The Gentleman's Style Guide

By Robin Austin Reed

You don't have to struggle to understand the complex world of fashion. Learn who you are as a man, develop your own unique image and then compliment that with great clothes that are comfortable and require easy care.

Women decide if they can trust a man by how he cares for himself. Looking great gives you the confidence to have empowered relationships.

Employers judge you based on your appearance in the first six seconds. If you can't blend with their culture, you won't land the job. I'll show you how to show up wearing clothes that builds confidence.

Readers learn how to:

1. Develop unshakable internal confidence.

2. Feel great by dressing in stylish and complimentary ways.

3. Avoid common fashion mistakes.

4. Build your wardrobe cost-effectively.

5. Have fun shopping efficiently.

The Gentleman's Style Guide - Land the Job. Get the Girl. Feel Great.

@Robin Austin Reed

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Austin Reed
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781724224361

Robin Austin Reed

Contributor to popular blogs and authoring five non-fiction books, Robin has been writing for over a decade about healing, recovery and personal development, working with clients in the ways of love and romance. Robin’s passion is in seeing strong masculinity meet the opposite world of radically elegant femininity. Coaching self-develop‐ ment, personal energy and limiting beliefs, Robin works with his students and clients to create pure and honest alliances for personal and business relationships. When he’s not writing, Robin goes to movie matinees alone, enjoys fine chocolate, wine and coffee. He procrastinates from the difficult process of writing by oversharing on Facebook and Insta‐ gram and giving away cool shit to his newsletter subscribers. Robin is single, travels the world as much as possible and all his characters are based upon people he’s met - especially the women. For more of Robin's work, visit his website at RobinAustinReed.com

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE NEW YOU

The Modern Man’s Style Guide

The Epic Life Series

What’s in today is out tomorrow. The changing world of fashion can be both maddening and exciting depending on things such as image, body type, budget, time and your own attention to the details.

First things first, give a good yell that fashion and image can be very confusing. Go ahead, get it out so we can move forward and discuss it without all the angst.

This is a simple guide and journey through not just fashion, but the identity behind the quest for looking good by changing your viewpoint on the fashion evaluation process versus what the magazines tell us.

This book is filled with simple tips as a guide to magnify the right aspects of you in different areas, by first uncovering who you are and what you value. I will help you evaluate who you are and pair this with individual circumstances such as your career demands, city you live, recreational activities and personal lifestyle.

I won't exhaust you with endless rules and misspent weekends shopping with your wife or girlfriend when you would rather be at the lake or watching football. Rather, I'm going to show you how to look good and more importantly, be confident and feel great. You will get more of the RIGHT attention from women (even your wife/girlfriend), you will receive more genuine compliments, you will be inspired to eat better, lose weight, workout and be more goal oriented.

Yes, that's right...all from adopting this style and fashion manifesto.

Most men get confused when trying to determine what’s in style. The better question is found in determining your overall goals in image and customizing that for your environment. For example, if you live in Dallas rather than Oklahoma City, there will be different fashion expectations that influence you. Cities such as Manhattan, Paris, Chicago, London and LA are among the most fashionably diverse cities in the world with many popular fashion trends being created and filtered out to other cities.

Budget is another large contributor since extreme fashion design can be very expensive due to the use of quality fabrics accompanied with artistic design and talented construction. (This is defined as couture fashion.)

We’re often attracted to clothing that is inexpensive and looks good on the rack, but after only a couple of washes or trips to the cleaners, the garment begins to lose construction and looks poorly maintained. An example of this is lower priced (less than $100) knits and sweaters. These are infamous for looking great when nicely folded on a store table only to bead and unravel once worn. Beading is when fabric threads become entangled from its original weave pattern and form small beads of fabric thread, usually on high wear areas like the elbows. (More on garment care later.)

Conversely, we sometimes splurge and buy a nice piece for our wardrobe only to realize we didn’t care for the garment correctly with proper storage or cleaning. It begins to look unkempt and the frustration grows.

It's time for a man not in the fashion industry selling an agenda to help guys on their quest to look and feel better by embracing a sense of style. That man is me.

Ready to begin the makeover of you? Let’s go!

Your Mindset

Your attitude, beliefs about the way you look and your definition of fashion dictates everything in how you spend, what you acquire, and how you dress, as well as your hairstyles, grooming and much, much more. What is your attitude towards the appearance of yourself and others?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Nothing could be a truer statement! Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labour’s Lost, 1588:

"Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye, Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues."

Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote: Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion.

The Bible at 1 Peter 3:3-4:

Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight.

David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include: Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

The Bible at Psalm 139:14:

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

If you’re looking at others to affirm how you look, you’ll forever be discontented. Let your new definition of fashion be the following:

Fashion in the art of creating the perfect stage for the best of you to be displayed to the world. ~Robin Reed

If you take nothing else from this book, please take this one statement and adopt it. No longer will you be thrown to and fro between the fickle viewpoints of people that are only concerned with selling magazines off the shelves of grocery lines you stand in to purchase bread and eggs.

Here’s the thing: Only you know what the real you looks like inside.

There are fashion experts that truly are experts. They study the latest trends, attend the shows in New York, Paris and Milan every year, know and follow the designers and are in the fashion industry. I admire many of these people and rely on them myself for sound guidance on clothing, fabrics, designers and style, but I am not a colleague of these people and don't compete in their field.

I