Are you even alive if you aren't confused?
Plus alpaca slapper pack early access with Dana Lee Brown, great new scarves & more
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If you know one thing about me (Jonah), it’s that even though my life has taken the form of a long, uninterrupted string of Ws, I remain one of the planet’s Humblest Eternal Beginners.
In no small part this is because, as a lifelong student of sauce semiotics, my thoughts often turn to the topic of washedness, a.k.a. what happens when you age out of having your finger directly on the youthful pulse of what the f--k is up.
Is being washed always a bad thing? That depends on how you define it. There’s a more expansive definition whereby some degree of washedness is taken as not only inevitable but desirable, too. This definition allows for the possibility of Growing Washed Gracefully — e.g., you reach your forties, stop wearing all the same clothes you wore in your twenties, realize that, Yes, You Should Dress Your Age, then figure out how to do that in way that isn’t lame.
Similarly, there are ways of caring about the workings of washedness that do not boil down by default to undignified manifestations of your own desperate, delusional vanity — i.e., you can ponder the multifaceted varieties of being “Unc,” consider what is admirable about being Unc at its best, what’s loathsome at its worst, what’s charming, pitiable, etc., and then try to plot your own path accordingly.
To put it more plainly: As you grow older, you face the interconnected questions of which parts of yourself to preserve, which parts of yourself to evolve, and which parts of yourself to abandon.
I think these are fun questions to work over, because they’re questions without easy answers and, anyway, there’s no opting out of them. You can ignore them, sure, and continue to Unc out on autopilot, but that’s obviously its own kind of answer and, whether you like it or not, Merciless, Indifferent Time is going to answer for you.
The other day I was at lunch with a friend talking about graceful and ungraceful washedness as relates to new music. This was the core of the conversation, which you can extrapolate to all kinds of non-musical contexts:
When you encounter the work of a musician that cool people who are younger than you love — a Bladee, say, or an Oklou, or a Yeat, or a Playboi Carti — is it more Fatally Washed to react to their music in a spirit of deep bewilderment, or in a spirit of total command?
All things being equal, that is, what’s the more admirable Oldhead Reaction upon hearing a new Playboi Carti single:
“Oh, I get this — I’ve heard Suicide, I’ve heard Yeezus, I’ve heard Death Grips, this is nothing new. Next.”
Or
“This music operates according to physics and principles I do not comprehend. I am going to play it again in an attempt to at least start wrapping my head around it.”
My own opinion is likely clear from the way I’ve phrased things, but I think dismissive, know-it-all, “total command” is the wacker Oldhead Reaction of the two.
Obviously there’s cases where you’re beyond justified in hearing some new cheesy derivative dogs--t and dismissing it accordingly. Ditto cases where you’re justified in saying, “I’m gonna abstain from giving a f--k here, and leave this to the children.”
But, on balance, I think the best way to Grow Washed Gracefully is by proceeding from a position of Curiosity, Confidence, and Confusion, where each informs, undercuts, and counterbalances the other.
Confidence is necessary to spot some chump s--t, diagnose inanity, reject hogwash, etc. — but it can create its own foolhardy blind spots.
Curiosity is plainly beautiful but has one massive pitfall, which is that you only have so much time on this Earth, and an impulse toward limitless curiosity is in tension with a desire to spend your limited days in rewarding ways.
And then, crucially, there’s confusion. Confusion can feel unpleasant, and it can feel embarrassing — but it’s also a function of discovery. I think this is what Sonic Youth meant by “Confusion is Sex.” A life with no more confusion is a life with no more wonder.
Speaking of wonder —
Tomorrow, the great Dana Lee Brown — one of our very favorite designers, who makes simple clothes in very small batches using natural fibers farmed, spun, loomed, knit, woven, cut and sewn entirely in North America — is putting out a capsule of 5 styles for fall & winter.
Several are brand-new designs, and all have one thing in common: “This group is built around fiber from an alpaca herd in upstate New York,” Dana explains, which forms the basis of “four new fabrics: a brown, undyed Alpaca pile, and three other textiles that combine this alpaca with California Rabouillet wool and cotton.”
Today, Classified-Tier Spyfriends get early access to the capsule —
For us, the outspoken hero of the drop is a new “streamlined, mid-layer vest,” cut from the undyed alpaca pile, finished with two patch pockets and a polished two-way Riri zip. This one comes in men’s and women’s cuts.
So does the quiet hero of the drop, the half-mock sweatshirt: a “boxy, vintage-leaning” piece cut from a new “custom-developed ‘Cocoon Fleece’: a thick, brushed, loop-back fleece” that Dana “conceived as a washable, equally luxe” alternative to other cloudlike wool-cotton-blends she’s used in the past.
There are also two different styles of cotton-wool-alpaca jersey short-sleeve tees and a new “full-height, full-cushion, dense-loop cotton-wool-alpaca sandal-sock (?)” she calls the House Sock.
You can see them all collaged above.
“The alpaca, wool, and cotton fibers are regeneratively farmed and undyed,” Dana notes. “With the exception of the pile vest, everything is machine-washable and soft enough for next-to-skin wear.” These pieces will be rolling out in very limited quantities at five DLB stockists soon — Portland’s Shop Boswell, L.A.’s Mohawk, Tokyo’s Maidens, NYC’s Ven. Space, and Vancouver’s Neighbour.
This is an exclusive for Classified-Tier Spyfriends. Here’s how to access the capsule right now, before anyone else: