Bad advice
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Blackbird Spyplane back once again. In today’s sletter we’ve got:
“You shouldn’t care about what other people think” is bad advice.
“You could do worse than learn a specialized trade, do it part time for dough, and with the rest of your time make beautiful things (which you can sell, too, without necessarily needing to)” is good advice.
Soft, spongy, Mach-3-absorbency-grade hand-woven cotton-linen hand towels a.k.a. “lil miracles.”
The other day, the deepest collection to date dropped from a tiny NYC clothing line doing great work under the radar — the shirts & pants are especially on point.
And more!
Let’s get to it —
In Tuesday’s major essay, about how wearing berets and other high-potency garments is like cooking with anchovies, I (Jonah) called clothes “irreducibly social,” and argued that, even if we’re primarily “cooking for ourselves” when we get dressed, “we are always cooking for other people,” too.
This is a point I’ve made before. But in a culture where people constantly tell you that the coolest thing you can do style-wise is not care what other people think, it’s worth emphasizing & elaborating on.
Clothes are how we speak to others without actually speaking to them. In the current symbolic order, if not since time immemorial, the clothes we wear are messages we draft about ourselves and send out to others. If you are the least bit concerned with how you look, these others take two forms:
1) Actual flesh-and-blood humans, ready to interpret, judge, draw conclusions from, and/or totally ignore the messages you’re sending.
2) Phantasms who exist in your own mind, and whose reactions and judgments you imagine and anticipate, consciously or not, when you put that s--t on.
In other words, what you choose to wear is always a message — even if you never step outside, even if you don’t post fit pics, even if the message is, I don’t care. The same way you can’t step outside of language, you can’t step outside of clothes.
The messages you compose can be more or less precise. They can be more or less original. Their clauses can harmonize or clash. You can draft them from a place of confidence, fear, love, pride, defensiveness, disdain, or happiness. They can emerge from a desire to disappear, or from an urge to attract attention.
You can approach them with extreme care, or unthinkingly. Either way, the more that the elements of your message seem to be pointed in the same direction, the more other people are likely to believe you — much the way they believe a great actor whose performance consists of a million microscopic cues working in concert toward the creation of a True Illusion.
And yet! If your intention is too palpable, if the energy is too unidirectional, and if there is zero of the pleasing frisson of human error, then you risk coming off less like a great actor and more like a politician — all “message discipline,” containing no actual message.
The exciting & vexing thing is that, no matter how exacting you are, the messages you compose when you get dressed will always contain an excess of meaning beyond your control. People might pick up what you’re putting down, but they might well pick up something about you that you didn’t intend to say.
That can thrill you, it can irk you, or you can take it in stride. But anyone who tries to tell you this stuff is simple enough to boil down to “stop caring what other people think” is either mistaken, blessed with enormous inbuilt swag so rare that their advice is of little use to most mortals, or lying!
Meanwhile —
The fashion industry slices the year into “seasons” that correspond notionally at best to seasons as normal people understand them. These cadences have become deeply ingrained across mills, factories, shops and balance sheets. And so it can be hard for designers — even small ones intent on doing their own thing their own way — to resist them.
But it does happen, and so here we are in mid-January, technically “off cycle,” and yet a tiny under-the-radar NYC line we’ve had our eyes on for a minute just put out a fall-winter collection featuring some understatedly sick pieces, foremost among them the button ups & pants. The line also just got a bit less tiny…