Random Fashion Thoughts (Part 3: Style farmer strikes back) - our general discussion thread

[dieworkwear]

Has anyone seen a jacket in a soft glen plaid OTR or MTM this season? Something in a similar tone to this?

If you choose a custom tailor you like, they'll probably have a patterned fabric close to that.

 

[Parker]

I think the the quality of the cotton is what makes denim itchy, not necessarily the fact there is stretch. I've got some jeans with stretch that feel super soft and some that are kinda scratchy. They are all 99% cotton / 1% whatever it is. For non-stretch, I remember APC denim is quite soft and pliable. I used to have some but not at the moment.

 

[Bromley]

Richard Sennett, a sociologist, thinks those kinds of cities are the best. The noisy, unruly, and even slightly unsafe cities where people are constantly hawking, screaming, and moving. He calls them "open cities."

https://www.richardsennett.com/site/senn/UploadedResources/The Open City.pdf

TBH, I agree with him. I personally dislike the super safe, planned spaces of suburbia, where you have to have a car and everything feels predictable and homogenized. IMO, cities make for better cultural spaces precisely because they have communities like gutter punks (although many, like San Francisco, are becoming gentrified and homogenized). The existence of gutter punks means a city can be more dissonant and incoherent, and thus offers a more interesting life.

I really enjoyed that. I'm glad he used Naples as the example of an open city-- it's the place I had in mind leading up to the mention. Ocean Howell's "The Poetics of Security" is my favorite piece of writing on urban design/city life. It gets into the same ideas from a different angle.

 

[UrbanComposition]

I really enjoyed that. I'm glad he used Naples as the example of an open city-- it's the place I had in mind leading up to the mention. Ocean Howell's "The Poetics of Security" is my favorite piece of writing on urban design/city life. It gets into the same ideas from a different angle.

From my experience, the scuzzy side of Naples is mostly hidden. Sure, there’s graffiti everywhere, but I’ll take that over human excrement and needles any day.

 

[steveoffice]

Richard Sennett, a sociologist, thinks those kinds of cities are the best. The noisy, unruly, and even slightly unsafe cities where people are constantly hawking, screaming, and moving. He calls them "open cities."

https://www.richardsennett.com/site/senn/UploadedResources/The Open City.pdf

what a load of psychobabble

 

[Bromley]

From my experience, the scuzzy side of Naples is mostly hidden. Sure, there’s graffiti everywhere, but I’ll take that over human excrement and needles any day.

I don't necessarily mean in terms of crime and grime. I'm thinking more of how you'll have to dodge a scooter driving on the sidewalk, get out of the way of an impromptu marching band parade. People living on street level and cooking on their windowsills. Baskets of food being hoisted by ropes to apartments. Cammarota Spritz. Generally, the crazy stuff that wouldn't fly in the safe, clean city where I live. That's the kind of hectic vibrancy I thought the paper was getting at, anyway.

 

[shopcanoeclub]

@Bromley sorry if i missed it but where do you reside?

 

[dieworkwear]

what a load of psychobabble

TBH, it's weird to me that Sennett's argument isn't automatically obvious to anyone who loves fashion. One facet of his argument is that open cities are more generative -- they generate culture, ideas, and meaning. The more open the system, the more packed and diverse, the more tolerant, the better.

And how is this not obvious to anyone who likes SWD? Look at how much fashion plunders from that kind of history and environment. Hedi Slimane? Heroin rock chic. Kapital? Gutter punk. Balenciaga colorful laundry bag? Chinatown.

Sennett's argument isn't that everyone should love or live in open cities. He's fine with people having clean, safe, and "efficient" environments. If you want to live in those spaces, America is literally your oyster because those are the dominant paradigms in city planning.

He's saying that even the sections of urbanism are getting corrupted by those ideas. The need for clean, safe, and "efficient" spaces is what's tearing down cultural centers. Look at San Francisco. Where do cool people want to live? The Mission. But what happens when clean, safe, and efficiency loving yuppies move into the Mission? It becomes boring as hell.

Without those histories and cultural centers, where would fashion be? We'd have Lemaire, which is good. Then, I don't know, gingham shirts and UntuckIt? You wouldn't have Air Force 1s or Kapital or SLP. It's kind of weird to me that some people who love the cultural symbolism of those communities hate the communities that generate those symbols.

 

[steveoffice]

yes, his point is obvious and elementary, buried in jargon

 

[Bromley]

@Bromley sorry if i missed it but where do you reside?

I live in a city in the South. I moved here because the city used to be a little rough, a little dirty, and pretty weird. It was more of an "open city", and it fostered a great creative community. Regional quirks and specialties abounded. It has since become cleaner, safer, and more homogeneous.

