When someone comes across one of my posts, I want them to pause. Half a second, long enough to feel that something is different before they can say what.
That pause is deliberate.
In Postcards From the Future I wrote about finding The New Yorker and the Sunday New York Times in my school library. As a boy I copied the fashion illustrations into a notebook; I wasn't good at it, but it taught me to look closely and I have been looking closely ever since.
I have always been an observer. Very little escapes me. I notice proportion, balance, colour, the relationship of one object to everything around it. I notice when something belongs, and when one more thing would weaken the whole. I couldn't have named any of it as a boy. I only knew when something felt right. Where that watching began, I wrote about in The Standard, "The Distance" (19 May) the childhood that taught me to read a room before I had the words for it.
More than forty years inside some of the world's great luxury houses refined the instinct and gave it a vocabulary. Neiman Marcus. Hermès. Tiffany. They didn't teach me to see. They gave language to what I already saw.
The eye follows me everywhere, and it asks one question.
Does this belong?
It is how I dress. I'm not a minimalist: I love rich fabric and colour, cashmere, silk, suede. A Dunhill pea coat coat over a plain white T-shirt. A cashmere-and-silk scarf. Cognac suede loafers in exactly the right colour. A watch I have worn for thirty years. None of it announces me. Together it says I paid attention.
It is how I compose a room. I love the grandeur of a Haussmann building; boiserie, rich fabric, the glow of a chandelier. The distinction was never between more and less; it is between what belongs and what does not. So, I begin with warm neutrals and objects that contribute, add one chair in an antique Fortuny fabric that seems to relate to nothing and belongs completely, and then I leave space, not because empty is better, but because the eye needs somewhere to rest.
And it is how I direct the art of my posts. The drawn portraits. The type. The palette. The size and position of a line, and the room I leave around it. I build most of it myself in Canva. When I use AI, I hand it a brief for an image I already see. I use it as a tool. I do not hand it my brand. AI can produce an image. It cannot decide what belongs. That decision stays mine.
I still read magazines. I watch Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, not to copy them, but to understand the visual language of the moment, and often to see what I don't want to do. What I see is sameness. The same hooks, the same slick graphics, the same typography, indistinguishable from one account to the next. The whole sphere has collapsed into one voice.
That is not an accusation. Those creators may have different objectives, a different audience, a different pace to keep. My view is simply different, and different doesn't mean better. I also don't think AI is to blame. AI answers the direction it's given; with a strong point of view behind it, it does remarkable work, and without one it reaches for the familiar.
My work does not look like the feed. That is the point.
The eye scrolling gets used to a rhythm, a hook, a face, big type, fast movement, a grammar built to seize attention. Then it reaches something quieter. A drawing instead of another polished photograph. A palette chosen for character, not for what's performing. Space where it expected more. For a moment the pattern breaks.
That moment is the point.
I've told the other half of this in The Standard, "The Day I Almost Let the Algorithm Rewrite My Brand" (16 June) the night the numbers nearly talked me into softening the work. This isn't that essay. I'll study the metrics; I won't let them author the voice. It may take the work longer to find its people. I'm not building for the fastest applause. I'm building for the person who stops.
They may not know why they stopped.
I do.
The friction is the point.
Amor Fati.
Until next tme,
