Learning to Love Minimalism with AURALEE

London-based writer Raven Smith has been known to dress in loud, brash patterns. But the austere elegance of the Japanese label is giving him second thoughts.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been a man of jazzy shirts. The shirts where you’re not quite sure if the pattern quite works are the exact shirts that work for me. Artisanally stitched by hand. A smidgen of gold thread. A touch of the alohas. The bolder the shirt pattern the better—hot pink slashed through with oxblood, anthropomorphic animal motifs, angry tessellated houndsteeth, even a Magic Eye chevron get my juices flowing.

Once the compulsively bought atrocities arrive, I retire to my lair (spare bedroom) to try the shirts on, reconstituting everything into its own look-at-me terrazzo, an annoyance of fabric and flaunt. I psychedelically traipse Britain’s mean streets (Hampstead) like von Trapp kids in their Fraulein’s curtains, a dazzle-camouflaged torso easily seen from space.

Minimalism, to me, is a forbidden fruit. I would rather sit on an anthill than adopt a dreaded capsule wardrobe. A blue jean, a wee flash of ankle, an old-maiden type of loafer, doesn’t do it for me. I like a tan mac, I do—they’re a sort of National Service requirement in London—but I would rather assume rain-lashed zebra print (a mac is just a long, waterproof shirt after all). I don’t want to be too reactionary against British menswear’s extremely austere style, its Savile-Row-librarian-sipping-a-Guinness predilections. And honestly, if UK lads can’t neck 18 pub pints in diffusion Drake’s, who can? There’s space for us all, but I cannot fathom the appeal of those with a seemingly personal vendetta against standing out. I find myself in a tiring crusade against quiet extravagance. I refuse to be bricked into the sanatorium of clean lines.But something changed recently. I was getting these flash migraines, and my aggressive pattern-clash wasn’t helping. I still want to look daring without looking dickwad, so I’m turning to AURALEE, a low-key luxe brand that has current menswear heads creaming their CDLP. This man of jazzy shirts is finally road-testing haute minimalism.

The first thing I try is the leather pants. Their overwhelming molasses richness, thick and dark, encasing my legs, a leather-clad luxury. I am a gun-toting clench-jawed Marlboro man, roaming the prairies. I am the moist seat of a purring Harley Davidson. I am rugby and I am fishmongering because they are just as fucking butch. I had a life before this, and there’s a life after, but this is the moment when leather pants permanently enter my lexicon. I am in love.Next is the jumper. A translucent cobweb of refinement, my barely visible nipples whispering, “Hello, stranger.” I simultaneously feel demure, like Julia Roberts in , and autonomously erotic, like Julia Roberts in . The only errand I have to run that morning is to Sainsbury’s, and I walk the aisles perusing cereal like Kit De Luca is hyping me down Sunset Boulevard. People look at me in a way that reeks of envy, coveting my refined daywear in a petty delirium. Nobody offers to buy my groceries, but you can’t have it all.Where the leather trousers are thick as mince, the AURALEE shirts I get are light as meringue. A roomy, lenient radius of cotton extends my increasingly adult-ed aura. I get a few AURALEE shirts because I’m a piglet, and match the hue to my mood. Pale SPF yellow for when I feel like a private school horse girl. A quiet, almost inaudible pink that noiselessly echoes the poor woman in as she pirouettes right up to death itself (this is a good thing). A goose-white number that conversely feels mineral and aggressing (there’s nothing more menacing than a flock of geese). I add a pair of faded-avocado suit trousers to the mix and I have, dare I say it, an easy uniform. If I am not an intellectual, then I’m a pseudo-intellectual, a man of dusty paperbacks, rabbit skinning, voting Tory, and other aristocratic pursuits. I feel like I’m swimming in a new pool, a side-pocket with no jazzy shirts, where minimalism is respected, but not too strictly adhered to. I am shrewd and roguish. I am both Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche and Patricia Highsmith’s Freddie Miles.

The final addition to my wardrobe is a suit, in church-candle ivory. I love a good suit, cleanly julienned to the body. I like a knife-sharp lapel, and I can tell you the lapels are divine. But the overall cut is softer, smoothly coating the tongue like a good white Russian. I don’t feel too overdone, too buttoned-up. There’s a quasi-unkemptness softening any traditional severity. I feel smart, without the starchiness of that ill-fitting two-piece I got married in half a century ago. I also feel a kind of cosmopolitan adeptness. I can roast a chicken for Sunday lunch and I’ll remember to take the giblets out. I am romantically cad-ish. Rom-com-ily sincere. The kind of guy who’ll defend your honor (ardently, aggressively, but never, ever physically). The kind of guy that leaves you an effusive voice-novella that you listen to in full. He likes poetry, but he’s not a poetry guy.I realize I have been flim-flamming my whole life, donning silly pub-darts-player shirts when I could have been slicing through life in the sharpest of garments. I’ve been wearing the kind of public atrocities Project Mayhem conspired to destroy in . With these new garments I feel reborn, or if not reborn, rewild-ed, factory reset-ed, and always remembered. I leave every room oozing with sartorial intent, and groaning with knowing. AURALEE hasn’t changed my life—do life-changing garments really exist?—but it’s offered more options, more outcomes, more avenues. I’m not quite living my best life, but AURALEE offers me a ventriloquism of accomplishment while I wait for the rest to fall into place.