DON QUIXOTE, UR-IGENTby David IsleA few years ago when the Internet blew its flame-fanning breath on

DON QUIXOTE, UR-IGENTby David IsleA few years ago when the Internet blew its flame-fanning breath on the dying embers of interest in tailored menswear, some wise old head coined a term to describe the neophytes consumed in the resulting bonfire: Internet Gentlemen, sometimes abbreviated to iGent. It’s a term of abuse, but also sometimes a term of endearment. I’ve self-applied many times in both manners.The Internet Gentleman is someone passionately committed to nostalgia for the time when Gentlemen roamed the earth - sometimes this is the 1950s, sometimes it’s the 1930s, sometimes it’s Victorian England, sometimes it’s Regency England. The Internet Gentleman has no direct experience with these halcyon days, and therefore must rely on the canon of wisdom passed on through hearsay, with perhaps some cross-checking with devoutly studied original sources, such as images of Cary Grant and the Duke of Windsor, the little recorded pith of Beau Brummell, or, for the most diligent acolytes, obscure tailoring and etiquette manuals.The sage Réginald-Jérôme de Mans once suggested Walter Mitty as a fictional forbear of the modern iGent. But Mitty himself is in many ways the diluted ancestor of a towering literary figure, who to me represents the original and already full flowering of the iGent instinct: Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha.Don Quixote is a country gentleman of middling means who, bewitched by repeated reading of tales of knights-errant from centuries earlier, decides that he himself must revive chivalry and knight-errantry. He puts on makeshift armor, cobbles together a team of horse, squire, and donkey, and goes roaming the countryside looking for wrongs to right.Don Quixote views himself as acting according to a minutely proscribed code of ethics and behavior. Of course, most of the people he meets find him ridiculous. Don Quixote brushes off their misunderstanding as a mark of vulgarity:“You know but little of the world, since you are ignorant of what commonly occurs in knight-errantry.”And disdains the worldly obligations imposed upon a higher being such as himself:“What knight-errant ever paid poll-tax, duty, queen’s pin-mont, king’s dues, toll or ferry? What tailor ever took payment of him for making his clothes?”Cervantes wrote in the early 17th century, and you can already hear the transition from “knight-errant” to “gentleman” beginning (Savile Row tailors have often had occasion to regret extending long lines of credit to English “gentlemen.”). Don Quixote earned a long string of imitators - you can see his influence in characters from Magwitch to Ignatius Reilly to Max Fischer. And, indeed, all the way to the iGent.Though film and musical versions have softened the character, Cervantes’s Don Quixote is not just a lovable kook. Cervantes is not always merely amused by Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s delusions have real consequences - physical violence, economic hardship, and emotional trauma. Sometimes Cervantes is exasperated with him, other times deeply sympathetic. iGent-hood is a much less dangerous form of fantasy. Although the economic hardship may be hard to avoid, a little bit of imagination in your dress is armor against the daily onslaught of external reality.Quality content, like quality clothing, ages well. This article first appeared on the No Man blog in August 2016.  -- source link
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