The Hand, 11.10.23 (A Collar, a Crewneck, a Non-Existent Hoodie)
I go into stores and touch the clothes.
Prada, 8.11.23
Not long ago I wrote about collars for my friend Ian Blair at Image. In the piece I spent a moment contemplating the FW23 collars on Prada’s coats. If you haven’t seen these things, imagine a regular Chesterfield-ish coat, then add a hint of a fuzzy sweater at the clavicle, the lay a dress shirt collar on top. Now make the collar thinner. Now make the points longer. No, longer than whatever you’re imagining. Like a flamingo stepping out of a pond:
The thing about the collars that the Midwest bosses wear so well when we meet them in “Casino” is that they’re absurdly long. And not long in the ‘70s way, where they zoom out from the neck like a fighter jet — a trait that Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada took to a silly extreme in a recent Prada men’s collection — but long in a front-and-center business way. The points nearly preclude the tie knot, offering instead a slim strip of fabric peeking through a slit. It’s almost a parody of a white-collar collar, a perversion of a clergyman’s. Here are men who move heaven and earth to avoid a 9-to-5, and their cloistered throats say so loud and clear. That and all the blood spatter.
I loved the collection when I first saw it because it had such a simplicity and purity and—really, it’s just that they look like nice, boring clothes with a bit of thought behind them, not doing too much, and I’m thankful because it means that these are clothes I only have to fantasize about affording without also puzzling over how to fit them into my far wealthier imaginary-future life. (A suit jacket version of the situation—two buttons with a normal gorge, lapels wider than a J. Crew Ludlow but nothing that would have been out of place on the Desperate Housewives set, short, boxy, extremely "regular size"—costs $4,800, though you can get a similar jacket for $4,500 without the collar. Plus! you get to keep the Prada triangle at the yoke.)
But I can’t get over how stupid the collars are. Just a silly, unserious detail. When you see the collars styled in magazines and at red carpets and stuff, it’s easy to tell that something isn’t right, because the peek of fuzzy sweater never becomes more than that, a peek, and the collar only lays, it doesn’t splay. So when I saw the collars in the window one day, I said showtime! Stepped into the store and made my way to the menswear. Boom! There it was. And it was somehow more curious than I had even imagined. If you peel back the lapel of a coat with the collar, you’ll see that the collar is only the collar, just a band a shirting, sewn directly into the knit. But it’s not a peek of sweater, just a puff, and attached to the coat with buttons. Dumb! It's the sartorial version of dragged-out Bugs Bunny sticking out a stocking’d gam to befuddle Elmer Fudd.
SEED Brklyn, 10.3.23
I wandered over to SEED because I was waiting for the bus. There aren’t a lot of places in the city with a Martine Rose rack, so I like to pop in when I can. And what did they have for me that day? A fuzzy mohair sweater from the Eros collection! Crewneck, charcoal, with little whisps of yarn breaking off like flares from the sun. The big draw, of course, is the lowercase “e-r-o-s” draped across the chest in white. Sprayed on? Looking more closely: Woven?!
When it comes to fuzzy sweaters, I’ve always had more of an affection for brushed shetland, because the J. Press shaggy dogs implanted in my brain at a really impressionable time—like, just-came-across-my-first-copy-of-Take Ivy impressionable—but fuzzy has been having such a widespread taking-up these last few years that I have been making room in my heart for others. And what’s not to love? The main point of clothing as a hobby, or what I would hope is the point, is that it evokes a feeling in you. The fuzzy sweater does both, giving you texture plus the warm lump of comfort and nostalgia and shelter that we call “coziness.”
“Eros” is sexy. “Shyness, extroversion, overconfidence, and arrogance,” Rose told Hypebeast, such a should-be-happy thing. But the garment itself is so dreary. I didn’t have a lot of time to process what I was thinking as I held it because the bus was pulling up and I had a long day ahead of me: some reading, a walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, a walk to a library for a book that wasn’t there and which I ended up reading on my phone, a walk across the Manhattan Bridge. The sun shone so beautifully on the water. Then it set, and the day was done.
Guggenheim Museum Store, 10.25.23
I really dug the new “Going Dark” show at the Guggenheim. It’s a long exploration of what it means to go underground, to step out of view. Lots of black, both the color and the race, lots of hard looks in portraits of people seemingly unsure if they want you them looking at you. Lots of references to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And of course, hoodies. Hoodies on giant, stilting, faceless figures (Sandra Mujinga’s “Spectral Keepers”). Images of of hoodied subjects refracted into a constellation of screens (Carrie Mae Weems’s “Repeating the Obvious”) or turned away (John Edmonds's "Untitled (Hood 13)"). A literal sweatshirt hood (David Hammons’s “In the Hood”). The sweatshirt hood offers respite from the elements, sure, but it also creates a tiny escape from surveillance. Pull it across your ears and disappear! Enter American Artist’s eye-in-the-sky “Security Theater.” If you go, save it for last. (Spoiler: It’s what you come to realize is a camera that hangs in the museum’s rotunda. It has artificial intelligence capabilities that highlight every “human” the camera spots, and as part of the work you sit in a booth with screens showing you yourself and every other “human” perusing the exhibit.)
Funny enough, the hoodie most powerfully conjured by the exhibit, and American Artist’s installation specifically, wasn't displayed or referenced anywhere. It was the one worn by the still-uncaught January 5th pipe bomber. Remember? The specter who left an explosive apiece at the respective headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees ahead of the next-day riot at the Capitol? On the FBI’s “Seeking Information” page, a nearly three-year-old flyer begs for the public’s help’s finding an “individual” only identifiable by their oddly specific Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers (with the yellow logo) and their obviously generic “grey hooded sweatshirt.” Anyway, I go to the gift shop afterwards, and I’ll give you one guess at what piece of oh-come-on merch wasn’t available to purchase.
Tell me a story about a piece of clothing you went to a store to get but couldn't find.