Let’s send “Blue-Collar Stolen Valor” to a farm upstate already
Plus a BUNCH of popping jawns for yrself & yr cribbo
Ayyy, welcome to today’s Blackbird Spyplane, where we are about to deliver the FINAL WORD on one of the GOOFIEST concepts to get a toehold in the contemporary jawn-political discourse before segueing smoothly into a gold mine of fresh under-the-radar finds including but not limited to a wildly versatile HAT, “unbeatable” PVC clogs for the arrival of spring, a tiny batch of hand-drawn sweatshirts that BREATHE NEW LIFE into the homemade-jawn trend, Mach 3+ LAMPS … and more.
Yours in friendship,
Jonah & Erin
Writing Tuesday’s sletter about “the democratization of fashion,” some DOPE ANCILLARY THOUGHTS crept into my big beautiful brain about the current vogue for workwear, which traces an opposite trajectory from the “democratized fashion” jawn: i.e., a work jacket, initially made for use by non-elites, becomes fashionable and (therefore subject to some “undemocratic” resale markups)...
The most iconic and eternally popping workwear pieces (besides jeans & trucker jackets) are Carhartt jawns, which have been cool to wear outside of strict physical-labor contexts since DOPE RAPPERS like Mobb Deep first rocked that s**t in their videos; and blue-twill “tradesman’s” jackets, which have been cool to rock outside of strict physical-labor contexts since IMAGE-MAKING SWAGGER DONS like Bill Cunningham and Steve McQueen (whose father was a bricklayer) made them staple pieces of their fits…
(🔨🔨 BTW — we wrote about a SICK slept-on Carhartt alternative HERE. 🔨🔨)
For the past couple years, some ppl in jawnz-focused corners of the internet have argued that it’s dishonest for people from creative & professional classes to rock workwear, in a phenomenon referred to (with varying degrees of seriousness) as “blue-collar stolen valor”…
The unmooring of the Carhartt signifier from its physical-labor signified isn’t a phenomenon limited to COOL PEOPLE IN COOL CITIES, obviously — as we’ve said before, you’re as likely to see one on, like, a rural-Missouri politician who owns a chain of speedboat dealerships, and whose claim to wearing it is, in that sense, every bit as (il)legitimate as an NYC creative director’s…
Our ultimate Spyplane Holy Decree re: the concept of “blue-collar stolen valor” is that, when it isn’t invoked as a joke, it’s an incoherent and ahistorical semiotics game that anxious elites can play amongst themselves, rehearsing their own guilt about the mounting hardships of working people in the most frivolous way possible.
Which has become a (the?) prevalent mode of contemporary political debate, of course, reduced to inane culture-war symbolism. Wondering whether a graphic designer “should” wear double-knee pants strikes me as the jawnz-philosophical equivalent of that widely mocked NPR tweet from the other day about the soul-searching that white people should supposedly do when it comes to choosing which color thumbs-up emoji to use…
Whether yr talkin’ emojis or clothes, a political framework that focuses relentlessly on symbology while ignoring material concerns is a CHUMP’S GAME !!
So, with all these synapses CRACKLIN’ thru the craggy grooves of my very non-smooth frontal cortex, I was intrigued to spot the following over the weekend: