“Luxury” ≠ craft
The word continues to lose meaning. Plus banging Japanese boots, a print sale from one of our favorite photographers, a trove of sick secondhand jackets & more
Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Brendan from Turnstile, Adam Sandler, MJ Lenderman, Steven Yeun, Mac DeMarco, Bon Iver, Seth Rogen, Kim Gordon, André 3000, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Maya Hawke, Camiel Fortgens, Rashida Jones, Father John Misty, Kate Berlant, Clairo, Conner O’Malley and more are here.
Enjoy our new Ultimate Spyplane Guides to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, Naoshima, Teshima & more.
Our new guide to How To Pack for a Trip Swaggily is here.
Did you hear that Cool Dudes have been joining other Cool People in buying Cool Ceramics? We’ve been writing about great ceramicists since Spyplane Year One — check the ceramics section of our Home Goods Index for a rundown.
In today’s Spyplane we’ve got:
Sick new jackets and a trove of secondhand gems
A print sale from one of our favorite photographers
Banging Japanese-made boots
“Luxury” hogwash
And more
Let’s get to it —
When clothing makes mainstream headlines, it’s usually for asinine reasons that Blackbird Spyplane does not care about. Luckily for you, we don’t waste your time pretending you should care about it, either, because this is a Blessed Oasis of Superior Big-Brained Sauce Semiotics, and we hold ourselves to higher standards.
“Politician x wore y” is a prime example. ~99.9% of politicians have no sauce, and few-verging-on-zero are worthy of admiration, much less emulation, ipso facto ~99.9% of their outfit decisions should be ignored. We are so starved as a culture for Style Discourse that we delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.
“What celebrities wore to awards shows” is another great example. Once again, note the high saucelessness rate of the people involved: Notwithstanding vibey Getty photos taken outside movie premieres in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, red carpets are simply not where compelling things happen clotheswise with any frequency. And yet our degraded culture treats red carpets as intrinsically rich Slapper Texts.
Earlier this month, however, a blip of clothing news made the rounds, and it related to a topic that Erin and I do care about: the depressing and unswaggy luxury conglomerate LVMH doing depressing and unswaggy s--t.
We’ve written about how LVMH’s flagship brand, Dior, produced $2800 handbags for about $57 each thanks to undocumented Chinese workers forced to work day and night in and around Milan in “sweatshop-like conditions,” according to Italian authorities. We’ve written about the pitiful compensation — which ranged from low to $0 — that another LVMH brand, Loro Piana, pays to the indigenous subsistence farmers in the Peruvian Andes who help gather the planet’s most expensive wool for them.
The other day, Italian authorities exposed further Loro Piana wackness: systematic labor abuse among their subcontractors. As Forbes reported, “Workers were forced to work up to 90 hours a week, seven days a week and made less than $5 per hour. They also slept in the factory in illegally built rooms.”
The kicker? One vendor told the court that her employees “had been producing around 6,000-7,000 jackets per year for Loro Piana at an agreed price of €118 per jacket.” To be clear, Loro Piana goes on to sell these jackets for like €5,000+, and markets them as rarefied gems that are made using spare-no-expense artisan techniques. This explains why the brand quickly issued a statement and, without offering any evidence to the contrary, insisted that the Italian court’s “cost figures are not representative of the amounts paid by Loro Piana to its supplier, nor do they consider the full value of all the elements, including, among others, raw materials and fabrics.”
Take it as yet another reminder that LVMH — whose CEO got his start investing in the distinctly non-artisan context of 1980s-era Palm Beach, Florida, condos — is first and foremost in the margins-maxing business at its most crass and anti-human, not the fine goods business. And it’s another reminder that “luxury” ≠ craft.
In more positive news —
Very sick jackets alert: