Old Year's Sleeve '19
Some writing I did about clothes this year.
On the Enduring Bland Appeal of Brooks Brothers—and the Freaks Who Love It (Garage, ed. Rachel Tashjian)
"A lot of us obsess not just over the company history, but also the details,” he told me. He parses the ubiquitous for anything that might make a given shirt more desirable. “I count buttons,” he said. “If you count seven buttons, it’s automatically inferior to a six-button.”
He’s looking for a canon, a rightness. “It looks right, it looks like a man’s shirt,” Yarbrough said. Perhaps there is no paragon of virtue, no collar more closely watched than the one perpetually framing Robert Mueller’s face from within a nondescript blue suit as he investigates President Donald Trump. Troy Patterson called his costume “the mark of an unreconstructed preppy.” Only Bobby Three Sticks, so staid, could pull off the high-wire act necessary to balance the excising of corruption from the highest levels of government with the reassurance that he’d preserve of the norms and institutions that failed to check that corruption in the first place.
Vibram's Rubber Soul (SSENSE, ed. Romany Williams)
In 2019, the high fashion market is all about collaboration: it allows brands to augment the goodwill they’ve gathered, or failed to gather, with the goodwill accrued by another brand. The more unexpected the better. Rick Owens x Birkenstock. Louis Vuitton x Supreme. Dapper Dan x Gucci. But before there were collaborations, there were sub-contractors, whose brands were enlisted to provide functionality and a sheen of seriousness. Like the capital-c Fashion Collab, they provide reputational augmentation, and as a byproduct of that augmentation, these sub-brands often acquire fame in their own right: That’s how you get Big Boi purring “YKK on your zipper” or George Costanza chirping “it’s Gore-Tex!” Though bringing in an outside manufacturer might be more expensive than just making something in-house, Enrique Corbi, the senior men’s design director at Ugg, laid out the appeal of subcontracting a Vibram sole. He’s been working with them since the early 1990s—through stints at Lacoste, Wolverine, and his current gig—and though Vibram soles cost more than their competitors, it’s a cost that companies are willing to front and customers are willing to swallow.
Fashion Illustrator Antonio Lopez Sketched His Dreams—and Made Fashion Reality (GQ, ed. Sam Schube)
(Alicia Drake, in her history of 1970s Paris fashion, The Beautiful Fall, makes the case that Karl Lagerfeld, the then fledgling Chloé designer who underwrote much of Lopez and Ramos’s time in Europe, became the Karl Lagerfeld of legend in part because the Puerto Ricans rubbed off on him, with the sheer speed that they were able to run through ideas and digest source material. The artist Paul Caranicas, who lived in Paris at the time and now runs the Lopez and Ramos estate, told Drake that “Karl was going to get there. But Antonio and Juan were the people to get him there fast.”)
Why Lil Uzi Vert Is the Most Stylish Man of the Decade (GQ, ed. Sam Schube)
The decade started in darkness, with George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie and further politicizing that garment. In the months and years that followed, alongside the Black Lives Matter movement, the expert display of black pain took on a bloody sheen of prestige, of importance. Affirmations of black happiness, then, emerged as a refusal of burnout, a pressure valve for the anguish of black life, and with them came an aesthetic of black boy joy: flower crowns, pastels, a visual softening of male aggression and stoicism most celebrated against a palette of cisness and straightness. Lil Uzi Vert is far from the first rapper to love fashion or wear feminine clothing, but he is a delightful bookmark for this new lens.
Some writing I did this year that was not about clothes.
Color Correction (The Columbia Journalism Review, ed. Betsy Morais)
A long-term project of white supremacy has been the divorcing of nonwhiteness from images of success—even of normalcy. (The doll experiments highlighted during Brown v. Board of Education, in which Black children assigned more positive attributes to white dolls than to Black ones, taught us that much.) The images of supposed inferiority that white supremacy pushes are produced through actually inferior housing, education, and employment outcomes, to name a few, which in turn are produced by racially hostile policies or neglect, its own kind of hostility. The natural inclination, then, is to focus on the pictures themselves as a means of reverse-engineering all that bigoted machinery. To picture Black people and other people of color in normal situations is to do just that.
