“The collector is such a miserable specimen, interested only in numbers. He’ll never be happy with one object. In his search for a truly unique object, he inevitably ends up with a whole set. A far cry from purity. Elimination is the crucial thing. The idea of collecting is the opposite of purity”
As a archivist, I think a lot about the ethics of collecting! I like to apply archival best practices to clothes acquisition as well. Namely, you need to be aware of how to care for something through the course of its lifecyle when you acquire it. You also shouldn't acquire something just because, but need to metabolize how it will work with the rest of the collection, to get the most use. If it would work better in another's collection, alert them to it! It's not all for you.
This has heavy echoes of the guitar community, where there's a type of collector/acquirer called the "blues lawyer", who drives up the prices of certain instruments to make them unattainable to anyone who would hope to play them. I think one interesting side effect is that it forces the people without unlimited resources to be more creative when acquiring in order to express an idea of feeling. To some degree, maybe whatever the compulsive shoppers are trying to get tells us what's not cool.
God I love terms like “blues lawyer.” In cycling, the rough equivalent ($15k aero bike someone buys in order to ride 2 miles once a week to the coffee shop) is a “dentist.” Professionals can’t catch a break!
I wonder if we might be giving ourselves too much credit - certainly the zombie fungus ant thinks it's doing everything right. For every sort of consumption-adjacent hobby I think the line between the profound and the pathological is constantly shifting and so fine as to be largely subjective. Even consistent archival practices can be just window dressing and a lot of my opinion comes down to whether I subjectively feel like someone's being a prick about it.
I have a friend who collects vintage Japanese Gundam figures and so forth, for bare accumulation and display. But it ties into his encyclopedic knowledge of those genres and his deep consideration of them. What does that mean about his collection? I have no idea! It's not legible to me, it's a bunch of plastic dudes in a glass case.
I have a friend who is an active and respected musician, who is constantly buying and selling instruments. He doesn't have a huge collection, but like that sword dealer things are passing through his hands all the time and each one is sold to fund the purchase of something else.
I don't buy a lot of stuff - I am by nature both picky and cheap, let's keep it a buck - but I've spent absurd amounts of time scrolling ebay or checking brand sites for things that I'll never buy, just to inform one purchase way down the line. Is that better? Man I don't know. I can say yeah that's how I work, I learn a bunch of stuff and when I pull the trigger I'm almost always happy with what shows up. But also I'm just stretching my consumerism over a longer time frame because of personal hang-ups. And maybe I'm not buying a lot of clothes but I've got a hideous number of books and LPs... And there are collection modes that are non-accumulative, thinking of the foodies who rush to check restaurants and dishes off of their lists and so forth.
I don't have a good answer here but I think we're very far from being able to separate out a Consumerism That Is Okay. To be honest most of the collection modes that I myself find objectionable are ones that 1) involve shocking amounts of money 2) involve items that I find aesthetically uninteresting or repulsive or 3) are being collected by someone who sucks
Maybe if I have one consistent rule it might be just "don't collect things without using them for their use," paintings should be seen, LPs should be played, pants should be worn etc.
but uhhh one more thing
a lot of our interests are, functionally, bankrolled by wealthy people with consumerist/collector tendencies. Like in every area there's a small percentage of people who are spending a disproportionate amount of money. My occasionally buying a fancy bottle of wine isn't the basis of the industry, the people buying cases are.
idk. no good answer. people should just try to make sure their actions increase their knowledge and pleasure and result in purchases that are used rather than stockpiled. that's all i got at the end of the day
Perfect description of the spectrum of healthy thrifting. I have noticed tendency to sometimes buy jackets especially, that I don’t really have a venue for, but are beautiful. I’m forced to see these hanging in the closet, and take them out sometime to try on. The only solution is to create an event to wear them to, or they remain disconnected from the world.
This piece parallels so well with your LWLL (Life Well Lived Lifestyle) essay. My motorcycles are weathered with road grime from summer trips traveling around the country. This calls to mind the motorcycle collectors who ride their rare bikes to the coffee shop and park it in the best spot...I tell them where they go and they say they're "stretching its legs" because it hadn't been ridden in weeks. It makes me sad to imagine such beautiful machines caged up in a climate-controlled garage. The most frustrating part of these conversations is the collectors sound like they memorized the spec sheet and expect you to gawk at its rarity, when they've missed the whole point of the pastime.
This sparked several thoughts: 1) I’ve definitely questioned, at times, my own acquisitiveness. The closet is for sure straining! And something you wrote about that chain-smoking clothes buying reminded me of a recent article by Pete Wells in the NYT where he mentions that eating sugars leaves a person actually more hungry, which often leads to wanting -more- sugar. Buying more clothes, similarly, can sometimes lead me to buy more clothes.
And 2) I love the zombie ant metaphor, but it calls to mind a counter-metaphor using the same model: Lawrence Weschler’s “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” in which the idea of “inhaling the spore” is about creativity or opening oneself up to another way of seeing the world. I’d -like- to think that my zombie ant acquisitiveness follows that model rather than the one you propose … but I’m probably fooling myself.
