#davidisle

I was first introduced to the furlane by No Man correspondent Réginald-Jérôme de Mans. I was passing through Venice, and received a missive from Monsieur de Mans, asking if I could visit a small shop in one of Venice’s crannies, and get him a pair of purple slippers, for delivery to him at a yert in Mongolia, where he was then exiled as punishment for an appallingly vulgar #menswear review. So of course I wound my way through Venice’s canals and side streets (one does not disappoint Monsieur de Mans, if one can help it), found the right door to push, and entered what seemed a forest of banana trees, except the fruits were velvet slippers in jewel tones, each with stitched rubber soles.

The origin story of these slippers is supposedly that they were made from scraps during World War II: Venetians gathered together small bits of velvet (apparently Venice is never without at least some small bits of velvet) and rubber from bicycle tires and pieced them together to have footwear when their rationed allotment gave out or didn’t appear.

According to a recent Elle article, after the war, gondoliers realized that the slippers worked well as boat shoes, since they had good traction and didn’t damage the wood on the boat. And Venetian nobles wore them to be able to sneak silently to their secret lovers. I’m not sure I believe either of these (if the wood is so easily damaged, what about all the other non-furlane-wearing passengers? And aren’t the gondolieri and the nobles basically one and the same since the war?).  

The Thomas Jefferson

As President, Jefferson earned a reputation for slovenliness in buttoned-up Washington by entertaining guests in house slippers. Jefferson’s admirers, of course, saw this as an example of the Virginia planter’s “republican simplicity.” This De Bonne Facture coat and DoppiaA roll neck might well adorn a modern democratic statesman, relaxing at home with refinement but without pretension.

The Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln had such a distinctive look and attitude, it’s hard to imagine him in modern clothing. But the cream GRP roll neck comes closest, I think, to capturing the high shirt collars Lincoln wore to match his towering neck, performing the same function of putting a man’s face on a pedestal. That’s why the roll neck is, as Lou Junod says in the timeless style profile of him written by his son, “the most flattering thing a man can wear.” Josh wears the sweater here with another Traveler Coat, this one in green.

The George Washington

Saved the first for last. If you’ve got a houndstooth coat, and are worried about picking a sweater with a pattern that won’t clash, you can always pick the sweater that’s never wrong. Only enough room for four stars and ten stripes on this Monitaly Old Glory, so looks like we’re going to have to make some tough decisions about who’s in and who’s out. But that’s what the Inis Meain thinking cap is for.

The Bridge Coat

The closest cousin to the pea coat is the bridge coat, which is just like a pea coat, but longer. This added length not only is more protective in difficult weather, but gives the coat a more dramatic effect. The extra length suits a tall man particularly well, endowing him with a more regal bearing; in the navy, the bridge coat the coat worn by officers, where the pea coat is worn by enlisted men.

The Great Coat

The great coat typically features more aggressive lines than the pea coat. The notch in the lapel is deeper and at a wider angle. The silhouette gathers at the waist more dramatically. The great coat has hip pockets but no side pockets. Unlike the pea and bridge coats, the great coat is not particularly associated with the navy, and thus it can be made in other colors (such as the pictured charcoal Frank Leder great coat) and does not feature other maritime details like buttons with anchors on them and the like. It goes by land as well as by sea.

The Trench Coat

By contrast, the trench coat’s lines are softer. The defining feature of the trench coat is its raglan sleeves. The trench coat is designed to be worn in the rain and is therefore, like the bridge coat, usually longer than the pea coat. The result is a more flowing, rounded garment. A trench coat is, again, not a naval item (there are no trenches at sea), and so is rarely made in navy; most often it’s made in khaki, but this olive version by Sage de Cret is by no means out of line.

These socks aren’t sold in stores. And the price wasn’t set by the designer – they’re traded on a digital exchange, the Unisocks Exchange. The company has apparently made 315 pairs (only 13 are left unsold), and created tokens that can be bought and sold in any fraction.

Anyone who accumulates a whole token can trade it in for an actual physical pair of socks that look like they could be bought at Costco. So why doesn’t someone just produce a bunch of these socks, probably at a cost of pennies per pair, and sell them for tens of thousands? With each pair of socks delivered by the company comes a digital “nonfungible token” (NFT) – that is, a token that can’t be broken up into pieces and sold in shares. This NFT acts like a certificate of authenticity for the physical pair of socks. It’s the same technology that secures rights to digital art and NBA moments.

So the socks (and their accompanying NFT) act sort of like gold reserves for a currency that’s on a gold standard. This digital currency is on a socks standard. There are some differences: gold probably has more intrinsic value than a pair of socks. It’s rare in nature and can’t be produced by man. But for both the gold and the Unisocks, the main value comes from the social understanding of what they represent and what other people would pay for them. Just like fiat money! With the socks, the distinction between the commodity on reserve and the pieces of paper that have value only by virtue of what they represent becomes still more blurry.

If you wore gold jewelry during the gold standard era, you were very nearly wearing money. Maybe that was a thrill for some. I wonder if anyone has the fortitude to wear a pair of $85,000 socks. And if they did, would the socks lose value? Are they a collector’s item or a currency? A $100 bill doesn’t lose value when it wrinkles, but does an $85,000 sock lose value if it goes through the wash?