As far as the journalism industry is concerned, there are, of course, larger questions to attend to: Are stories diverse enough to require diverse illustration? Are diverse writers putting them together? Are diverse editors assigning them? These are all different fights, each one worthy in its own particular way. But if they must all be fought, and if displaying a plausible reality where Black people work in offices stimulates progress on the other fronts, then it remains a vital part of the larger struggle.
“Nursery University,” a Study of Parents Battling to Get Their Toddlers Into Élite Preschools (The New Yorker, ed. Sharan Shetty)
Child-rearing is a nexus of need, vulnerability, and fear. Our needs—our children’s needs—make us vulnerable, and vulnerability makes us afraid. The wealthy are able to throw money at this fear: “Nursery University” watches them bring in consultants (one charges four thousand dollars for seven sessions) and moan about checks that they are clearly happy to write. As the since-closed Mandell School picks its class (the process involves essays and family photos; five hundred aspirants fight for twenty spots), members of the admissions staff crack jokes about the system that they find themselves perpetuating. “How many more investment bankers and lawyers can you fit in an application pool?” the director asks. Tuition is twenty thousand dollars a year.
Some writing I edited this year that was not about clothes.
Pretending to Be Famous in The Sims - Lauren Michele Jackson
The usual Sims pathways remain in Get Famous—actor, musician, author, stylist—but now characters can also accrue fame in their free time or even without formal employment. In the spirit of things, I made Caterina a full-time social-media influencer. A bright-green “+Fame” qualifier allows users to nudge their Sims’ celebrity level by directing their Sims to post social-media status updates or upload photos to Simstogram. There’s no Simified SoundCloud or YouTube, but Sims can produce music tracks, upload vlogs and product reviews, and collect daily royalties according to viewership. I found myself drawn to those glowing bonuses like a dumb moth, choosing the weighted options every time they appeared. Between writing a column (which doesn’t affect fame scores) and writing a blog post (which boosts fame scores), I chose the latter; I shilled every snapshot doubly to Simstogram and the press; every amateur painting went for whatever an art dealer was willing to pay. Get Famous makes two types of in-game drones available for purchase with Sims money, and Sims can upload pre-recorded drone footage or stream live, quickly gaining bursts of new followers. Were the device not limited by what felt like a brief battery life, I would have bid my Sims to live-stream everything for the sake of exposure. You cannot, I’ve discovered, take drone footage of Sims mid-“woohoo,” the game’s euphemism for sex.
The Complex Legacy of Vigilantism in South Africa - Khanya Mtshali
In his 1985 “ungovernable” speech, Tambo emphasized the need for women to be “active participants in the struggle waged by our national liberation movement.” While women had long played a critical role in the anti-apartheid struggle, Tambo’s decision to highlight their increasing role was designed to create a place for them in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet the mistreatment of female fighters happened within the A.N.C.’s own ranks. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, prominent A.N.C. leaders such as Joe Modise, who was then the defense minister, admitted that rape in A.N.C. military camps was a “very serious problem,” but insisted that such incidents were dealt with accordingly. Female freedom fighters who served in the A.N.C.’s military wing told a different story, explaining that reporting allegations of sexual assault and rape was seen as a distraction from the liberation project. Jessie Duarte, the deputy secretary general of the A.N.C., said at the time that “if women said that they were raped, they were regarded as having sold out to the system in one way or another.”
The digital vigilantism of the “Am I Next?” movement seemed to exist in the same tradition as other forms of extralegal attack, but with a softer imperative. Instead of torture and murder, the vigilantes provided a space for survivors to talk and allowed women whose stories had been questioned—or, worse, ignored—to feel vindicated, and to have their experiences treated with importance, sympathy, and understanding.
Big thanks to all the editors, top-editors, sub-editors, copy editors, fact checkers, photo editors, lawyers, tech teams, readers, writers, subscribers, and payroll staff who worked with me this year! Dear reader, I hope your 2020 is what you need it to be.
Fit Pic of the Year (via me)