Mushrooms behave in unpredictable ways and have revelatory properties, of course, so shout out to the Museum of Jurassic Technology style spore inhalers — there is definitely something to this
I'm aware that I have some amount of the acquisitive and compulsive itches, but am aware of how cursed they can be so have found ways to scratch them in ways that feel pro-social and creative, namely: thrift stores. They're safe spaces to just let go and acquire. What's more, I find it can be a fun way to experiment, allowing for creative exploration with minimal social cost (and potentially some small social benefit). Highly recommend for those who also struggle.
Is there a way to see this less as a moral binary and more as a feedback loop?
The embodied, pro-social dresser doesn’t appear out of nowhere. They’re often shaped by the same feeds, archives, resale markets, and aesthetic micro-cultures that also produce the compulsive, acquisitive type. One metabolizes the system into a lived practice; the other stays stuck in the system as a game of signals, drops, and status.
In that sense, the “virtual” and the “embodied” aren’t opposites so much as stages of digestion. The question isn’t which side you’re on, but whether the clothes (and the culture around them) are passing through you into a fuller life, or whether you’re just circulating inside the loop.
Maybe the real axis isn’t creative vs. compulsive, but integrated vs. unintegrated.
You might enjoy this small book which makes the case that a certain type of acquisitive brain worm eventually sees collecting as a need that has to be constantly satisfied and becomes a emotional regulation mechanism vs something you enjoy with a surplus/generous mindset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku:_Japan%27s_Database_Animals
the former type of brainworm feels like a maladaptive response to an overloaded information environment, where there is no grand narrative/consensus reality around the behavior
i think clothes have something that swords or gundam figures or really anything else (for heteronormative men like me who are pushed away from lipstick, makeup, nail polish, jewelry, etc) don't have: the promise that they can make you cooler and/or hotter
i certainly only started caring about clothes because of deep-seated insecurity about my coolness, which has sometimes crept into insecurity about my appearance in general; over time as i got more secure it turned into appreciation for craft, beauty, form, etc, but the germ of it is still evil
and so the compulsion to buy more and more clothes and grow and change as a wearer is at least a little bit informed by the desire to finally be Cool Enough
"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. ... What else is collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"
“The collector is such a miserable specimen, interested only in numbers. He’ll never be happy with one object. In his search for a truly unique object, he inevitably ends up with a whole set. A far cry from purity. Elimination is the crucial thing. The idea of collecting is the opposite of purity”
-La collectionneuse (1967), Éric Rohmer
As a archivist, I think a lot about the ethics of collecting! I like to apply archival best practices to clothes acquisition as well. Namely, you need to be aware of how to care for something through the course of its lifecyle when you acquire it. You also shouldn't acquire something just because, but need to metabolize how it will work with the rest of the collection, to get the most use. If it would work better in another's collection, alert them to it! It's not all for you.
well put ! grateful for your professional POV
I love this! I'm also an archivist, and thinking I need to make a personal collections management policy
This has heavy echoes of the guitar community, where there's a type of collector/acquirer called the "blues lawyer", who drives up the prices of certain instruments to make them unattainable to anyone who would hope to play them. I think one interesting side effect is that it forces the people without unlimited resources to be more creative when acquiring in order to express an idea of feeling. To some degree, maybe whatever the compulsive shoppers are trying to get tells us what's not cool.
God I love terms like “blues lawyer.” In cycling, the rough equivalent ($15k aero bike someone buys in order to ride 2 miles once a week to the coffee shop) is a “dentist.” Professionals can’t catch a break!
I wonder if we might be giving ourselves too much credit - certainly the zombie fungus ant thinks it's doing everything right. For every sort of consumption-adjacent hobby I think the line between the profound and the pathological is constantly shifting and so fine as to be largely subjective. Even consistent archival practices can be just window dressing and a lot of my opinion comes down to whether I subjectively feel like someone's being a prick about it.
I have a friend who collects vintage Japanese Gundam figures and so forth, for bare accumulation and display. But it ties into his encyclopedic knowledge of those genres and his deep consideration of them. What does that mean about his collection? I have no idea! It's not legible to me, it's a bunch of plastic dudes in a glass case.
I have a friend who is an active and respected musician, who is constantly buying and selling instruments. He doesn't have a huge collection, but like that sword dealer things are passing through his hands all the time and each one is sold to fund the purchase of something else.
I don't buy a lot of stuff - I am by nature both picky and cheap, let's keep it a buck - but I've spent absurd amounts of time scrolling ebay or checking brand sites for things that I'll never buy, just to inform one purchase way down the line. Is that better? Man I don't know. I can say yeah that's how I work, I learn a bunch of stuff and when I pull the trigger I'm almost always happy with what shows up. But also I'm just stretching my consumerism over a longer time frame because of personal hang-ups. And maybe I'm not buying a lot of clothes but I've got a hideous number of books and LPs... And there are collection modes that are non-accumulative, thinking of the foodies who rush to check restaurants and dishes off of their lists and so forth.
