There’s a new tailor in town. That is, if you’re anywhere near 373 Broadway, New York. He sews military uniforms, even though they look like everyday suits.
Your average suit company sells you good-looking fabric.
A great suit company, on the other hand, sells you purpose, love, belonging, vision, or hope.
That is essentially what every great brand does: the brand sells you an idea. Here is what Alex Ledezia sells:
That, my friends, is a brand. While most brands are killing themselves with woke bs and deconstructing masculinity, Alex Ledezia, some obscure New York tailor, strides into the wide-open territory these brands have left behind and decides to plant a flag there.
Business leaders with traditional values too often tend to dismiss brand building as soy boy fluff, when what they should be doing is owning the insanely lucrative gap these self-immolating companies are leaving behind. So let’s give Alex a hand and make it go viral.
Other traditional values business owners: Be like Alex. Build a brand.
Now. Here’s why this ad is amazing:
Alex Ledezia’s suits aren’t for your average guy. They’re for cultivated leaders, men of action, men who seek to carve out their position in a long line of high achievers before them.
With every shot, Alex shows as he tells. I hesitate to even call it an ad; it is a manifesto, call to arms, a sensory and symbolic adventure. I recommend you watch it more than once.
His overarching philosophy taps into something that’s on many young men’s minds: the feeling that you are living amidst a civilization in decline, unmoored from the great traditions which built your world. He is selling a significant part of the solution to your problem.
How does he begin?
He starts out by smoking an unfiltered cigarette. Masterful.
Not only does it make him look super cool, it calls up subconscious images of the ‘classic man’ of the 20th century. Smokers like Jimmy Stewart who won WWII and still came home to be a class act man in society. He’s not a kid sucking on a cherry-flavored thumb drive; he’s a man taking in a delightful puff of Virginia tobacco. Right off the bat, you’re hooked into a masculine tradition.
Then, as if he couldn’t get any cooler, Alex snuffs out his full-flavor heater on one of those reflective modern ‘art’ masterpieces. He coolly dismisses the hollow, artificial efforts at the displacement of classical traditions. He notes that the suit, perhaps like the cigarette along with the rest of your cultural tradition, has been abandoned.
He immediately offers your alternative: adhere to higher standards anyway.
How do you do this? Get yourself an Alex Ledezia suit.
As he proceeds about his day in New York, he expands on his commitment to aesthetics, to beauty, to transcendence. He looks completely different from the other people around him, but he signals more belonging to Grand Central Station’s classic architecture. Alex is the one, not the others, not the society, who looks intelligible within the husks of the old civilization. His suit is parallel to classic architecture. It’s built for one focused on the transcendent, just as the halls and monuments of old.
Immediately, the ad proceeds to starkly contrast the young suited subject to the outside world. Alex and his suit are juxtaposed to the modern society: he is surrounded by sneakers and T-shirts on a crosswalk, he passes signs calling for ‘resistance’ and ‘progress’, he sidles by graffiti on once-great edifices. He’s showing you the reality of decline and embodying the better way forward.
Wearing a Ledezia suit is not simply an honor to the self, to personal appearance, nor just an outward display of regard for others; it is an outward sign of the wearer’s desire to moor himself in transcendence, tradition, and resistance to the decline.
“And though you bear witness to its decline, it is not inevitable”
A rare beacon of hope in what the target demographic feels is the beginning of a disenchanted dark age. This is the stuff you’d expect to hear in an officer’s speech to his men before a battle. Of course it is, because to resist cultural decay and relativism is to do battle. Alex Ledezia has decided to supply you the decadent uniform for your fight.
The dramatic crescendo ensues. He’s standing under truly great and beautiful art depicting the struggle of your forefathers over the icy Delaware on the Christmas of ‘76. He is reverently acknowledging the American flag, the halls of justice. Myriad beautiful images flash on the screen as the deeply emotional classical music fills your ears.
Invoking gratitude, Alex accuses you with the richness of Western tradition: paintings of well-dressed people of old, of military officers from long-forgotten battles, of the Virgin Mary, of philosophers and academics who contributed to your traditions. He challenges you to take up duty to this tradition, and not to acquiesce to its abandonment.
In the most significant use of symbolism in a symbolism-saturated Reel, Alex begins to armor himself with an evening shirt and a bowtie standing in front of Jaque-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii.
His target demographic, those who empathize with classical traditions, immediately know it: the Horatii fought and died in a 3-on-3 battle that determined the fate of the nascent city of Rome. They are the touchstone of defenders of the West, here embodied in Rome, and an archetype of male self-sacrifice on behalf of the civilization. You’re not buying a suit. You’re pledging your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor to your friends, Romans, and countrymen.
The call to action is delivered in the pinnacle of Western dress, in the beautiful, clean shawl collar tuxedo:
“The reinvention of society is preceded by the man who reinvents himself.
So dress accordingly.”
Knockout punch.
You can keep breathing now. Your work is cut out for you. You must not acquiesce to the despair and listlessness plaguing the modern world. You need to start where you can control. You need to go reinvent yourself. First, you need to put on your uniform for battle.
You need to call Alex Ledezia and get yourself a bespoke suit. If his suits are as good as his understanding of a brand vision, if this achievement was truly Alex’s own, lone work, I’ll be the first to hang one of his sartorial works of art on my shoulders.
We thank you, Alex, for your manifesto.
Traditional business owners and marketers, do likewise.