Do we really need more clothes in the world?

Yes we do. A Profound Year-End Reflection

Dec 19, 2023

Our guide to the Pants of the Year is here.

Our G.I.F.T.S. list is here, and the B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.

Our Profound Essays, Mindsets and “Unbeatably Spicy Takes” are here.

— Jonah & Erin

Your boy profoundly fitted in Y’s … and profoundly thoughtful and wise 🧠

We got a reader question the other day that was short and to the point — but chasmic in its implications:

“I wanna start a small-run clothing business but … do we really need more clothes in the world?” — guybrods

The short answer is: Give it a shot on some earnest, exploratory level, and if you don’t feel a burning passion, please don’t do it. If you do feel a burning passion and your s**t catches on and you decide to make a go of it despite the fact that doing this kind of work is TOUGH, then congratulations & G-d bless you — and make your best attempt, as you enjoy success, to honor your original animating burning passion above all else, not the fiendishly tempting yet much more dubious prerogatives of, e.g. “scaling” and profit maximization. We definitely don’t need more clothes from arrivistes & opportunists who don’t love this jawns s**t to their core and are just trying to reap plump margins by, e.g., imitating other, more innovative designers, contracting for the low with unaccountable factories, etc., etc.

But I (Jonah) want to push further here. Because the type of conscientious & contemplative clothes-rocker who rides with Blackbird Spyplane is no stranger to the question of whether “we really need more clothes.” It’s a concern that gnaws at the edges of contemporary jawns enthusiasm, as you wonder whether your desire to cop mad fly s**t all the time is an unhealthy compulsion, and as you fear that, through this compulsion, you are to some nagging degree implicating yourself in a decadent, destructive, world-clogging glut of consumption.

Feeling queasy about this, you might form an answer along the lines of: “We absolutely don’t need any more clothes in the world, and if I pause for ~5 seconds to consider the hyperabundance of garments currently in existence — a hyperabundance whose creation and perpetuation has poisoned ecosystems, drained aquifers, annihilated species, turned arable land to desert, pumped carbon into the atmosphere, plastic into the seas and microplastics into our bloodstreams, enhanced the profitability of industrialized animal cruelty, and exploited, injured, sickened, literally enslaved and otherwise immiserated millions of workers, many of them children, all in the name of supplying the free market with kilotons of mostly swagless & cursed fetish objects to sell, untold numbers of which wind up in landfills or set on fire — I find myself party to a moral obscenity so grody, vast, and seemingly irreversible that all I can do is feel an intense, paralyzing sadness. Mamma mia.”

Because the harsh reality is that, among the many contradictions embedded in modern cultural life, few are as gnarly as the contradictions embedded in a life spent f**king heavy with clothes…

If you care a lot about clothes and you do an inventory of the garment industry? You’ll find a centuries-spanning ethical and ecological blight most closely comparable not to any other cultural medium in its scope but to fossil fuels and agriculture. (Without miring itself in total gloom, Sofi Thanhauser’s incredible 2022 book, Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, paints a sweeping & bracing picture of the industry, past and present, and I can’t recommend it enough.)

The question of whether the world “needs” more clothes has a lot in common with a question you hear people ask, typically in a climate context, about whether the world “needs” more people. We see this dramatized hokily in, e.g., the Avengers movies, where the villain is an overpopulation zealot. And we see it dramatized more complexly in, e.g., Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, where Ethan Hawke’s protagonist obsesses over a climate-activist’s anguish about bringing a child into this world and whether “God will forgive us for what we’ve done to His creation.” The ‘drip anti-natalist’ line of inquiry goes something like, Is it right to bring a new jawn into this world??

