How to Build Cool Outfits

Geoffrey Bruyere and his associate Benoit Wojtenka are professional fashion consultants from Paris, France. They are authors of the Style Guide for Modern Men.

As a style consultant, that’s a question I often hear. Actually, most of people know more or less how to choose a shirt, a pair of jeans, shoes, but don’t trust themselves when it comes to build a look mixing clothes. Still, developing outfits that totally works is not that hard once you stop overthinking.

First of all, some questions should simply not occur: “what to wear with a pair of raw denim” for example. This is simply not the right question: men’s fashion has to be simple and fun. This guy should rather ask himself “what do I want to wear today?”

With years of blogging, coaching men, and helping fashion brands, this little quote has become my motto: “you cannot get good with style if dressing keeps being a pain”. That’s why wearing “what you like” has to be the core of your fashion style. It’s much more easy to dress well with items you like rather than applying a rational method too… rationally.

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The Style Guide for Modern Men

A few months ago, the guys at Bonnegueule.fr approached me about promoting an English version of their ebook to my readers. Those guys wrote a handful of fashion articles for my site (under the pseudonym “Gill”) and the articles all came out well. So I said send me a copy and I’ll take a look.

Now, this has been a monthly occurrence for years. Someone wants me to promote their book or product. I tell them to send me a copy. And typically within 15 pages, I think it’s crap, delete it and move on with my life.

Not this time. In fact, I was so impressed by it that I emailed them and said that not only would I like to promote it, but I’d like to slap the PostMasculine name on it and sell it as a staple product here. It was that good.

Honestly, as someone who has scoured the internet for men’s fashion advice for years, and who only recently feels like he’s “got it together” in the style department, it was something that I wish I had found a long time ago. If you’re a man, there are a few problems when it comes to learning about fashion and style by yourself. The first is that most sources simply showing clothing that looks good and they don’t explain WHY it looks good. GQ and most fashion blogs are a good example of this. You flip through them, see all of these “great” jackets and watches, and no explanation of why they’re considered great or why they look good, how they differ from lesser or cheaper jackets or watches, or whether they’d look good with your physical features or not.

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State of the Site

Yesterday, I shared some of the raw data from the recent survey of Post Masculine readers along with what they perceive to be their biggest problem areas, both for themselves and men in general. Today we’re going to tackle what readers think of the site and what we could be doing better.

Question: “What could the site be doing better?”

Almost 200 responses to this question in total, and I parsed out about 130 specific, actionable suggestions. Most of those suggestions were the same dozen or so repeated in different forms. Listed below are the most common suggestions, listed in order from most suggested to least:

  • Update more often
  • Better design / site navigation
  • More media / video blogs / podcasts
  • Higher quality content / better writers / better writing
  • More posts written by Mark
  • Branding problems
  • Your marketing sucks
  • More forum support, creating a bigger sense of community
  • Regular Update Schedule, i.e., every M/W/F

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Who Are The Readers? (Survey Results)

I want to thank everyone who took the time to answer the survey earlier this week. Many of the results were unsurprising. Others were reaffirming. Others were enlightening. Now that it’s over, here’s a fun (long) post running down who the readers of this site are, what you guys like and what you’re looking for. Below are some of the more interesting and surprising statistics. Further down, I analyze the written responses and as we’ll see there are actually some surprising results.

Who You Are

  • 98% men. Still a sausage-fest.
  • 64% of readers are in their 20′s. 20% are in their 30′s. This is a much higher proportion of 20- and 30-something’s than the Practical Pick Up survey I did last Spring (it was 54% and 16% respectively, then). It seems that the age of the readership is narrowing around my own age (I’m 27 now).
  • 65.2% of readers say they are satisfied with their life. 13.7% say they’re very satisfied. 24.7% of PM readers are very satisfied with their job situation.
  • 67.9% of readers are very interested in world travel, 48.9% are very interested in changing careers or starting a business, and 81.3% are very interested in developing more emotional awareness in their lives (more on this tomorrow).
  • 28.1% consider themselves part of the PUA community, while 43.5% say they’d be comfortable sharing articles on Facebook and Twitter. The two most common responses given by people not comfortable sharing on social media were, “Don’t want people to know I’m reading pick up content,” and “I don’t use Facebook/Twitter.” Fair enough.
  • For every person who signed up for the Approach Women Program, 2.5 people said they “Will Sign Up, But Not Now.” This explains the somewhat-disappointing sales numbers from the other week. Ironically, it seems a LOT of people have some approach anxiety about signing up to a program which conquers their approach anxiety.

