Related Recs

👞

AN UNCONVENTIONAL COLORWAY OF THE PARABOOT MICHAEL

I’ve made it clear a few times that I have a love affair with this ancient French footwear model. These became really popular in the menswear space a few years back and everyone and their mother picked up either a brown leather or black leather pair. Suddenly this niche shoe belonged to everyone, both enthusiasts and non. But then you’d see someone with a full brown / white pony hair version. Or you’d see green leather. Or in my case, a matted black leather with pony hair on the tongue. That’s when you knew that someone had ball knowledge. The thing is everyone who wanted to participate in the popularity opted for a safe colorway, and you can see by how often black and brown colorways are resold used online. But a real enthusiast owned the black and brown model, and then also went out of their way to invest in a weirder, more niche colorway. When I bought my pony hair pair I had friends who poked fun at me; three weeks later my fav menswear writer picked up the same pair — thats when I knew there was an even deeper well of menswear nerds out there, all united by weird French shoes.

@marianoleonczik

Apr 11, 2025

👟

Japanese shoes with lore

I love menswear. Like after my wife / daughter / truck, my 4th greatest love is menswear. And there’s nothing better than menswear with lore. Which is why I’ve hunted down and am in talks to put in a (lowball) offer on shoes with a fun history attached to them. Ugly? — Yes. Culturally significant? — No. Special to me? — Extremely. Why wear just regular clothing when you can wear clothing that looks like it was formulated in a lab?

@marianoleonczik

Jan 30, 2025

👟

Vinny’s Maree t-strap + more

Ahhh, it’s been a while since a clothing ask has scratched that itch in the back of my head. I think the Vinny’s take on a Mary Jane is 10/10. The black leather (brown looks nice too) + the chunky sole is an easy win. I can’t wait to wear these around with shorts and pink socks peeking through the opening. They also do an incredible Fisherman sandal. I know these might not be for everyone but I’ve seen countless fits with these, including recent PI.FYI guest Aaron Levine, aka the menswear god himself. For the girls, y’all have cool choices that the boys don’t get to have 😔 Look at these Mary Jane’s from Solovair in a gorgeous olive leather. Look at this Fisherman / Mary Jane hybrid from G. H. Bass. And the Sebago Angelina’s that broke the internet seem to be going on sale on some sites. It’s a weird shoe summer™️ and I’m here for it.

@marianoleonczik

Jun 24, 2024

Top Recs from @jon-caramanica

🏠

Mike Holmes

Sometimes I think I’ve reached, like, the end of TV. I don’t really care about prestige drama. Reality franchises on their 7th or 12th iteration bore me. I gave up on cable news because it made me more jittery than coffee.I can watch HGTV for hours though. Inject all that mid-period Chip & Joanna straight into my veins. Show me all the secret brick-cuttters working on the fringes of Laurel, Mississippi. Interested in couples therapy? Sit with a few episodes of “Love It or List It.” Want to know exactly why that first wave of commercials for “Christina on the Coast” got reedited? I’ll tell you if you ask nice.Most of these shows revolve around how to make something more beautiful. Beauty fades, though. Is your dream built to last?When it crumbles, Mike Holmes can fix it. A no-nonsense Canadian who tears down drywall with bare hands, he has a persistent mien of disappointment. Electricians, roofers, landscapers, plumbers - they’re all colossal idiot cost-cutters who prey on unsuspecting homeowners. In Mike Holmes’s world, all is chaos, and he is the only hope for order.On his old shows - “Holmes on Homes,” “Holmes Inspection,” and so on, you get the point - - he glumly but firmly tears apart homes to find the evils that lurk within. He’s almost impossibly astute, an “Iyanla, Fix My Life”-level reader of the needs of a house - and its owners. (Reruns air mostly on the DIY Network, part of the extended Discovery/HGTV ecosystem.) I love how simple the homes are, and how catastrophic the hidden scars are. And yet time and again, he makes it right - an everyman healer and an avatar of the lost art of competence. In a time when every day feels like free fall, these shows are a somber acknowledgment of the ubiquity of disrepair, and a paean to the belief - the certainty - that it can be overcome.

@jon-caramanica

Aug 24, 2021

📚

International Design Yearbooks

I’ve seen these annual digests of the best in product innovation around forever but only started buying them recently. I grabbed one at a place in LA that had loads of dusty design books on the cheap. Not long after that, I went to a Housing Works on the UES because someone on TikTok said it had the best clothing selection. It didn’t, but they did have 2 of these for $10 each.They’re pure cheat code. Every good idea that’s being ripped off by contemporary artisans is in one of these - lamps bent into unnatural shapes, shelves that don’t look like they hold very much, dinnerware that you’d never dare eat off of. The designs are Italian and Japanese, of course, but also Finnish, Canadian, Spanish, even American. Each edition has a different luminary as an editor: Arata Isozaki, Mario Bellini, Philippe Starck, freakin’ Alessandro Mendini. They’re tidy, portable museums.

@jon-caramanica

Aug 24, 2021

🎵

Remble

This TikTok-favorite rapper is an inheritor of Drakeo the Ruler but also brings to mind Aceyalone and maybe even MC Paul Barman and what can I say, life is wild.

@jon-caramanica

Aug 24, 2021