The Grey~ Standard · September 14, 2026 Where success comes to dress, drink, smoke and think. |
📷 @faboss79
Welcome to The Grey~ Standard a weekly correspondence for men who live with discernment. Inside you’ll find thoughts that elevate the mind, craftsmanship that endures, and escapes where the world slows to your pace. Every edition is an exercise in subtlety — a quiet conversation between elegance and intent.
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The Conversation~  The Dorchester, a Qatari Sheikh, and the $31,000 Fiat That Is Paying for a $620,000 Weekend.Sheikh Nasser bin Abdullah Al Thani keeps a Bugatti Veyron and a Lamborghini Aventador in the garage. What he did not keep was his tab at The Dorchester: roughly $620,000, of which $270,000 was room charges, $4,500 interest, and $350,000 the hotel declined to itemize. The Financial Times reports the Park Lane grande dame sued in March; this week the County Court at Central London gave it permission to sell the one car it could reach — a 2011 Abarth 695 Tributo Ferrari worth about $31,000, or five percent of the bill. His lawyers say he was never properly served and dispute the sum. Somewhere in Mayfair, a concierge is being very polite about it. |
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The Goods~  Bugatti Now Makes Golf Clubs. The Full Set Is $72,000, and Only Twenty Men Get One.Molsheim has found a new way to charge you for a horseshoe grille. The HONMA × Bugatti Collection is a thirteen-club set — driver, fairways, hybrids, irons, wedges, putter — built by the Japanese clubmaker in four tiers: $6,500, $12,500, $25,000, and the 5 Star Super Premium at $72,000, limited to twenty sets worldwide. The top tier works the grille and the Tourbillon's instrument-cluster motifs into the clubheads under full-gold finishes, and HONMA says it is aimed at experienced, lower-handicap players. Translation: the clubs will not fix your slice. They will, however, make everyone at the range stop talking when you open the bag. |
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The Life~  Manhattan’s Club War: $200,000 to Join Aman, and the Waitlist Is the Real Velvet Rope.New York’s private clubs have stopped competing on cocktails and started competing on initiation fees. The Aman Club at 730 Fifth Avenue now sits at a reported $200,000 to join plus $15,000 a year, buying a 25,000-square-foot wellness floor and a 65-foot heated pool above the traffic. Robin Birley has brought his first American club to 848 Madison as Maxime’s; The Twenty Two keeps 78 rooms above its Levantine dining room on East 16th; Chez Margaux runs the late shift in Meatpacking; Casa Cipriani and Zero Bond hold their ground downtown. The room you cannot get into is the only room that matters. Grey~ members will recognize the feeling — from the other side of the door. |
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The Look~  J. Press at 125: Ivy Grows Up, Moves to the Bowery, and Brings the Tweed.One hundred and twenty-five years after Jacobi Press opened on the Yale campus, the house showed its Fall collection inside Capitale, an 1891 bank on the Bowery, with Jack Carlson steering. The cloth is the point: Scottish Shetland, Irish Aran, Harris Tweed, and bolts from Fox Brothers and Marling & Evans, worked into patchwork overcoats, duffles, and totes, with Barbour, Gloverall, and Lavenham along for the collaborations and a Made-in-Japan capsule for the purists. Carlson says the founder “created an idealized version of the world” he imagined at Cambridge and Oxford. The trick, a century on, is that the idealized version still fits. Buy the sack jacket. Ignore the trend. |
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The Bank~  Larry Ellison Lost $200 Billion in a Year, Then Cancelled a $7.5 Billion Sale Rather Than Blink.Twelve months ago Larry Ellison was worth more than $400 billion and briefly the second-richest man alive. This week, with Oracle down 27 percent on the year and 53 percent from its peak, he sits near $204 billion and seventh on the list. On September 11 a filing disclosed a plan to sell about 50 million Oracle shares — roughly $7.5 billion. One day later he cancelled it, having sold nothing. Oracle is spending $28 billion a quarter on AI infrastructure, burning $5 billion in free cash flow, and raised $20 billion in equity to keep building; cloud infrastructure revenue is up 121 percent and the backlog stands at $664 billion. Ellison is 82 and still controls forty percent of the company. He is not selling. He is waiting. |
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Presented with  RSVP to access Las Vegas cigar-friendly networking events with Cigars & Conversations. |
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The Vices~ What We’re Smoking & Drinking (and where we are escaping)
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“To be truly elegant, one should not be noticed.” — Beau Brummell |
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The Gentleman’s~ Agreement We will continue to curate the best of men’s content for you. Help us out and tell a friend that deserves to be in the know. Refer friends and acquaintances here. |
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Your Reminder~ The bill always arrives. The gentleman is the one who already knew the number. With Respect, |
Inside Grey~ Where success comes to dress, drink, smoke and think. | ||||||
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