"Gentlemen, rouse yourselves from the slovenly majority, Valet 7 has finally emerged from the subterranean chambers of our printing press to make its crepuscular landfall, and its main theme is sex. A 280-page tome of dissent against the beige mediocrity of the modern street, it is all that stands between you and inexorable march of modernity and its unseductive ills. Among much else fodder for the poet within, we sit down with Nicolas Gabard of Husbands Paris who reminds us that tailoring and indeed style are a dialogue with history—a way to inhabit a silhouette that is as much an intellectual statement as it is a physical one. We perform a necessary exorcism: the ritual cremation of a Birkenstock sandal, committing, finally, this orthopaedic monstrosity to the pyre not out of malice, but out of a sense of civic duty. Ugliness is a cardinal sin that no amount of cork-soled comfort can absolve. Following this theme of heat, David Miro of @paris_image_unlimited peels back the layers of his taste and discernment by taking us through an array of his favourite items. At great length, as is our wont, we survey and discuss the question on every well dressed chap’s mind: what makes a suit sexy and transforms its wearer into a figure of such statuesque potency that he becomes eminently beddable? We pair this with a lament for the tassel, that percussive ornament whose rhythmic clack remains the true soundtrack of a life lived in character. We reflect on a childhood Christmas ritual, where a deflated football was transmuted into a mirror ball of shimmering, dust-filled light—a first lesson in eroticism. Meanwhile, the legendary musician Tommy Mandel recalls a vanished era of rock-and-roll where fingering was fetishized in the pursuit of the decadent chord. There is, as ever, a bloody sight more to get your teeth into. And finally it’s here. Read it before the shadows grow too long and the undertakers are already in the pub. —Valet"