It’s easy to spiral out thinking about this kind of s**t — especially on the internet, connecting dots and mapping grim parallels in a way that feels at once righteous, correct, manic and useless. Mix in the creeping current phenomenon of sales bloat / steroidal jawnflation…

And add to that the sense that the market is being vacated of decent middle-tier jawns, with mad $1.99 Shein joints and other cheap fast-fashion s**t on one side, and on the other side it seems you’re shelling out hundreds of dollars minimum these days if you want a well-made, non-sweatshopped-out slapper, with increasingly scarce options in between besides swagless timeline brands…

And don’t even start thinking about what happens to the staggeringly high percentage of jawns people cop online only to return them…

And it might hit you that we’ve reached “peak clothes” !!

In the face of all that, it makes sense to say, “We’re done here. S**t is beyond torched, let’s pack it up — no more clothes, baby.”

But while we feel this… we gotta reject it.

Set aside the fact that ‘no more clothes’ is not a remotely realistic outcome as long as there are still people on this planet. It’s not a remotely desirable outcome, either. O no! Here at Blackbird Spyplane, we’re unwavering proponents of people making dope beautiful s**t with love and ingenuity, and an imaginary world where no one’s trying to make new dope ingenious clothes anymore sounds unbearably cold … disenchanted… wack.

So if you ask us, there’s a better answer to the question at the top of this sletter, and it goes something like this:

Yes — there are too many clothes in the world…

…And yet we nonetheless ‘need’ more of them, because clothes can be some of the sickest, most transportive and meaningful things people make and cherish in the course of full, vibrantly lived lives. This has been true for millennia, of simple jawns and audacious jawns alike. And somehow it remains true today despite the FOUL behemoth that is the globalized garment industry.

This is not an easy answer, because it requires that we acknowledge gnarly and depressing contradictions without resigning ourselves to their permanence. It requires that we accept that s**t is mad f**ked up without losing sight of the fact that other arrangements of human life and abundance and creativity are possible, even if the way we get there is anything but clear.

The first clue lies in slappers themselves: Think about a beloved sweater, or a jacket your friend gave you, or a cooked old t-shirt you cherish… Think about all the hands that went into making that piece and getting it to you… about all the people — strangers and loved ones both — who imbued it with significance along the way…

Think about how intensely and beautifully social a garment can be…!!

And think about how profound it is that you can take something that someone else made using the sacred waters, cottons, linens, wools, etc. of Gaia, and that you can fit this thing over your body and be so transformed and enswaggened by it that other people see you and say, “Man I wish I had that guy’s fits” and you can say to yourself, “Holy shit I’m getting a fit off” —

Hahahah 😜 You can change the last panel to “that guy is doing his d*mn thing too,” if you want a less funny but more kindvibed punchline

Think about all that, and now ask yourself: How much is the cursed garment industry to thank for that beauty & profundity? Now that the core mission of actually clothing people has been, at this point, achieved and then some, how much can we actually credit the industry for achieving the core mission of bringing popping s**t into existence? I concede that the answer isn’t zero — there’s a ton of, e.g., fire footwear that wouldn’t exist without mass production — but how much higher than zero is it?

And real talk, how much of the industry is in fact the enemy of what matters most about jawns? How much of it deranges our relationship to clothes, creating a barrage of marketing designed to make us feel empty and lacking, injecting obscene profit motives into the equation, driving prices either way too low on some Shein s**t or way higher than they have to be, and alienating us from our brothers and sisters who made the pieces and from a planet so miraculous in its bounty that it literally s🌱p🌱r🌱o🌱u🌱t🌱s the ingredients for slappers from its soil?

Because then the question shifts away from the futile & ultimately misleading “do we really need more clothes” toward a more actionable question: “How do we work to end the destructive BOGOSITY of an industry significantly at odds with what is most beautiful, ennobling, and fire about clothes?”

The most common answers tend to focus on acts of harm mitigation… Shopping small, shopping local, buying mostly secondhand, “buying less, buying better,” and other increasingly granular attempts to divest from bad actors: supporting independent designers, only copping clothes made from natural fibers or deadstock and upcycled fabrics, etc.

These kinds of displays of conscience and personal virtue feel important but also insufficient — and often outright sus, given that they so readily lend themselves to corny “vote with your wallet”-style consumerist credos.

