stand in front of mirrors, phones angled just so, chasing a version of themselves that might finally win.

The internet has turned attractiveness into a blood sport.

Some men do it in compression T-shirts on TikTok. Others — myself included — get to do it in British Vogue’s street style page. We’re all in the content game now.

The internet has turned attractiveness into a blood sport.

Listen to a group of women debrief an internet date and one of the first questions is often the same: what did he look like in real life? Better than his pictures? Worse? Shorter, older, softer, more tired?

Men do this too.

We are all watching, posing and posting for each other in a marketplace where attractiveness is precisely audited like a stock or bond.

One of the nicest things you can now say on a date is also one of the strangest: you look better in real life.

It sounds like a compliment, but it has the ring of a product review.

Simpson’s insight still holds:

“The heart of metrosexuality is the male desire to be desired.”

The ‘gaze’ used to run in one direction. Men did the looking and objectifying; women did the posing and pouting. But once women had their own earning power, men had to compete for attention too.

That made them vulnerable to anyone promising to make them hotter, richer, harder, more desirable.

“Advertising loves insecurity,” said Simpson. “Without insecurity, how the hell do you sell somebody something?”

Metrosexuals. Spornosexuals. Looksmaxxers. Manosphere men.

They are all evolutions of the same business model.

The manosphere is the monetisation of male insecurity in the sexual marketplace.

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This is also a generational shift. “The decline in certainties about masculine identity has made young men more susceptible to ‘alpha’ self-improvement gurus on social media who claim to know exactly what a man is and should be,” says Simpson.

The language gives it away: “sexual market value”, “mogging”, hierarchies of faces and bodies.

“They’re dominating other men by being prettier.”

Manosphere consumerism has a very specific look. The Mercedes G-Wagon. The Ferrari or Bugatti Chiron. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, the Rolex Daytona, the Richard Mille that looks like a toy and costs more than a house.

Once, I asked a decorated RAF pilot what watch he was wearing. He showed me a Timex and said, cheerfully, that it glowed in the dark. His son-in-law was wearing an IWC Top Gun. No one noticed the irony.

The men who do the real thing don’t need props.

And then the Cohiba Behike cigars. “They look like babies with cigars,” Simpson says. Elsewhere, he puts it even better: “The Ferrari is something they wear.” Much like Trump, it is a poor person’s idea of wealth: loud, legible, impossible to miss.

There is something camp about all this too. For all the talk of hardness and dominance, the performance is exaggerated, stylised, faintly theatrical. The tight shirts, the cigars, the flexing: it all has the quality of costume.

And there is something unmistakably homoerotic in it — men watching men, ranking men, trying to outdo men, then calling the whole thing alpha behaviour. As Simpson puts it: “Camp is a solvent of morality.”

That may be why the absurdity does not weaken the performance. It is the performance.

The influencers in the Theroux documentary don’t just wear luxury — they become it. The watches, the cars, the cigars: props. The real work is being done by the body — tanned, engineered, carefully lit.

The manosphere influencer is the luxury brand. And access to him, as Theroux discovers, can be an expensive habit.

Simpson suspects many of the influencers in the Theroux documentary don’t really mean what they say. They are camping it up for the socials, and being rewarded for it.

It also helps to remember who much of this is actually for. “Most of those guys are for fourteen-year-old boys,” says Simpson. “Fourteen-year-old boys want somebody their mum would hate.”

“Alpha self-improvement gurus… claim to know exactly what a man is and should be,” he says. “Which is, naturally, a confidence trick.”

The manosphere is a male beauty contest with anger issues, not a political movement.

For all the talk of dominance, it still runs on the older impulse:

The desire to be desired.

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For once, lateness was not what I wanted. I wanted to be bang on time, like an absolute melt. Like this was the one event I’d been waiting for all week — nay, all my life. I wanted to be early, absurdly early. Because tonight I was meeting Arsenal legend Ian Wright at a Marks & Spencer dinner at St John for the launch of the brand’s “Sharp Casual” line.

