Dinosaurs and Badgers Thursday. . .

A dinosaur pocket square (a nod to our son's continuing fascination with the beasts) and some socks featuring my Alma Mater's mascot Mr. Bucky Badger. A warm double-breasted navy polo coat, schoolboy scarf (University College, Dublin stripes), and the hat for this week top off today's attire nicely.

I am home once again as I write this, but remain dressed thusly for a 3pm meeting via our old friend Zoom.

Five similar fur fedoras are now in the rotation, in various dark tones though not black, and I wear a different one each week. The mistake a lot of guys make, when I see photos shared in online fora, is in wearing their hats straight across the face, akin to an Amish farmer.

No, no, no. If you're going to wear such a hat, commit to it, and wear your chapeau to one side at a jaunty angle. It also helps if you reshape it carefully with some judicious rolling and careful rumpling to make it yours and impart just the right attitude instead of that 21st century "brand new just out of the box" look.

This is another area where hat guys seem to go wrong. Their head wear always looks as though it is rarely worn and instead resides in a glass case in a museum display somewhere. Sure, I get it. Good hats ain't exactly cheap. But they are meant to be worn and enjoyed after all.

So, how do you pull off a genuine fedora in 2022? Just watch any film noir from the 1940s and early 50s for a tutorial. Think Widmark, Mature, MacMurray, plus a host of other A- and B-list male actors of the era. And then of course there is the master himself. Humphrey Bogart.

There are also lots of period TV series (Netflix, PBS, Hulu, etc.), usually though not always British, where the actors get it right when it comes to classic men's hats. Consider those a valuable secondary source for nailing how to wear a fedora.

Now, I realize that there is a faction out there, which holds the opinion that only "douches" (not my word) wear hats. That may be, but my fedoras never fail to garner positive comments from a wide range of people, from students to 80-somethings. So, I am not sure that I buy into this myopic train of thought.

In short, I enjoy my hats, and if a few others do too, enough to share their appreciation with me now and then, so much the better.

But you've got to own it. Timid anxiety and sneaking around the peripheries of daily life ain't the way. If you're going to dress with intention and leave the house looking more presentable than 99% of the people you will encounter most of the time in our slovenly age, carry yourself well.

Confidence is the unseen part of dressing with panache.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

Up North Style. . .

Bad Dad makes a friend. YMP and Bad Dad on the shores of Lake Michigan. Or was that Crystal Lake? The Grand Duchess takes a selfie in her kayak. How NOT to impress the girls sunning themselves along the river. YMP and Bad Dad kayaking on the Platte River headed toward Loon Lake. J ust back from a week in Northern Michigan in a charming and spacious house on the banks of the Betsie River outside of Thompsonville. A largely pleasant seven days despite some challenging episodes with the Young Master, who has picked up some very questionable habits and language from his friends in the 8th Grade during the school year just ended. But otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves and contemplated remaining for a few days longer since the house was available. In the end, we decided to return home as planned originally since neither my wife, nor I wanted to spend the remaining days chained to our computers in Zoom meetings from our vacation destination. I actually managed to leave the laptop and ip

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and

Classic Style

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