Swatch Book, 9.8.17
Some writing about clothes I liked this week.
Everything Is Far from Here - Cristina Henríquez
This is a haunting piece of fiction about a woman separated from her son during an "illegal" border crossing and the maddening (weeks? months? years?) she spends in detention. This part jumped out:
She meets with a lawyer, a man in a stained tan sports coat. She asks him how long she’ll be here. She asks him what happens after this. “Eso depende” is his answer to both. Then: “Tell me everything. They’ll need to determine if you qualify for asylum, if you have credible fear.” And though she doesn’t want to relive it, she tells him about the day, a few months ago now, that the boys—boys whose mothers she knew from the neighborhood—pushed her off a moving bus and dragged her across a busy intersection, how she kept scrabbling her legs under her to try to stand, and how they kicked her to keep her down. How nobody helped her, how nobody stopped them because nobody knows how to stop boys like that. How they made her kneel in the alley behind the fruit store while they held a gun to her head and all took turns, how they put the gun in her mouth and made her suck that, too, and how when they were finished they said, “You’re in the family now, bitch,” and laughed.
“Why do you think they targeted you?” the lawyer asks.
“I was alone.”
“You’re not married?”
“Not anymore.”
“And you’re pretty.”
She narrows her eyes.
“And men—”
“They were boys.”
“Even more so. We have an expression here: Boys will be boys.”
She feels a rising anger.
“If we go back,” she says evenly, “they will do it again.”
“We?” he asks. “Is there someone else?”
“My son,” she starts, but her voice breaks. She clenches her fists. She digs her nails into her palms, determined not to cry.
Details are few and far between in this story—we don't even learn the protagonist's name—but Henríquez decided to include this one about the (also nameless) attorney's stained cotton jacket. In a follow-up Q&A, she talks about how the story explores the hardening of hearts towards detainees at the detention center among "the staff and the protesters outside who don’t have much sympathy for them but the other detainees as well." With that in mind, the jacket becomes especially illustrative. The lawyer is wearing a tan sports coat because he doesn't believe enough in the dignity of the detainees or his work with them to shoulder something in a proper navy or grey. The attorney is wearing a tan sports coat because his pants don't match, because he's not wearing a suit, because this is casual business for him. (I bet he's not even wearing a tie.) The attorney is wearing a stained tan sports coat because he believes his task is casual but not so casual that he can shield his client from his slovenliness and the attendant carelessness he highlights with his speech. He is one of many people who just don't care. His apathy, and everyone else's, towards these people, who are being pushed and pulled into what Henríquez calls "the churn" because of unimaginably (or incredibly imaginable) forces, is what ultimately gives us a president who can't reconcile the "illegal" nature of some immigration and the nativist law-and-order crowing that brings him the praise he so pathetically needs to sleep at night. Stains all, stains everywhere.
Raf Simons Knows What America Needs - Katherine Bernard
Raf clearly thinks we're all childish. From the new digs at Calvin Klein:
I love the look of this store. It’s soothing and stimulating at once. It looks like a gender-neutral preschool. I tell a salesman this and he laughs. I later learn he is actually on the design staff, so the Raf-laugh counts for even more.
The display pedestals are geometric shapes in primary colors. There are giant stuffed cylinders that Mr. Ruby calls “candles” and touchable yarn pompoms (also by him). A lot of clean white underwear is hung carefully on racks. There’s a bed (with a $400 white jacquard American flag duvet) for a nap. It looks like a place you’d go to learn empathy and sharing, to have a cubby for your things. Soft carpet to pad tantrums. A lot of the clothes are encased in plastic, assuming that people are prone to accidents (inspired by those spill-proof American sofas).
I was willing to chalk this up to cozy vibes, but then Robin Givhan chimed in with "Raf Simons is planning to scare folks for spring 2018. So at least he gives them a blankie." Now I'm heated.
‘Pretty doesn’t work anymore’: How brands can ‘win’ Instagram during show season - Jill Manoff
Here are ad exec Trey Laird and model Candice Huffine holding forth on Instagram marketing:
Laird said brands need to realize that, thanks to Instagram, they’re now talking to the world; it’s no longer the industry talking to the industry about what’s “edgy” and “forward.”
