By Manish Puri
Daniel Baraka Zaluke is a Nashville-based photographer, stylist and creative consultant. He also just happens to have incredible personal style. His Instagram page is a terrific inspiration – especially for those guys who have built up a good collection of staples and are starting to think about how to be a little more creative, how to wear more colour, and how to bring their personality to a look.
It turns out I’m not alone among the PS readership in thinking this; Daniel was a popular nomination in our 2026 award for best-dressed people. So I’m sure you’ll be as pleased as I was that Daniel agreed to sit down and chat about his style: how he evaluates ‘the rules’, his uniforms and practical tips for the shorter gent.
I think it’s quite telling about the way Daniel approaches clothes that he, very kindly and without asking, went off and photographed some looks especially for the article. I had planned to use some of his Instagram posts, but Daniel concedes he’s a bit of a perfectionist. And I think you’ll find that same desire to elevate everything a notch throughout these outfits.
On mixing worlds
Daniel, it’s an absolute pleasure to speak with you. You live in Nashville now, but am I right that you weren’t born in the US?
Yeah, I was born and raised in Congo, central Africa. I didn’t move to the US until I was 17 years old.
The Congo is where a lot of my passion for clothing comes from. It’s a national affair. You inherit it from the culture, essentially.
And now I think about menswear all the time. I tell people it’s my disease.
So that love of just presenting yourself right every day sounds like a part of the Congo that you’ve brought with you to the US.
We don’t have much, but we take so much pride in how we present ourselves.
I remember an episode of Anthony Bourdain where he was in the Congo [Parts Unknown, S1 E07], and he asked this guy what’s the first thing you buy if you’re very very poor and get a little money.
The Congolese guy said the first thing would be soap, so you could look clean. And then you’d keep a dollar to buy a shirt or something to look smart. It’s a matter of pride and dignity.
I imagine compared to some of the sapeurs [followers of the fashion subculture La Sape] in the Congo, even your most adventurous outfits might seem relatively restrained?
They are extreme in all the best ways – they have a certain freedom. They’re not burdened by the rules of dressing, so they take risks. It’s a huge inspiration, but moving to the United States gave me a bit more access to education about clothing and helped me develop my taste.
In the US, there’s no institution that’s as venerated as Ralph Lauren. So coming here, I really got into Ralph and studied his style. I love the tension in his outfits and the way he mixes different worlds.
I think you can see that influence in my style. That mixture of worlds is very important to me. When you have everything in the same code, it’s boring. I can appreciate it and I can respect it, but it’s not me. When you mix two or three worlds, that’s when an outfit becomes interesting.
I think this outfit is a great example of you “mixing worlds”. I can see military, tweedy country and a super luxe shirt.
Yeah, the jacket is a linen P43 that Buck Mason made which is perfect. I love the weight of it. The shirt is this 100% silk shirt from Tom Ford, which is unbelievably light. It’s almost like a black tie silk shirt with a band collar. And the vest is a linen/silk/wool blend, and has a country feel. I love this mix of elements.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at your outfits and there’s always so much to enjoy, they’re very rich in details. However, and I don’t want to demystify or oversimplify things, you often return to certain motifs: cream trousers to ground a strong poppy colour, monochrome fits – usually all navy or black – and, as is the case here, really chic earth tones.
I want my outfits to look complex, but be very simple for me to put together. I never want to think for more than like six or seven minutes about what I’m going to wear. It has to be quick.
I think if people were to analyse my outfit, they’ll see some very clear themes.
And one of the ways you make things look a little more complex is with layers – you very rarely wear just a two-piece outfit like a shirt and trousers or T-shirt and shorts. How does layering work in a Nashville summer?
The thing I find very interesting about the United States is how people treat the day as if they’re spending so much time outside. But usually you go from your apartment, down to the garage, you get in your car, you drive to work in an AC building. You’re in perfect conditions for 90% of the day.
In fact, sometimes layering is more called for in the summer, because they overcorrect and the buildings are very, very cold. I’m freezing. Like, yesterday was the hottest day in Nashville, and I still had a jumper around the neck just to add a bit of dimension to an outfit. I love knitwear, in my perfect world I’d wear it every day.
Knitwear and velvet slippers? The latter is almost ubiquitous in your outfits.
It’s one of my signatures I guess. I love them because they work with everything. I wear them with sweatpants, I wear them with denim, with chinos, I’ll wear them with a black tie rig.
And again, this goes back to simplifying the wardrobe, I don’t have to think too much when I’m getting dressed. If the weather allows it, I’m probably wearing velvet slippers.
I have lots of other shoes, tons of loafers and boots. I just find lacing shoes to be exhausting, so exhausting.
On uniforms
Another way to keep an outfit looking complex but simple to prepare is to have a uniform that you can play with. Do you have one?
Yes! I have a question I ask people when I’m doing personal styling work with them: if you were a comic book character, what would your outfit be? Like when you think about Tintin, and he’s in his adventures, he’s wearing the blue sweater with the pants. It doesn’t mean that’s what he’s always wearing, but that’s his default outfit.
For me, in the summer, it’s a white band-collar shirt in linen, a pair of jeans and some slippers and a jumper around my neck. My winter uniform is a pair of cream chinos or cords, a button-down shirt – probably light blue or a butcher stripe – with a navy cardigan and a navy chore coat.