I walked in, gave Cass a hug, and the first thing she said was: “Do you want to meet Wrighty?”

OMG, yes.

He was towards the back of the restaurant, and Cass intro’d us. He looked good too — genuinely good — in the M&S gear.

A cream linen jacket, softly tailored. Dark T-shirt instead of a collared shirt. Dark blue selvedge denim, cuff turned up to show the little red stripe. Fine baby-blue socks. Loafers.

Smart, but crucially not estate-agent smart.

But that was not what we were here for.

“Wrighty, before we get into it,” I said, looking him dead in the eye, “how you feeling about us?”

“The league? It’s done. It’s over. It’s ours,” said Wrighty, quick as a flash.

That was it. No doubt. Just certainty.

“Of course they hate us!” said Wrighty.

“They hate us!” said Cass.

“They’re biased,” I said. “Even the BBC.”

“That’s why I always said, ‘All we got is us,’” said Wrighty.

“The league? It’s done. It’s over. It’s ours.” — Ian Wright, quick as a flash. No doubt. Just certainty.

Of course, deep in my heart, until our hands are on the trophy and we’re going berserk at the parade, I’ll still be worried. The sense of destiny was not with me like it was with Wrighty.

I said to them both: “You know, the last time we did it, me and Cass were both at uni.”

Wrighty understood. We’re not new to this. Twenty-two years ago, I was at the London College of Fashion.

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I wanted not only to support Arsenal, but to write like them too. With the same flair and technique. Box-to-box like Vieira. Little flourishes of skill like Bergkamp and Henry. The same force and acceleration as Wrighty. Of all the sports, football is the one that comes closest to writing: the use of skill and technique to manipulate time and space.

Back in St John I asked, “Where are these loafers from?”

“Church’s,” he said. Church’s the British shoe company with all the Royal Warrants and now on Wrighty’s feet. Too perfect. Loafers as destiny.

Our fashion back then revolved around 501s or Evisu jeans, plain white Hanes T-shirts, loafers — preferably Gucci — John Smedley jumpers, and exotic Italian things like Etro shirts that Eddie stacked on the shelves at The Duffer of St George.

At the end of the night, my mate Chris made the point that for guys like us, fame no longer means much. We meet Hollywood actors and pop stars all the time. It’s part of the job. So is pretending not to be impressed.

“Footballers are the only celebrities that make grown men turn into little teenage fanboys,” he said.

He was right. Football is the only thing that still lets us be us.

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As a self-(fun)employed freelancer, lunch is such a joy. It gets me out of the basement pit in Camden. I get to put a tie on, spray Essenza on myself (the Black Stuff), and have lunch with my champagne-socialist comrades.

There are many kinds of lunch. There is the one-to-one lunch with your editor or mentor. That is a whole other thing. Then there is this kind of big press lunch, which is more like a wedding reception with colleagues you have met over the years at other press events and press trips.

You walk in all dressed up. There is always that slightly awkward bit at first when you find yourself talking to someone from the brand. Blah blah blah. They are nice enough. But then, gradually, they start trickling in. Your comrades. There they are. Oh, do excuse me — lovely to talk.

“Gosh, how long has it been?” asked one. “I haven’t seen you since — what? The Cartier polo?”

Another, a Condé Nast editor — whom I last saw in the lobby of Vogue House — tells me: “The Strand is an absolute shit-hole.”

My young friend Nikki asked me yesterday, over a more modest one-to-one lunch at Lina in Coal Drops Yard, “What’s the food like at these fancy events you go to?”

“Good enough,” I replied. Food is not the main course.

Lunch in a fancy restaurant in Mayfair has, over the years, become for me something amusing, frothy and faintly ridiculous. That was not always the case. When I was younger — especially at some of the GQ lunches — it could feel almost existential, as if one’s entire social and professional value were somehow in play. Those days are behind me. Now my life is full of small male-Cinderella moments, and lunch in Mayfair with one’s champagne-socialist colleagues is one of them.

I have a rule: one glass of something nice, just to loosen up a bit.