“The whole notion of what ‘aspirational’ and what people want is different,” he said. “It’s maybe not different in the industry yet, but that’s the industry’s problem, and they’re going to have to catch up with the world.”Huffine agreed: “In the [industry’s] bubble, aspiration has lost its meaning and become unattainable,” she said. “In a way, it’s time to burst the bubble. The humanization of the model, the brand, the designer is what people crave. That’s what Instagram does.”
The failed aesthetic they're talking about is "avocado toast with a sprinkle of paprika, a little bit of cappuccino art situation and a pair of Fendi pair of sunglasses, all shot on a white Carrara marble countertop," and they're counseling a move into new means of coveter cultivation, using "a point of view" or "pulling back the curtain." It reminds of the arguments that ad people have been having for the last few years about banner ads vs. native ads. (Advantage: banner ads, for the moment.) Everyone agrees that the goal is making people want things, and everyone agrees the reward for successfully doing so is money, but if people don't keep wanting things, or fail to respond appropriately to visual prodding, the next impulse isn't to question of reconsidering priorities and purpose—nobody wants to put themselves out of a job—but instead to develop new forms of intimacy. If brands start "showing more than just their 'best and most beautiful imagery,'" and make whatever thing they're hawking just a little less out-of-reach, victory can be theirs.
exclusive: telfar clemens discusses his new uniforms for white castle - Antwuan Sargent
White Castle has a uniform rollout that has fashion (clothes by Telfar Clemens) and art (photography by Jayson Keeling) all rolled into one. It's really beautiful, and seems to have been pulled off way more smoothly than the new McDonald's uniforms everyone flamed back in April:
The image Cisco and Chris, of twins who work at the Queens location where Clemens eats regularly, shows the brothers wearing the uniform blue shirts and holding each other's gold and diamond Jesus chains. Images of an employee named Etta show her in a pink dress and similarly hued glasses with her daughters at home in the Bronx. And Michael is a portrait of a young black male with blonde hair sitting at his kitchen table wearing a T-shirt designed by Clemens that says, "original" across the chest in bold lettering. In each image the White Castle workers — and in some cases their children — stare directly at the camera, celebrating what Keeling calls "the bravery of allowing yourself to be seen."
The piece largely concerns itself with the relationships between Clemens and White Castle restaurants ("The designer's fondness for the fast food chain became public a few seasons ago, when video surfaced of Clemens throwing his spring/summer 16 fashion show after-party at the Times Square location."), between Keeling and his subjects ("The humanizing pictures see several of the chain's New York employees at work and at home, alluding to the politics of labor and representation."), and between White Castle's executives and the collaboration they greenlit (Vice president Jamie Richardson: "Our two brands may have started 84 years apart but they share a passion for originality and timelessness that we believe is unrivaled."). But the one I'd like hear a bit more about is the one between the subjects of the photos and the company that employs them. Back in 2013, when the "Fight for $15" wage hike movement was barely a year old, Richardson called the modest plea "beyond the fringe" on CNBC. Later, when New York decided it would raise its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15, he told the National Review that the state had created "a whole generation of kids who won’t get their first job." (Nevermind that realtively few fast food workers are kids, or that few of them even make minimum wage.) It's interesting that White Castle is so interested in humanizing their workers with cool clothes and lovely portraiture, but not with enough money to earn a decent living.
Short-form video content of the week: "Mans Not Hot" - Michael Dapaah
It was a good week for jokey-joke clothing videos. We had "Loafers with the White Socks" and this helpful durag tutorial but what ultimately took the cake was Dapaah's brilliant treatise on hypermasculine climate denialism, of a genre with "real men don't use umbrellas." Like its sibling, The Ting Go (born of a 22-and-a-half-minute freestyle sketch on BBC Radio 1Xtra), it works amazingly because it layers well with other memes, as below, or it can be made hyperspecific and applied to situations like Steve Bannon's trademark wearing-too-many-to-hide-my-stench-and-soul-shaped-cavity look. (Sidenote: Perhaps Bannon is just preening for his Hollywood connections in case a Sammy the Rat role opens up in a live-action Wayside School adaptation.) Perspiration ting!