Some more interesting results when answers are cross-referenced against one another:

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Highs and Lows of an International Lifestyle

The cute Brazilian girl in the cell phone store looks up at me and sputters a series of syllables in my general direction. She’s been fiddling with my phone for 15 minutes now, the phone I just bought for twice as much as I would have paid in any other country. Now she can’t get it to work. Explanation is pending, at least until I decipher the Portuguese syllable soup she continues to vomit at me.

I’m frustrated, if you didn’t notice.

“Não entendo,” I reply, for probably the twelfth time. It means “I don’t understand.” One of the only Portuguese phrases I know.

The coy smile she had given me the first few times I said it are now replaced with an aching impatience. She frowns at me, then the phone, and then sighs. She pulls out a Post-It note, scrawls some Portuguese on it, hands it to me along with my dysfunctional new phone and slowly instructs me to go to another store in the mall and have them deal with it. She has to repeat these instructions three times before I understand them. This is the fourth cell phone store I am being sent to. Apparently there are a lot of bureaucratic procedures involved with buying a cell phone in Brazil, the details of which are obviously sailing clear over my head. And since none of the store clerks speak English, they’ve all eventually reached a breaking point, lost patience and sent me down to the next store to be somebody else’s headache.

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Fix Your Posture

Guest post by Dan. Dan is a competitive powerlifter and long-time fitness enthusiast. Over the course of a lifting career of being coached by world champion powerlifters and nationally recognized strength and conditioning coaches, he has developed a philosophy on health and fitness that focuses on practicality, functionality, and enjoyment. He most enjoys advising regular guys who simply want to look, feel, and perform better. Learn more from Dan at his website.

In the health and fitness world, muscle gain and fat loss get the spotlight. We often overlook the role of our body’s natural posture and alignment in our exercise endeavors. This is a huge mistake. First and foremost, postural flaws are rarely simply aesthetic in nature and are often indicative of functional problems that could lead to injury and keep us from our physical pursuits. Additionally, and I’m willing to bet this is of more concern to the readers here at PostMasculine, a jacked up posture can ruin your body language and overshadow the efforts you are putting into your diet and fitness in order to become more attractive to the opposite sex. In this post, I’d like to cover the most common postural flaws that I see in the average guy who spends too much time sitting in front of a screen of some sort and has not been structuring his workouts to counter all that time on his computer or in front of the TV. I’ll also give you some simple movements you can do in between the sets of your workout to help fix these issues.

Issue #1: The Crane Neck

The Problem: If you walk through a doorway and your chin enters long before the rest of you does, you’ve got a Crane Neck. Guys with Crane Neck always look confused and lost. Crane neck often occurs in guys who spend an inordinate amount of time staring at a computer or television screen. Your head should be in alignment with the rest of your body, meaning that the base of your skull should be in a straight line with your upper spine, not sticking forwards.

The Fix: You can do a movement known as Quadruped Chin Tucks to help strengthen the muscles in the rear of your neck to pull your skull back into it’s proper position. In between sets of a lower-body weight lifting exercise, get on all fours and look straight down at the ground. Let gravity pull your head downwards and then use the muscles in the rear of your neck to retract your head back. Hold that position for a count of 5, slowly let your head return to the down position and then repeat, doing 5-6 reps.

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All About Romance

Guest post by Xander. Xander is an executive in the entertainment business and resides in West Hollywood, CA.

