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Exotic glamour
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Exotic glamour is not the glamour of simplicity, nor of the familiar. It is a kind of seduction that lingers—elusive and tactile at once—drawing you in with textures that feel foreign, yet somehow intimate.
The black Mandarin suit speaks this language. The French linen is soft against the skin, but it carries a weight beyond fabric. It's the allure of distant lands, of mysteries hidden in shadows. The covered buttons suggest something concealed, something not meant for everyone to understand.
It conjures the feeling of stepping off a plane in Tangier, the air thick with potential, or of sailing the Bosphorus at dusk, minarets reflecting in dark waters, the distant call to prayer stretching like a thread marking not time but place.
It’s the moment in The Sheltering Sky when Bowles writes of the desert’s vastness—a place that swallows you whole, offering both beauty and peril. The suit moves in the same way: a little dangerous, a little untouchable, like a fleeting glimpse of someone you’ll never meet again.
It’s a kind of elegance that lingers—smoky, resinous, with the scent of Cohibas hanging in the air—and it carries the energy of a man who is always just out of reach, detached from convention, too consumed by his own ambitions to be tethered to the ordinary.
Bernhard Roetzel wears a custom Heron’s Ghyll mandarin collar suit made from Maison Hellard French linen.
Photography by Tommi Aittala.