You are not a commercial for yourself

A profound Spyplane reckoning

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

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Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

Sometimes storm clouds gather above my big beautiful brain and with a sudden jolt it strikes me that — try as I might to delude myself through elaborate intellectual justifications, and despite co-creating a brilliant newsletter devoted to the principle that cool clothes rock — fashion is dumb and my investment in it is a sickness. The other night was one of those times. We watched a Criterion interview with swag lord and cinematic king Wim Wenders where he shouted out a 1950 feature by Yasujirō Ozu — a major hero in the Spyplane Cinematic Pantheon — called Munekata Sisters. We hadn’t ever seen it, so we threw it on.

Ozu’s films explore tensions between tradition and modernity in a Westernizing Japan, and in Munekata Sisters we see this play out between the title’s two siblings, who disagree about the virtues of staying plugged into what’s popping vs. being a defiantly washed oldhead who does not give a f**k. At the end of a scene where they argue about this, I blurted out, “Christ, clothes are stupid as s**t,” to which Erin replied, “F**k… They really are.”

The sisters relate to clothes in opposite ways. Setsuko, older and traditional, spends the film rocking the same kimono-and-geta setup. Mariko, younger and modern, rocks a flotilla of blouses, skirts and heels, and she is on some “brassy dame” lust-for-life s**t generally.

In the scene in question, Mariko calls Setsuko “outdated,” then opens her purse to 🚬 blast a dart 🚬. But Setsuko pushes back:

SETSUKO: “Your idea of up-to-date is skirt lengths going from long to short. If everyone has red nails, yours absolutely must be red, too, no? If what’ll be old tomorrow looks new today, is that enough?”

MARIKO: “That’s how the world is.”

SETSUKO: “You think that’s good?”

MARIKO: “It doesn’t matter. Good or bad, you have to stay up-to-date. I don’t want to be outdated.”

SETSUKO: “Who cares if you are?”

MARIKO: “I do. That’s where we differ. We grew up in different worlds. This is the world I grew up in. Fine with me.”

Ozu’s script paints Mariko three-dimensionally enough that, yes, she can come off as flip & bratty, but her p.o.v. makes total internally consistent sense. Who cares about trends? She does. That’s the world she grew up in. Fine with her!

But I suspect that Ozu is fundamentally on Setsuko’s side, shaking his d*mn head at Mariko’s outlook. And the jolt I felt watching the scene was one of uncomfortable self-recognition: I felt where Setsuko was coming from, and in Mariko I saw something that felt foolish about my own relationship to clothes…

I tend to think about clothes-rocking as a cultural form like any other: subject to shifting values and vogues, cycles of staleness and freshness, conservative retrenchment and avant-garde repudiation — in other words, locked in a prison of trends. Trends don’t just change the way we see clothes, after all, but the way we taste food, hear music, see paintings, read fiction, laugh (or don’t) at comedy, etc. And so I draw a distinction between mindless trend-hopping and making / enjoying things that feel meaningful & exciting as relates to a specific cultural moment, whether it’s a novel or an outfit. Because as much as IG style influencers and “10 Perfect T-Shirt” listicle publishers would like you to think otherwise, there is no such thing as “timeless” style.

There is such a thing as a style too slavishly tethered to its time — full of superficial references and voguish thought patterns that will age poorly. But it’s a profound irony of creative ambition that actively trying to make something “timeless” or “universal” is a great way to put up a brick, whereas if you set about making something extremely specific you stand a better chance of coming out the other end with something worthwhile. And so my default position boils down to something like:

1. Sick clothes rock, and putting that s**t on is tight,

2. Sickness and tightness are contingent virtues that can never exist entirely outside of shifting historical contexts, also known as trends, and

3. This is the world I grew up in. Fine with me.

The Ozu scene, though, was a powerfully simple reminder that the world I grew up in is not the way the world always was. In the 19th and 20th centuries, powerful and well-organized economic interests came together and made the world this way. Mariko, like me, was born into this world, so she has a harder time seeing its edges than Setsuko, who was born earlier and sees them more clearly.

Which powerful interests am I talking about? Becca Rothfeld describes them in her brilliant, highly Spyplaney, celebrated new book, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Discussing the 19th century “advent of mass manufacture,” Rothfeld writes that, “as factories churned out identical wares with unprecedented efficiency, limitations on production began to vanish. The final barrier to soaring profits was the stingy consumer, who could not be coaxed to continue wanting what she already owned. The ideal product was therefore something that a person would go on wanting even when she had it — something that would induce desire so pronounced that even possession could do nothing to dispel it.”

Mamma mia. Sound familiar? This is a dynamic of obvious relevance to anyone who cops clothes in a way they sometimes feel verges on compulsiveness. Tell me you aren’t seeing some Matrix code around you right now, revealing that the seeming reality of your own bottomless desire for dope s**t has in fact been hacked into & tWiStEd by malevolent powers on high!