I don't have a good answer here but I think we're very far from being able to separate out a Consumerism That Is Okay. To be honest most of the collection modes that I myself find objectionable are ones that 1) involve shocking amounts of money 2) involve items that I find aesthetically uninteresting or repulsive or 3) are being collected by someone who sucks
Maybe if I have one consistent rule it might be just "don't collect things without using them for their use," paintings should be seen, LPs should be played, pants should be worn etc.
but uhhh one more thing
a lot of our interests are, functionally, bankrolled by wealthy people with consumerist/collector tendencies. Like in every area there's a small percentage of people who are spending a disproportionate amount of money. My occasionally buying a fancy bottle of wine isn't the basis of the industry, the people buying cases are.
idk. no good answer. people should just try to make sure their actions increase their knowledge and pleasure and result in purchases that are used rather than stockpiled. that's all i got at the end of the day
i fw your questions & can't argue with your conclusion !
Perfect description of the spectrum of healthy thrifting. I have noticed tendency to sometimes buy jackets especially, that I don’t really have a venue for, but are beautiful. I’m forced to see these hanging in the closet, and take them out sometime to try on. The only solution is to create an event to wear them to, or they remain disconnected from the world.
This piece parallels so well with your LWLL (Life Well Lived Lifestyle) essay. My motorcycles are weathered with road grime from summer trips traveling around the country. This calls to mind the motorcycle collectors who ride their rare bikes to the coffee shop and park it in the best spot...I tell them where they go and they say they're "stretching its legs" because it hadn't been ridden in weeks. It makes me sad to imagine such beautiful machines caged up in a climate-controlled garage. The most frustrating part of these conversations is the collectors sound like they memorized the spec sheet and expect you to gawk at its rarity, when they've missed the whole point of the pastime.
This sparked several thoughts: 1) I’ve definitely questioned, at times, my own acquisitiveness. The closet is for sure straining! And something you wrote about that chain-smoking clothes buying reminded me of a recent article by Pete Wells in the NYT where he mentions that eating sugars leaves a person actually more hungry, which often leads to wanting -more- sugar. Buying more clothes, similarly, can sometimes lead me to buy more clothes.
And 2) I love the zombie ant metaphor, but it calls to mind a counter-metaphor using the same model: Lawrence Weschler’s “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” in which the idea of “inhaling the spore” is about creativity or opening oneself up to another way of seeing the world. I’d -like- to think that my zombie ant acquisitiveness follows that model rather than the one you propose … but I’m probably fooling myself.
Mushrooms behave in unpredictable ways and have revelatory properties, of course, so shout out to the Museum of Jurassic Technology style spore inhalers — there is definitely something to this
Yessss just sent a friend to Museum of Jurassic Technology yesterday!
Amongst record collectors the red zone behavior is called getting "gripsweats."
I'm aware that I have some amount of the acquisitive and compulsive itches, but am aware of how cursed they can be so have found ways to scratch them in ways that feel pro-social and creative, namely: thrift stores. They're safe spaces to just let go and acquire. What's more, I find it can be a fun way to experiment, allowing for creative exploration with minimal social cost (and potentially some small social benefit). Highly recommend for those who also struggle.
When we interviewed Molly Young she recommended gardening — specifically the act of planting a seed and helping it grow 🌱
Birding and hunting for seashells also do this for me.
Is there a way to see this less as a moral binary and more as a feedback loop?
The embodied, pro-social dresser doesn’t appear out of nowhere. They’re often shaped by the same feeds, archives, resale markets, and aesthetic micro-cultures that also produce the compulsive, acquisitive type. One metabolizes the system into a lived practice; the other stays stuck in the system as a game of signals, drops, and status.
In that sense, the “virtual” and the “embodied” aren’t opposites so much as stages of digestion. The question isn’t which side you’re on, but whether the clothes (and the culture around them) are passing through you into a fuller life, or whether you’re just circulating inside the loop.
Maybe the real axis isn’t creative vs. compulsive, but integrated vs. unintegrated.
i like what you're laying down... will sit with this new paradigm
curious how it sat with you after a bit
You might enjoy this small book which makes the case that a certain type of acquisitive brain worm eventually sees collecting as a need that has to be constantly satisfied and becomes a emotional regulation mechanism vs something you enjoy with a surplus/generous mindset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku:_Japan%27s_Database_Animals
the former type of brainworm feels like a maladaptive response to an overloaded information environment, where there is no grand narrative/consensus reality around the behavior
Sounds fascinating, thank you
i think clothes have something that swords or gundam figures or really anything else (for heteronormative men like me who are pushed away from lipstick, makeup, nail polish, jewelry, etc) don't have: the promise that they can make you cooler and/or hotter
i certainly only started caring about clothes because of deep-seated insecurity about my coolness, which has sometimes crept into insecurity about my appearance in general; over time as i got more secure it turned into appreciation for craft, beauty, form, etc, but the germ of it is still evil
and so the compulsion to buy more and more clothes and grow and change as a wearer is at least a little bit informed by the desire to finally be Cool Enough
Real shit ! Though I don’t know if evil is quite the right word for that germ
Spyplane, are those a new version of the Guidi Kinori joints in your IG carousel? 👀
No they’re inline, but I believe Evan might have a version he’s working on
"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. ... What else is collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"
- Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library"
so many illustrious bars about collecting pathologies