Spy Nation, please don’t get it twisted... That “virtuous litany” reflects many of the core beliefs animating this newsletter, and we think such practices are tight. The problem is that they can dissolve too easily into meaningless displays of effete consumerist vanity. Yes, there are materially and morally important reasons why it’s ill to know the people who make your clothes and the non-cursed ways they make them. But in the absence of any other political analysis, “buying responsibly” or whatever you wanna call it risks becoming mere affectation — less a coherent politics and moreso a guilt-laundering luxury category.

We see this in the context of food systems, in, e.g., the clowned-on figure of “the locavore,” who insists, Portlandia-style, on knowing the name of the certified organic pasture-raised chicken he’s about to eat for dinner. This fool loses sight of the fact that eating organic is chill not just because it’s good for you and good for the earth but because of a glaringly obvious virtue we hear about much less, which is that organic farming is good for the farmworkers who are actually exposed to the chemicals involved in raising non-organic crops!! (Also think about the beautiful birds, too, and consider vegetarianism.)

When you think about it that way, you start to wonder why “organic” is a luxury consumer category in the first place, as opposed to a regulated norm, other than the fact that the farmworkers whose bodies are literally on the line have so little political power that Big Ag can say f**k ‘em and tax upmarket conscience-havers in the process.

With clothes, too, the incentives of workers are broadly aligned with the interests of the conscientious jawns enthusiast… workers don’t want the waters near where they live polluted by toxic dyes and the byproducts of synthetics manufacturing… workers don’t want to put in the endless hours for paltry dough that fast fashion depends on for its ungodly churn…!

We know that any “change” that unfolds purely along an axis of consumer choice does little to threaten those with their hands on the levers of power. Real change requires a holistic, bird’s-eye view analysis and action — one that includes regulation that strengthens garment-worker protections & ability to organize, and which mandates supply-chain transparency from brands… and also regulation that increases tenant protections, and spending on social services, both of which will help fire small lines and the shops that support them to thrive, and which will afford more people the dough to coppeth ill s**t now that they don’t have to shell out as much to landlords, who do so much less for society than sick JAWNS crafters …

And also radical climate action, such as the very ill fossil-fuel-industry-sabotage approach embodied in the phenomenal 2023 Spyplane-Certified Cinematic Banger How to Blow Up a Pipeline …

“Correctly consuming” your way out of the problem is a clear LOSER’S GAMBIT, whereas blowing up bulls**t with panache obviously goes hard!!

And that brings us to the conclusion, Spy Nation — which, you guessed it, all comes back to swag.

In the Spyplane Cosmology there are few fates worse than being a mere “consumer” — a jawns copper trapped saucelessly and joylessly in a State of Shopping… Acquiring a lot and barely enjoying it… Letting an endless series of e-commerce purchases hit the front door, to the anhedonic extent that the crib starts to resemble a Mailboxes Etc., and your role there as relates to clothes is to open packages, snap a desultory fit pic with the fold lines still in the garments, then experience near-instant boredom, list them on Grailed & impatiently hit refresh on the next FedEx tracking number in your queue … All too rarely vibrating upon the sublime frequencies of lived-in swag!!

Taking about swag is funny, but swag itself is anything but frivolous. Swag is deeply important, because swag is a uniquely gorgeous manifestation of grace. Since fire clothes are a technology of swag enhancement, fire clothes are themselves, by extension, instruments of grace, and they are to be held sacred.

They help to remind us that life, too, is fire, and they help connect us to the planet and to other people. To the people who made the garments, and to the people who recognize that our fits are dope and link & build with us while we are out doing fun, chill, soul-nourishing s**t totally unrelated to getting dressed.

Remembering that life is fire and connecting to Gaia and other people through that truth is precious, and not to be taken for granted.

So shout out to clothes — there are way too many of them, and we will never have enough.

Do we really need more clothes in the world?

Yes we do. A Profound Year-End Reflection

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