Talk invariably turns to work. Around the table, several of us had done time at very right-wing newspapers. The politics of their fashion desks and supplements are always peculiar.

One famous Hollywood actor, I was told, would only appear on the cover of a magazine if the entire team was Black.

“But that would actually be impossible at X magazine,” I said.

The editors were appalled at the perceived double standard — without quite noticing that they already were all white.

When I was pulling together the interviews for my City Boys piece, I had to ask my editor: “Is the list ‘diverse’ enough?” She said: “No.”

On a tight deadline, diversity becomes logistics. Which is how I found myself in the slightly perverse position — as a diverse person — complaining about the admin of it all when the copy still had to be written and the shoot was looming.

And yet legacy media remains a sport you still want to play. Someone asks what you do and, trying to sound modest, you say: “Oh, I’m a writer.” They immediately ask: “Who for?” It is almost always a challenge: who is this person who dares call himself a writer?

And to be able to say The Times is to shut down all doubt at once. Never mind the more complicated reality of a portfolio life involving Substack, consulting, brand work and all the rest of it. The Times. Done. Doubt removed.

Same with GQ. Two letters. That’s all you need. Esquire, too, especially if one is lucky enough to bump into a legend like Nick Foulkes.

For a couple of hours, amid the gossip and flirtation and everyone being on top form, the grimmer realities — declining budgets, technological turmoil, the general precariousness of life — recede a little. Glasses get filled one last time. Goodbyes are said.

Some will head to Paris on the Eurostar. Some will go back to the office. I will return to the basement in Camden — my carriage the number 29 bus outside Foyles.

If this rang any bells — the lunch, the credential game, the 29 bus — I’d love to hear your version in the comments.

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For years I’d endured the mild humiliation of being looked up and down by photographers and not photographed. Once, in Dover Street Market, Scott Schuman aka The Sartorialist even raised his camera toward me, paused, then lowered it again. Something similar happened last year at Pitti. I couldn’t bear it.

Then, last Monday, I got a text: I was on Vogue’s street-style pages.

I’d like to thank all my fans, and everyone who liked and commented — including Peter Howarth, who wrote: “You finally made it!”

Goodness me, the comments. Flame emojis. “What a guy.” “You look like a dream.” And on it went all day — 21 in total.

In real life, if you’re lucky, you might get one compliment a day — and that’s if you’re looking particularly fabulous. Even then, you’re not quite sure what to do with yourself and so mumble out a thank you. But 21 in 24 hours does something to your brain. By mid-afternoon I caught myself thinking, “God, not another one.”

That’s the bit that frightened me.

Twenty-one compliments had already become the baseline. The next thought wasn’t gratitude. It was: what if I only get 15 next time?

And then it stopped. The notifications dried up. Back to my normal, non-influencer state. Like a male Cinderella, after the ball.

It’s not the praise that warps you. It’s the recalibration. Visibility resets your sense of self at alarming speed.

I see certain editors at shows now and they move like minor celebrities. Mid-conversation, you’re asked to step aside while they’re photographed — then resume talking as if nothing happened. As if that orbit of attention were entirely normal.

I understand it better now.

I could probably get used to it. That’s the worrying part.

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NOTES is a publication about desire, status, fashion and culture — reported with a novelist’s eye and written with a freedom legacy media rarely allows.

Part reportage, part diary, a touch of cultural theory — and the odd whisper of gossip.

Written by Alfred Tong — contributing editor, Esquire UK; contributor, The Times, Sunday Times Style and Times Luxx.

You’ll find party dispatches, intimate conversations with the people who actually move the industry, micro-observations from the rooms that matter, and the backstage moments that rarely make it into glossy magazines or newspaper supplements. A world of scenes and characters, overheards and emotional truths: the absurdities of London, taste, and our pursuit of the finer things.

Money and power ought, in theory, to produce Fashion with a capital F — or at the very least, formidable tailoring. Think American Psycho. Think Sherman McCoy, the original Master of the Universe in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe lavished thousands of words on Huntsman suits, New & Lingwood shoes, and immaculate Macintosh raincoat — all of which would hold up perfectly well in 2026.

