Daily Fashion Project, The Inimitable Ignatious Joseph
Where is home for you?:
My home is in Europe. Of course i have a place to hang my hats, but I have never seen myself as limited to just one country or one city. I was born in Asia and so moving here meant making this part of the Eurasian landmass with its elegant capitals like Vienna, Paris, Rome, Brussels and the many more intimate places my home. Home you could say is where I share life with other people who have similar interests and passions to mine.
If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would you go?
Right now! You mean in this very instant? I would say I'm due for another trip East, to a more sedate, even sultry climate. I think I could use a hot tea in Kandy between innings at my favourite cricket ground.
If you could only have one pair of shoes, what color would they be?
Are you serious? Naturally red. Or white with a jar of very good French shoe cream— red that is.
Podcasts or audiobooks?
I belong to the generation that still holds the newspaper in two hands and folds it under one’s arm on the way to breakfast.
Extroverted or Introverted?
Selling anything requires a certain amount of extroversion. But I think I am basically a shy person who prefers privacy when not in the line of duty.
If you were a dragon, what would you hoard?
I have always thought of dragon's as fire-breathing, mobile beasts, not as sedentary types inclined to hoard anything. If I were a dragon, I would be flying about the earth even more than now.
What first interested you in men's fashion?
I was never interested in men's fashion. I have always been interested in being well-dressed. There is a difference, you know. The Austrian Adolf Loos once wrote that being well-dressed is never out of fashion and if your attire is conspicuously fashionable, one can be sure that next season one is no longer "swell-dressed".
Has one piece of art, literature or music helped shape who you are today?
I was raised with the game of cricket. I would say that my feelings about life and sport are best explained in the book by CLR James-- Beyond a Boundary. It is a cricket book for non-cricketers too.
Do you prefer to learn from other's mistakes, or make your own mistakes?
There are some who believe it is impossible to learn from others' mistakes. I support this view. A casual observer or even many a "consultant" sees the mistakes of others only from her or his own perspective, values, and history. That is why we hear or read so often that certain people make grand (as opposed to great) decisions which appear to fly in the face of history. History is a fiction. Everyone is forced to make his own mistakes. What we call "learning from the mistakes of others" is a selection process: we identify things outside ourselves and suppose that they can be compared with our own life situation or experience. Once we do that it is no longer "theirs". But then we do not know in advance the consequences of doing what others did or did not do unless we know our own histories. And that is the heart of the problem: we have to find our own mistakes and then we can ask if the choices made by others are-- as we identified them-- options for us. This is also why all these "self-help books" with advice from, let us call them "successful" people, are mostly useless. I often say there is "no self from the shelf". This also applies to life. No one can solve another person's problems. You always have to do it yourself-- and as George Carlin once said-- "self-help? well if you did it yourself, you didn't need any help…"
If you had to choose a different career, what would you be doing?
Selling soap powder, perhaps? Or as scorekeeper for the Sri Lankan national cricket team…
