Soigné

06/05/2025

Proudly presenting soigne.co. Check it out and let me know what you think!

A heterodox print publication devoted to Fashion & Culture, Free Speech & Free Expression, honoring Artists, Ideas, and Ownership.

05/27/2025

The popular complaint today is that heels are oppressive—that they limit movement, that they’re painful, that they exist for the benefit of the viewer, not the wearer. All of that may be true in a modern context. But the irony is this: women weren’t forced into heels.

They adopted them.
Just like men once did.

And when men saw that power was being imitated—or perhaps challenged—they shifted the image of power to something else. This wasn’t a conspiracy. It’s a pattern. One that plays out over and over again in fashion.

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05/27/2025

There was a time when dressing like an emperor of Heaven was considered a humble submission to something greater than oneself. Today, to see a Roman cardinal draped in yards of bright scarlet silk—soutane, fascia, biretta—feels almost absurd, like an antique ghost haunting a world obsessed with normcore hoodies and $5,000 “quiet luxury” tailoring.

What happened?

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05/21/2025

What the Met needed—and what Superfine deserved—was danger. Black dandyism has always been about subversion: about turning oppression into spectacle and survival into style. What it got instead was the Pinterest-board version of progress, curated by a woman who has spent her entire career editing Blackness out of the frame unless it served her narrative.

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04/27/2025

Luxury fashion didn’t suddenly discover ethics. It discovered that ethics sell.

Today, sustainability isn’t just a marketing tool—it’s a product tier. Brands like Prada, Loewe, and Saint Laurent now offer $2,000–$5,300 raffia bags as totems of climate-conscious status. “Carbon neutral” becomes shorthand for carbon offsets, and “recycled” often means blending a few plastic fibers into petroleum-heavy fabrics.

The promise? You're buying less harm.

The truth? You're just buying better storytelling.

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04/26/2025

In Washington, where even ghosts seem to require security clearance, James L. Swanson walked like a man who already knew the ending. Not just to the chapter, but to the book, the movie adaptation, and the out-of-print liner notes. He was a raconteur in a city of scripted statements—a man who could quote both Lincoln and Lucille Bluth with equal conviction, and often did.

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04/25/2025

There was a time when fashion didn’t just reflect culture—it mocked it. When designers scorned convention, when models didn’t wear masks like surgical patients but strutted like insurgents. Fashion was once the domain of the dissenters, the provocateurs, the heretics of taste and tribe. But somewhere between the first lockdown and the last brand-approved pronoun pin, the industry traded in its edge for orthodoxy. It traded rebellion for relevance.

And in doing so, it lost something far more valuable than market share: its soul.

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04/22/2025

To counter this cultural softness, we propose a return to Muscular Americanism—

Effete Americanism apologizes for the body. Muscular Americanism sculpts it.

Not the jingoistic flag-waving of empty nationalism, but a revived spirit of effort, elegance, and excellence.

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04/22/2025

Let’s get this out of the way: If this sounds like retro toxic masculinity to you, you’re the problem.

Because this isn’t a cry for dominance—it’s a plea for direction.

This isn’t machismo. It’s mourning.

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04/22/2025

There was a time when killing a man was seen as a moral crisis. Now, it’s just content.

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04/16/2025

He was once everywhere—gracing Armani campaigns, Men’s Health covers, and runway shows that defined mid-2010s American masculinity. Jason had a look that felt carved out of postwar nostalgia and retro-future grit: square jaw, glacier eyes, a body carved for billboards—banished from Instagram with no path to appeal, while the man behind the curtain, Mark Zuckerberg, makes the podcast rounds to rebrand himself as a born-again free speech absolutist. But the industry that built him was the same one that ghosted him.

https://soigne.co/articles-1/f/zuckerberg-says-free-speech-is-back

04/15/2025

“New cultural institutions need to be built – not in coastal enclaves, but within reach of all Americans.”