Artist’s rendition of your boy Young Spyplane seeing Matrix code everywhere and realizing the seeming reality of his own desire was in fact hacked into and ~tWiStEd~ by malevolent powers on high

Adam Curtis expands on this in his excellent documentary Century of the Self explaining how, in the early 20th century, pioneering masterminds of the then-nascent marketing industry invented the concept of “lifestyle” consumer categories — the notion we take largely for granted today that the products we buy say something important about who we are. The goal was to infuse goods with a perceived symbolic value, separate from literal use value, so that companies could make us desire goods we didn’t actually need. And it worked, transforming a generation of Setsukos, happy to own one kimono, into a generation of Marikos, who yearned to drip on these swagless goofies with a closet full of slappers.

I too am someone who likes to drip on these swagless goofies with a closet full of slappers. But the Ozu scene jostled me off autopilot, forcing me to regard my own thinking about clothes in the same skeptical light Setsuko regards Mariko’s:

I’m tired of my old shirts, I want a new shirt. I was feeling solids but now I’m feeling stripes. I’m bored with straight earth tones, I’m thinking some sick muddy purples would look fresh right about now… Do thoughts like this emerge from within me, reflections of my own taste and agency, or is an itchy, parasitic, consumerist logic speaking through me like I’m a dummy? The answer is not an unambiguous “yes” — but it’s not “no.”

And yet!!

The twist is that Rothfeld’s book is all about how a life focused unvaryingly and unimaginatively on needs, with no glorious, excessive overspill of useless, ravenous wants, is a deprived and disenchanted life indeed. I agree with this. The body needs Soylent. The brain & the soul want feasts!!

And that applies to fashion. Because sure, sick clothes can be a superficial object of vacuous consumerism and ego-affirmation. But sick clothes also affirm the creative ingenuity and labor of the people who made the fly s**t, weaving us into a social relationship predicated, at bottom, on celebrating and sharing what’s best and most beautiful about human creativity.

A beautiful, cool, and otherwise meaningful garment —ennobled and enchanted by the profound process whereby people coaxed plants from the rich soil of Gaia, spun them into fibers, knit or wove them into fabrics, then transformed them into slappers — becomes a vessel of connection, a talismanic repository for meaning, and no less an emblem of the kindness, generosity and talents of the people who “cooked” up a garment for you than when people take time, care and pride in cooking you a meal.

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Where things get muddy is when our healthy desire for beautiful man-made things — intimately connected to our healthy desire for connectedness & community — gets hijacked and zombiefied by manipulative, profit-hungry, fundamentally anti-social souls…

There are mad depressing material illustrations of this, i.e., the people who make clothes are underpaid and treated like interchangeable cogs in a churning, monstrous, Gaia-polluting machine. And there are mad depressing symbolic illustrations: For instance, look at how the word “community” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torched rhetorical territory of people who live to “move product” above all else.

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people to consumer demographics, but because, in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson, seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things, whether it’s literal drop-shipped products someone peddles through a TikTok storefront or more-abstract products, e.g., the sense of envy we hope others feel when we post from a balling Tuscan vacation …

The obvious problem with this is that, after a while, feeling like every public utterance / outfit / joke / photo you share has to be a little commercial for yourself… sucks! It doesn’t feel good to constantly market yourself and to regard everyone you see as a potential customer, unless you are a true freak.

And no, the fact that I am saying this in a blessed independent anti-consumerist dope-clothes newsletter that depends on a paid tier for its existence does not contradict that, so don’t get cute!!

In the case of clothes, our relationship to them can be superficial and solipsistic … Rather than emblems of connection, clothes can be instrumentalized into ways to stunt on others or distract ourselves from tough questions about our own happiness. And yes, feeling like you are flexing on these dweebs is fun, but only in a qualified, half-serious, ultimately unsatisfying way.

The most satisfying and nourishing communities, after all, are those where people aren’t in competition, trying to sell each other things, or united around nothing beyond a common consumer desire. The camp-out line for a sneaker drop contains the possibility for meaningful interpersonal connection only in spite of itself. Ditto a corporate “brand activation,” and so on.

These are the kinds of “communities” most encouraged by the establishment logic of our time. Whereas this logic is ambivalent if not actively hostile toward communities organized around economically non-productive activities, and whereas it has only violent antipathy for campus protest encampments / antiwar movements organized around active divestment from the western imperialist project!!

But let’s bring this home, for a profound CONCLUSION —

Where does that leave me, sitting here mapping out these nuances and contradictions while wearing extremely fire clothes that look very cool? It leaves me with a renewed focus on what is actually meaningful about caring about clothes, and with a renewed sensitivity towards the omnipresent attempts to co-opt, exploit and pervert that meaningfulness …

Mariko likes to stay eternally on trend. That’s ok! But when Setsuko asks, “if what’ll be old tomorrow looks new today, is that enough?” of course the answer is, No, it’s not. Remember that buying s**t is not the same as having swag … Remember that having cool interests beyond cool clothes, and doing good deeds besides putting together sick outfits (which, to be clear, is a good deed), will make your clothes look better on you… Remember that you don’t even need to own things to feast upon their beauty. “Sight is sensory, after all,” Rothfeld writes, “and voyeurism can be voluptuous.”

And remember that a ravenous desire for cool clothes is tight so long as you keep it “gourmand” mode and avoid slipping into “glutton” mode, where, in the throes of a boundless acquisitive frenzy, you keep shoving food down your face without even tasting it, without thinking about how it got on your plate — without ever stopping to consider whether you’re enjoying it or not.