Introducing Styleternity Coda
"One man's disillusionment with legacy media is another man's soapbox"
It’s about 72 hours into the new year — good riddance 2020! — and, aside from my time-honoured custom of being locked in mortal combat with a hangover the size of a Jeroboam, I’m happy to report that this Substack is officially up and running. Ergo: a domain name has been secured and an ‘email preamble’ sits unedited in my browser — presently even more neglected than last week’s panettone. And so the work continues.
This first post is hardly the best format for getting all Gettysburg Address on readers, but I do feel that it’s important to elucidate the pivotal concerns that have brought me here; and, more precisely, what I hope ‘Styleternity Coda’ can become given an abundance of time and effort.
After two-point-something years working in luxury magazines in Hong Kong I’d grown weary of the constraints and shortcomings of the traditional media landscape. By and large, titles of the digital and printed variety here — as in many places around the world — are cripplingly reliant on advertising, translating (in all but a handful of cases) into a tedious status quo in which the lowly writer trades editorial independence for “broad audience reach”, “search engine optimisation”, “share of voice” and whatever other buzzword has kidnapped the head — mostly vacant — of the marketing exec who happens to be indirectly paying for coverage. (Side bar: There’s a difference between storytelling that is impassioned and plausible, in spite of the author’s preexisting rapport with their subject, and the sort of “sponsored content” that serves no one other than the brand that commissioned it.)
Consequently, this newsletter will be written using the same loquacious, unredacted language as the social media account that inspired it, free from the long arm of sponsored content. Where partaking in a product or service as a necessary part of writing a particular story, that will be disclosed to readers up-front and more importantly — make sense within the broader selection of content being published. There go all my pitches for Blue Apron, I guess.
That segues handily into a primer of this newsletter’s chief preoccupations. Namely: watches, ‘wine & spirits’ (a catch-all for alcoholic beverages), and the various other pursuits we consumers enjoy that are as much about art as craft. My first forays into the blogosphere under the ‘Styleternity’ moniker — now over half a decade ago — revolved around classic men’s clothing; and over time, I’ve come to recognise certain parallels between that community and those for whom drinking well or collecting watches brings profound joy. Taken together, each of these subjects makes for quite the Venn Diagram — one which I very much look forward to exploring. But I’m getting ahead of myself: there’s still the matter of that bloody ‘email preamble’.
For now, tell your friends to subscribe to the newsletter — there is, bluntly speaking, too little content to underwrite a demand for paid subscriptions just yet — or leave a comment about the stories you’d like to see by below.
See you in February,
RPL.
Congrats Randy, looking forward to it!