You seem to wear a lot of band collar shirts.
This is a vintage Hermes shirt that I got from my father. He gave me two of the same exact shirts. They’re wide and billowy in all the best ways. They fit unbelievably well, the way they attach the sleeves to the body of the shirts is so masterfully done. I cut off the collar on the shirts because they were a bit worn out. I do that a ton.
I love simple pieces. Actually, I love simple pieces and complicated pieces. As I love to layer, the bases have to be simpler, and so a band collar makes sense in a lot of my outfits.
On “cooking” your clothes
Do you have the collars removed by a tailor, or do you just cut them and singe off any loose threads?
I cut them myself and I’ll burn the edge off a little bit the first time, but after you wash them you’re still gonna get a bit of fraying. Personally I really love the fraying, I think it adds a bit of texture, a bit of life to the outfit.
This is something that I’ve noticed, people treat ready-to-wear clothing as if they’re buying ready-to-eat meals. But you’re not, you’re buying ingredients and they need to be cooked.
So I’m always modifying my clothes a little bit, whether that’s cutting off the collar, changing the buttons, changing the zipper. Maybe that dishonours the designers, but I already gave them the money.
Ha, indeed. Well, if the clothes are the ingredients, then maybe changing little elements is your seasoning.
Yeah, if I didn’t modify any of the clothing a little bit, then I’m just eating a salad, which isn’t bad. Sometimes, having a salad is good.
But this Lemaire jacket (above) is a good example of cooking. When I got it, it was very pale blue. I really love the design of it – I think Lemaire has some of the best cuts in menswear right now – but I wasn’t sure of the colour.
I got it because I got a great deal on it, so I was like if I keep it, I have to dye it. So I dyed it this warm brown, and I love the way it turned out. I use a mix of Rit Dye All-Purpose colours – I never use a single dye as the base colours lack depth. It’s a unique piece. Nobody else has it. It’s my own. [Daniel kindly shared a detailed step-by-step guide of how he dyes clothes which I can add to the comments]
On navy studies
I wanted to ask you about the ‘navy studies’ series on your Instagram page where you wear an entirely navy blue outfit. Can you tell me more about that?
That’s an exercise that started when I was working with clients. I would show them an item in two colours and they would say: I already have so much navy in my closet. I should go for the green.
And I would tell them, no, you shouldn’t. You should go for the navy, because it sounds like you gravitate toward navy. This is going to make your closets much easier to navigate than adding this whole other colour which you’ll have to figure out how to build around.
You know, you could be the most stylish person in the world and wear navy exclusively. And so, I set out on this adventure where I started my navy studies, and I was just going deep into how I could make it interesting.
Were there any particular lessons you learned about materials or textures?
One thing I’ve learned is that the weight of a garment matters. You can have a full outfit in the same exact shade of navy and in materials that don’t contrast too much in texture, but if the weight is different, it will come through.
Like, even in the winter, I would wear a light silk summer shirt as a base with a lambswool sweater. I’ve found that menswear sometimes encourages people to spend more and acquire more, but that’s not reality for lots of guys. This way you can get a bit more mileage out of some clothing.
Forgive me for asking, it’s not always easy to gauge from photos, but is it fair to say you’re not the tallest guy in the world?
Oh yeah, I’m super short. I’m like, 5’ 5” most of the time, 5’ 6” on a very good day.
There’s just a lot of bad advice for shorter guys on the internet, mostly surrounding lengths of coats. And that is to go shorter because you don’t want it to swamp you. But that ignores proportions. If you’re 6′ 5” and your coat reaches down to your mid calf, as a 5’ 5” person I should be able to do the same, and it should have a similar effect.
The advice on patterns is definitely accurate. You don’t want massive patterns. Mostly, because your body cannot accommodate very big patterns. You’ll have the pattern repeating just twice. That’s not good.
However, the key piece of advice that’s not talked about enough is the importance of sleeve length and hem length. As a short person, I cannot afford to have sleeves that are too long. That changes everything about the way that a jacket or a coat looks. The sleeve length has to be perfect, if anything, almost veering to the shorter side.
This is especially true in the US, where I think the typical sleeve length is longer. Vintage is great, because very often the sleeves are shorter already. For example, the sleeve on the vintage Ralph Lauren polo coat I’m wearing here was perfect and needed no adjustment. On trousers, I’d recommend no break, or a half break if you’re adventurous.
So, I’d strongly advise the shorter guy to invest in getting those two things adjusted for them.
I love that you don’t take rules at face value, but examine them to see if they make sense for you.
I think there’s lots of rules in menswear that don’t make a ton of sense. Like wearing snuff suede with off-white pants, a combination that some people swear by. Over time, I’ve realised that on black skin, a dark brown suede, like I’m wearing here, works better. It breaks up the visual line better than snuff suede on black skin.
And it’s not necessarily like I set out to break the rules when I wake up in the morning. It’s just you start to notice a lot of the rules obviously were designed by white people for white people. So there needs to be more voices in menswear that are challenging these rules that are considered almost universal, because sometimes they’re just not.
Daniel is @danielzbaraka on Instagram
Manish is @the_daily_mirror on Instagram
