"Affordable" is a smokescreen

Not always, but way too often! So here's a wildly special wildly expensive shirt, plus cheap vintage ones, excellent incense & more

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— Jonah & Erin

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Here at BBSP we love digging up troves of slept-on secondhand eBay gems that cost peanuts — but by and large, the new clothes we write about do not cost peanuts … because new clothes shouldn’t! We like to support cool independent designers who make beautiful, ingenious and/or idiosyncratic things in small runs. Between the time, labor and materials involved when you work that way — plus the fact that there aren’t big cost-cutting economies of scale at play, like hitting factory-minimum discounts, etc. — it’s hard not to wind up with higher price tags than you’ll see at a mass-market retailer, to say nothing of an industrialized horror merchant like Sh*in serving up kilotons of dollar-menu-a** proto-landfill…

We own & love any number of well-made mass-produced jawns, but we’ve also written with suspicion about how so-called moves to “democratize” fashion too often boil down to marketing HOGWASH, and about how the rhetoric of putative “affordability” is too often a smokescreen obscuring a garment’s true costs — underpaid workers, animal cruelty, polluted water tables, etc.

And yet — until today, we’ve never featured a $1,000 shirt in the sletter. We haven’t come close. A rack for a button-up?? That takes us into a luxury stratosphere of the jawns market that we tend, with some exceptions, to not care very much about, and indeed often find mad gross.

But what about a unisex shirt so beautiful, so unique, so rare in its materials, so labor-intensive in its creation, and so seemingly capable of being rocked for the rest of yr life — its sauce only enhancing with time — that, while reeling at the objective fact of its price, and making no assertions about whether it’s “really worth it,” we also think it’s too sick and special to ignore!?

That exact shirt has been found. And, if you’re the type to splash out not on a shirt but on beautiful functional pieces for the cribbo?? This beauty comes in handwoven BLANKET form too…

We’ve also got:

• Sick California-made button ups, for men & women, that can be scored for like $30 at resale in true eBay-treasure-trove style — thus restoring non-exorbitant shirt-cost equilibrium to the sletter…

• Our new favorite incense, currently CARESSING OUR NOSTRILS at HQ as I type…

BUT FIRST —