My wife and I moved our family back to Cincinnati last summer, after having lived in Nashville for 7 years. Now that we have kids, we felt it was important to be closer to our families. And we have a lot of really great friends in the Cinci area, too.
It’s been a good move overall, with one exception: Cincinnati has a significantly worse menswear scene. While Nashville’s not known as a Mecca for menswear, the music industry and general “it-city” vibe mean it’s got an image-based orientation and loads and loads of rich people, both of which do lend themselves to great clothes. I have an entire page on my site just for Nashville menswear shops (which I’m sure is missing some new shop that’s recently opened).
Cincinnati, while geographically bigger and with a similar population (in the larger, metro area), definitely has nothing like the music industry going on, and as for rich people, I assume they exist, but where do they get great clothes? In NYC or Chicago on business trips? You want a good AD for a watch, Richter & Phillips has you covered. But I simply do not see the need to start a page called Cincinnati Menswear Shops.
One bright light is my tailor here—Tom Licata whose business is Hyde Park Tailors—who is the only tailor I trust to do anything right. I recently had him alter two jackets I’d had work done on by other shops in Nashville, and he said it was a nightmare to undo their work because what they’d done would leave visible marks unless he shifted things around (I was letting them back out, after having slimmed them years ago).
All that backdrop serves to express the surprise and delight I felt when I started following the Instagram account of a stylish dude who was recommended in my feed, and discovered he lives in the Queen City!
He reached out to me to see if I wanted to meet up, and we made plans. We met up in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood, which has a neat local flavor (there are many such neighborhoods surrounding Cincinnati). We shot a couple pics outside, then headed into a place called Anjou, where we drank Paper Planes (a cocktail he introduced me to which I liked).
Henrik is a nice guy who originally hails from Europe, though he’s lived in the States for many years. We had a nice chat about our backgrounds, the Instagram menswear scene, being parents of small children, and whether making a modest living from making YouTube videos is worth it at a societal level.
That sentence sounds like a podcast intro, so, sorry to disappoint, but we didn’t record our conversation, and you can’t hear it. However, you can follow him on Instagram and enjoy his unique style and sharp photography: https://www.instagram.com/hwilberg