 

[dfagdfsh]

yes, his point is obvious and elementary, buried in jargon

His point isn't elementary, it's entirely counter to the dominant vision of urban design typified by Robert Moses' New York and every major city in America. Think about what urban renewal means, and how common it is in modern urban life: rebuilding spaces in such a way that 'dirty elements' -- really, poor people -- are removed and priced out of the area to be replaced with upper middle class conveniences. Even in San Francisco, when people complain about housing, they're usually complaining about a lack of housing for young, working professionals, not homeless people or people below the poverty line.

I live in a city which has been significantly gentrified over the last 5-10 years, and it shows. When I was a student I lived in an apartment that shared the block with a coffin factory, a free clinic, and a store that sold used mannequins. Today that block is luxury condos and an expensive gym. The point isn't that wanting to avoid the grime of urban life is bad, it's that in replacing that grime with Chipotles and dog parks destroys an important element of the urban experience and a driving cultural force. At least with white flight to the suburbs the urban core continued to exist, now even that is being consumed.

 

[Wrenkin]

I think the the quality of the cotton is what makes denim itchy, not necessarily the fact there is stretch. I've got some jeans with stretch that feel super soft and some that are kinda scratchy. They are all 99% cotton / 1% whatever it is. For non-stretch, I remember APC denim is quite soft and pliable. I used to have some but not at the moment.

APC was also my first thought for pale, non-stretch denim.

 

[LA Guy]

I copy-edited a book or two on pretty much this issue when I was 13 or 15, I don't remember which. My father is a pretty well known urban and regional planning academic, and I got to know the topic not just through osmosis, but also through child labor, under the auspices of "learning something" over summers. I was a Chinese immigrant kid growing up in the 80s, so it's not like I really had a choice whether to do it or not.

My takeaway from the research of that time is that a lot of people in the educated professional class romanticize and consume urban culture - the use of the underclass subcultures to inspire and sell fashion is a pretty good example. Derelicte was supposed to be a joke, but it's only funny because it's mostly true. The people who actually have to work in the streets of dirty, grimy, cities - cops, garbagemen, taxi drivers (I remember a lot of in depth interviews with those), prefer the suburbs, because they are forced to deal with the crap (often literal) in their quotidian lives, unlike say, most of us here, who work in quiet, safe, clean offices, and only have to interact with the grime of an "open city" when they like, and then only for a short time.

The presence or absence of choice greatly influences one's perception of something. I don't know how many of you drive, but as a kid, neither of my parents (both born and raised in HK) drove, and for physical/medical reasons, I can't drive. As a consequence, I loathe publiuc transport, because for me, it isn't a choice. It's just another inconvenience I have to deal with. This in contrast to a lot of my professional class friends, who do use public transportation, and feel morally righteous about it, but only when they feel like it, and otherwise, either Uber it, or drive themselves, if they don't.

If you go out into the outer suburbs of the Bay Area, for example, you'll find that it's mostly the working class people, many, if not most, of whom work closer to the city center.

re. the Mission and the SOMA, c'mon man, give me a break. I remember when the SOMA was full of crappy autobody shops and tracts of urban brownspaces in the late 90s. Don't tell me that was preferable to the tech offices and fancy tea shops and nice-ish bars and cafes that are the norm there now. And as for the Mission? Gentrification has brought us... better restaurants? Self Edge? Stores like Mission Workshop? I mean, c'mon, it's not like fifteen years ago, the Mission was this awesome place with great stuff that has now been pushed out.

 

[LA Guy]

I live in a city which has been significantly gentrified over the last 5-10 years, and it shows. When I was a student I lived in an apartment that shared the block with a coffin factory, a free clinic, and a store that sold used mannequins. Today that block is luxury condos and an expensive gym. The point isn't that wanting to avoid the grime of urban life is bad, it's that in replacing that grime with Chipotles and dog parks destroys an important element of the urban experience and a driving cultural force. At least with white flight to the suburbs the urban core continued to exist, now even that is being consumed.

lol. That's just color. You didn't frequent those businesses. Be real now.

 

[UrbanComposition]

I don't necessarily mean in terms of crime and grime. I'm thinking more of how you'll have to dodge a scooter driving on the sidewalk, get out of the way of an impromptu marching band parade. People living on street level and cooking on their windowsills. Baskets of food being hoisted by ropes to apartments. Cammarota Spritz. Generally, the crazy stuff that wouldn't fly in the safe, clean city where I live. That's the kind of hectic vibrancy I thought the paper was getting at, anyway.

Ah, I see. Personally, I enjoy that kind of controlled chaos; I’m way more relaxed driving where everyone is just trying to move than trapped behind overly cautious drivers, for example.