I recently fulfilled a long gestating desire to visit the birthplace of the martial art I practice, Muay Thai, and spent my holiday break in Thailand. After a week of sightseeing and training on our own, my friend and I met up with the tour group that would be our travel companions for the back half of the journey. In the group was the gorgeous Sofia, a 20 year old Australian girl, with a body that undoubtedly made her popular in high school and a cigarette dangling from her fingertips that made her look like an extra in a Robert Plant music video from the 80′s. After several nights of warding off heavy competition from other guys in the tour, random other travelers, and local Thai’s enamored with this blonde bombshell, I felt my dry charm and non-nonchalance finally begin to reel her in. As we chatted at a beachfront bar, sand underneath our toes, tiki torches illuminating the low tide washing up the shore a mere 10 feet away Sofia turned to me and said:

“You’re witty. You know you’re the only person on the tour I truly enjoy hanging out with.”

I smiled and looked into her eyes and enjoyed this perfect moment in paradise. My bliss was broken as I heard “Sofia!” and a beer bottle get shoved in between us.

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The First-Time Entrepreneur, Part 1

This is a guest post by Frank Hajdu. Frank is an NY-based entrepreneur and writer. He’s split his time across NY and LA, first as a banker, then a talent scout, and finally a digital media exec. Only recently did he realize that the best vocations are self-created. So when he’s not writing for PostMasculine, he serves as Co-Founder of Jobstr.com, a job-based Q&A website. Follow him on Twitter @jobstr.

“Actions speak louder than words, but not nearly as often.” – Mark Twain

Is it me, or does it seem like everyone ages 20-40 is starting a company these days?

I’m being facetious, of course, but it’s not without a kernel of truth. Start-up culture has become ubiquitous; legions of even the most marginally ambitious people are either starting companies or seriously considering doing so. Just look at the numbers: an average of 565,000 new U.S. businesses were started per month in 2010, and $30.6 billion in venture capital was raised in 2011 – the highest one-year total since 2001. Even in a down economy, people are swinging for the fences in droves.

Including me. I’m a 33-year-old, first-time entrepreneur. My partner and I work full-time on a self-funded website we launched just one month ago. We love our product, our users love our product, and while there’s certainly room for improvement, we’re deeply confident that we’re onto something. But don’t let the pitch-talk fool you: I’m scared out of my fucking mind.

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Implementation Intention

Public Service Announcement: A number of people requested the option to join the Approach Women Program using Paypal instead of a credit card. You can now sign up using Paypal here. Sign up with the button at the bottom and then I will email you with your login information.

I just finished recording some audio for a future product. I’ll be frank. I hate recording audio. I don’t know why. Usually I’m pretty productive and get on top of whatever I need to do. But when it comes time to record myself, I find the most amazing ways to procrastinate.

This has been a consistent problem for years now. But after a period of time, following the Do Something Principle, I’ve trained myself to just open up the software that I need and load up the proper file. That’s it. Just load everything up and then I can go back to stalking girls on Facebook or whatever I was doing before.

After another bout of procrastination, when I full pull myself together to do something else, it’s usually just to test the mic, and do a quick sound check. That’s all. Make sure it sounds OK.

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3 Keys to Overcome Anxiety

Becoming good with women is largely, if not entirely, a process of conquering one’s anxiety, fears and emotional baggage with women. All of the theory, the lines, the tactics, the persuasion techniques — these are either minor details at best, or pointless distractions at worst.

Remove a guy’s inability to act confidently in the face of his fears, and most of his lady troubles will resolve themselves with time and experience. He’ll stop fearing rejection, stop hesitating to take action, and become comfortable acting on opportunities as they present themselves. I’ve seen it time and time again.

But overcoming your anxiety is this is much easier said than done. Despite there being decades of psychological research on overcoming fears, social anxieties, building confidence, and acting despite being afraid of something, the men’s dating advice industry is woefully uninformed on these matters.

The first major piece of misinformation is the idea that anxiety around women is ever eliminated completely. Research and experience simply shows this is not true. In fact, forcing and expecting yourself to eliminate anxiety will often only make things worse in the long-run. It can actually make you even MORE anxious, and it can push one into disassociating with their emotions and empathy for other people.

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