An alternative dinner suit

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 faraway lands, of mystery hidden in shadows. The covered buttons hint at something concealed, something not meant for everyone to understand.

It conjures the feeling of stepping off a plane in Tangier at dusk, the air thick with potential, or walking the streets of Lisbon at midnight, where every turn feels like a secret. 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 in the mind—smoky, resinous, the scent of Cohibas hanging in the air within the Havana of memory, blurred between the real and the exotic. The atmosphere thickens with whispers of leather, spice, and slow, humid heat.

Wearing it is like standing on the edge of something: timeless yet unknown, grounded but untethered. It carries the energy of a man who is always slightly elsewhere, detached from convention, too consumed by his own ambitions to be weighed down by the ordinary.

Bernhard Roetzel, lensed by Tommi Aittala, wears a custom Heron’s Ghyll mandarin collar suit made from Maison Hellard French linen.