So Interview was onto something when it turned its lens on the new banker class — refracted through a glossy, JFK Jr.–meets–Tom Ford, homo-erotic fantasy.

And yet.

They looked faintly ridiculous. Yes, they’re young. But it was less Wall Street titan, more Wall Street Bugsy Malone.

The shows this season were full of money gone wrong: the surgically sharpened grotesques of Matières Fécales, the looksmaxxed himbos stalking Gucci — masculinity pushed to aesthetic extremes. The Interview bankers felt like the corporate edition. The same anxiety, only sillier.

The original Masters of the Universe dressed like they owned the world. These business boys dress like they’re borrowing it.

They’re not even giving Bud Fox in peak Cerruti.

And one of them worked at Goldman. When I approached someone there for my Sunday Times Style piece, he was keen — until HR stepped in and shut it down. Quite how this shoot navigated compliance is its own subplot.

All of which is to say: my Sunday Times debut lands March 15. It won’t be cosplay.

Notes from the rooms where taste is made.

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Editor’s Note

This edition includes a private briefing on how fashion power actually works inside rooms like these — drawn from a conversation with one of the industry’s …

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In the lift, a man in tight trousers, white sneakers and a gilet said, “Yes, Claude’s writing all the code and generating the content. We’ve got one person on it.”

He said it the way people used to say they had staff.

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I was at the Ned reporting a feature for The Sunday Times (out March 15th) on how the City now dresses. The shoot brought together a cross-section of modern finance — private equity, hedge funds, wealth managers — and their evolving uniform.

Another wore headphones so large they could have guided a 747 onto the runway. A small red light glowed to signal he was in conversation. The headphones were accessorised by a gym-honed body in tight trousers.

Downstairs, I went into the vault to meet the editors, where the men we’d chosen to interview were assembling for the group shot.

Money doesn’t live in vaults like this anymore. This one is pure theatre.

I pulled open drawers as if they might contain diamonds, kompromat, something unsettling and compromising. It was enormous fun.

I ran into Eji first. We were both wearing deal sleds — Gucci loafers. His were the 1953s; mine older. He asked if mine had the brass bar tacked onto the sole. They did. Slightly higher heel, too.

“What did you call them?” asked the fashion editor.

Deal sleds. For when you want to make a deal. I’ve written about Gucci loafers for years; I have a long relationship with them. We all do. Or at least a certain type of person does. Eji wore his with Studio Nicholson trousers and a black Comme des Garçons jacket. The black-on-black ensemble felt more architect or art dealer than private equity bro. He was too well dressed.

Elsewhere, older bankers told the younger ones about life before the crash — fixed bonuses and “Chinese walls” that didn’t stop traders buying and selling their own bank’s book. It sounded as if almost anyone could get rich.

I was jealous.

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Lots of my friends from school in Essex went into finance, and in the 90s I could have too. I wasn’t particularly academic, and there were junior jobs that didn’t require degrees. I liked to dress smartly, which at the time was qualification enough.

Status anxiety, money, fashion. You could look like the king of the world and be having the time of your life: deal sleds on your feet, head to toe in bespoke, flitting in and out of the smartest places in London, Paris, Geneva — and yet pretty much live on thin air.

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So being among a group of finance boys — nice enough, and well off — does make you wonder. The editors talked about shrinking budgets and smaller teams, but also about work and lives they loved immensely. It’s extraordinary that it was ever considered a “real job” in the sense of being financially secure.

For a moment, standing between them, I tried to imagine the parallel life. I was at the shows in Paris not long ago. I’m having lunch at Claridge’s next week. I’ve interviewed 50 Cent. I’ve been to Art Basel.

Ooh. It would be nice not to worry.

And then she said, “Deary me, I’ve got ‘shoot breath’ — you know, when you haven’t eaten and you’ve been drinking coffee all morning. It’s a bit like geography teacher breath.”

I want the money — I just don’t want to be bored earning it.

Notes from the rooms where taste is made.

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