Though removed by an ocean and a couple of centuries, I get the same feeling from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, now dramatized (the first two books, at least) in the TV series My Brilliant Friend.  The story begins in post-WWII Naples, a time and place of extreme poverty and desperation.  But also of great achievement, which many Neapolitans today look back on with pride.  The city revolted against Nazi occupation during the War, and after the War launched decades of economic advancement unknown in Europe before or since.  Reading the books at their publication in the 2010s feels, even in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, like a trip back to a time when one didn’t have to look hard for purpose in life.  Survival itself was more than a day’s work.  Being so close to death, the characters seem more alive.

Ferrante doubles the refraction by her placement of the narrator.  Not only are we, the readers, looking back on a more gloried time, but the narrator Elena tells the story of her more gloried and more economically disadvantaged friend, Lila.  Though Elena excels in school, she recognizes Lila’s brilliance as brighter than her own.  Although, or perhaps because, Lila’s circumstances do not permit the path of academic advancement that Elena follows, Elena envies Lila’s ability to harvest and appropriate the glories of life.  At one point, Elena recounts the various aspects of her life that she experiences only “quasi” –almost—but that Lila experiences fully.

Lila also does not suffer from any attachment to history, national or personal.  The great exertions of her formidable creative power—a story she wrote as a young girl, the shoes she designed for her production with her brother—she quickly abandons.  In both cases, she later explains them as only attempts to escape the desperate poverty and precarity of the neighborhood where she and Elena grew up.  When Elena—always searching for a higher meaning—tries to show Lila the beauty in the story she wrote, Lila dismisses her, and says her interest in the story was purely mercenary.  Elena is left to wonder whether her own appreciation of Lila’s story is silly or refined, whether seeing the artist’s work as more profound than the artist brings her closer to or further from glory. Whether she has overcome, or merely repeated, Lila’s fullness and her own quasi-ness.

But the paper’s main argument is the relationship between sumptuary laws and income.  “The purpose of sumptuary laws,” claims a 1963 book by Postan et al., “was in part to prevent the rich from ruining themselves through fruitless competition.”  The idea is that luxurious clothes represent high status.  If everyone is allowed to buy them, you get into a rat race where the truly wealthy have to keep buying more and more lavish clothing in order to demonstrate that they are, in fact, wealthy.  It’s easier if everyone agrees that only certain people should buy certain things, which maintains the same hierarchy without the “fruitless” expense on ever more sumptuous raiment.  

Desierto and Koyama demonstrate an inverted-U relationship between income and sumptuary laws.  In their model, there are only two types of people, nobles and plebs.  When society is poor, there’s no need for sumptuary laws. Only the nobles can afford silk anyway, so there’s no need for laws preventing the plebs from buying it.  Poverty is doing the job just fine.  When society gets rich enough that even plebs can afford silk, then the nobles pass sumptuary laws to prevent status competition.  As society gets richer still, the cost of enforcing sumptuary laws gets high enough that the nobles finally give up and grant plebs entry into the wonderful world of lighting money on fire in order to win the admiration of their wastrel peers.

I know what you’re thinking.  Won’t some great plague please come and relieve these people of their anxiety. Well, Desierto and Koyama have thought of that and it turns out that only makes it worse.  In a nice demonstration of the left side of the inverted-U—where an increase in income leads to an increase in sumptuary laws—they show that waves of sumptuary laws follow waves of plague deaths.  The idea is, the labor shortage following a plague outbreak raises wages, which allows plebs to afford more expensive clothing, which leads nobles to prevent them from buying it.  (Incidentally, even without the status competition, not a bad perk to be able to block some of your competition on the demand side; not a few times in the past I would have been happy to pass a law preventing others in my size from buying from my favorite stores.)

Today, of course, there are no sumptuary laws.  To paraphrase Anatole France, the law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to buy, say, a $250 paperclip.  Has this, in fact, led to fruitless wardrobe competition?

Once you’ve selected a leather, you find the pattern you need and cut out the pieces:

Next you sew the pieces of leather together to make the upper:

Then you put the upper on the last and leave it for a while to round into form:

Then attach the heel and sew on the sole:

Then you’ve got yourself an Aurlands penny loafer:

John D. Rockefeller, progenitor of the Rockefeller riches, though perhaps of doubtful scruples in his business career, was a model of Baptist rectitude in his private life. But John D. Rockefeller’s father, William Avery “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, Sr., was a different sort of man. When John was young, Devil Bill spent months at a time away from his wife Eliza and their six children, occupying himself as a traveling salesman and itinerant con artist. His capers ran from the relatively benign—pretending to be deaf and dumb, or selling inert elixirs, advertising them as health potions but warning that pregnant women not consume them lest they lose their child—to the deeply disturbing—he was accused (but never convicted) of raping a woman at gunpoint.

As John reached adolescence, Devil Bill’s recesses from family life extended ever longer, until finally Devil Bill never returned. As it happened, Devil Bill had constructed an entirely separate life in another town, calling himself Dr. William Levingston and sharing a household with another wife, named Margaret Allen. 

Devil Bill never entirely lost touch with his son—John’s investment in his first business partnership was partly financed by a loan (at 10 percent interest) from his father. The partnership, named, in one of those odd coincidences history never tires of providing, Clark & Rockefeller, was quite successful. But John’s towering success came to him after Devil Bill left the family, and though the filial relationship survived at fits and starts, it seems that John’s financial relationship with his father largely ended with the one loan, much to the detriment of Devil Bill’s bank account.