Last February I went to Paris for the first time. While there, I visited the Musee D’Orsay, an old train station which was turned into a museum about thirty years ago. I went somewhat reluctantly, on the last day of a ten-day trip. I don’t really go in for the Impressionists, which are well represented at the Musee D’Orsay. I was once fascinated with Degas, but his pictures have become monotonous for me and his character repulsive. I still enjoy Toulouse-Lautrec’s bawdy sentimentality, and Gaugin’s Tahiti paintings. But Seurat and Monet make me feel like I’ve eaten too many jelly beans.
Anyway, it didn’t end up mattering as I spent almost no time looking at the Impressionist paintings. Instead I ended up getting completely absorbed in the Art Nouveau collection. Art Nouveau is a whimsical, curvaceous, flowered-but-not-flowery aesthetic that attaches best to furniture and glassware. There is some Art Nouveau painting but it’s almost uniformly terrible. But Art Nouveau woodwork can be gorgeous, like this desk at the M d’O:
or this wall cabinet:
But Art Nouveau’s truest medium is glass, which is perfect for the faded jewel tones of the Art Nouveau palette:
Art Nouveau had a sort of renaissance in the hippy ‘60s, mostly in poster and album art like this. Around that time Jimi Hendrix was often seen in military-inspired velvet jackets with an Art Nouveau kind of decadence about them:
I don’t know exactly when it was, but at some point I became captivated enough with this style that I decided I wanted to try to design an Art Nouveau jacket. Which led to the sketch you see at the top of this post. I presented it to Edwin DeBoise of Steed, expecting that he would be absolutely appalled, or even worse, deliver one of those devastatingly polite British refusals, like “That is a very brave proposal.” But he actually said yes, and within minutes we were looking at velvet swatches. The sketch you see laid on the velvet is his, of course.
I wanted green, since it represents nature and is used heavily by Art Nouveau. The rest of the jacket follows the same horticultural themes, with the lapels mimicking the silhouette of a tulip, and the frogging snaking tendril-like at their base.
I initially wanted a dark purple silk for the lapel facings, but it was hard to find the right one. Most were too shiny or bright. Then fate delivered me what I hope will be the perfect solution. While in Venice a couple of weeks ago, I visited the Fortuny showroom on Giudecca island. Fortuny is an old fabric producer that still uses printing machines they bought in the 1910s. Most of their fabric is sold to interior designers. Because most of their fabric is used for upholstery. But I found one that I decided to use for the jacket lapel facings, with a floral gold print on top of a smoky violet base.
I can’t imagine where I will ever actually wear this jacket. It may turn out in the end to be a disaster. But I have enjoyed thinking about it and designing it immensely, and if nothing else, I will hang it on my wall of my living room as a curiosity for my rare visitors to enjoy with me.
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Some two years after I posted about my admiration for de Monvel prints being conquered by my laziness, I have finally hung up all my pictures. Including the Monvel prints that I bought and framed, and had been sitting unappreciated in a closet.
I’ve now got one (bottom left, above) next my coat closet that shows an older man dressed in what looks like a red tailcoat helping another nonplussed ginger gentleman in white tie into what may be a green overcoat. His ginger friends already have their green overcoats on, except for the one who I think may be wearing a frock coat, which would have been archaic even when this picture was made. Anyway, I think the older guy is a salesan trying to sell either the hat or the coat or both. But it could be this is a coat check and these gentlemen are all depositing or retrieving their things before heading to the theater.
I’ve got another (top picture above) next to my front door - it shows a man snappily dressed in a double breasted coat, tophat, spats, and cane. It’s next to the door because this is what I imagine myself to look like when I leave the house. He also has an “X” for an eye. I’m not sure if the custom of using the “X”-eye to indicate a dead person predates this picture or not. He may also be blind. Which would make his outfit that much more impressive.
Finally, I’ve got a small picture (bottom right) on the inside of my closet door, next to my ties. A salesman proudly shows off his newest neckwear to a surly cross-armed gentleman. This is what is going on inside my head when I grab ten ties from my closet, thinking any of them would be gorgeous with that day’s outfit, and then upon reflection (in the mirror, of course) end up rejecting them all.
After two years of procrastination, putting the pictures up took about ten minutes. On the whole, I’m very happy with them.
I was minding my own business scrolling through Tumblr on a Sunday morning, and fifteen minutes later managed to find myself imbroglioed in a promise to write a blog post. The casus bloggi is this post from dirnelli, which led to an exchange on Twitter. To summarize, dirnelli got all #actually on GQ for calling Eidos an “Italian brand” though their designer is American and they do not currently sell in Europe; I got all #actually on his #actually since their designer is an American of Italian descent, and their factory is in Italy, and they are owned by an Italian company; this led to a discussion of whether brand nationality means anything, at which point I felt like 140 characters could no longer contain me. So here I am, taking to Tumblr.
My main point is that if you care about a brand’s nationality, full stop, you are prostrating yourself to the great god of marketing. Because you will perceive a brand’s nationality to be whatever they market themselves as. Eidos markets themselves as an Italian brand, with some justification, mentioned above. Meanwhile Ralph Lauren - considered a thoroughbred American brand - is also made in Italy. As is Huntsman, the doge of Savile Row. French luxury giants under the LVMH umbrella produce much of their goods in China.
Does this matter? Does Italian manufacture make RL any less of an “American” brand? Should you care?
Maybe you want to buy something made by workers who are treated with respect and paid fairly. The “Made In” label is a very poor proxy for that. I’ve written before about how slippery these labels can be, even under strict regulations. But even if you do know for sure where every step of production has taken place, there is a huge amount of variance in working conditions within each country. There are factories in China that pay decently, have plenty of space, and don’t overwork their employees. Meanwhile here’s a story about Amazon warehouse workers in the good ol’ US and A.
But I think most people care about brand nationality for what my friend Reginald Jerome de Mans calls that “frisson of impression” that we are getting a little bit of French je ne sais quoi with each Hermes tie or Dior belt. These are the people famed pitchman Vince Offer (Israeli-American, if we’re keeping track) is talking to when he touts his Sham-Wow as “Made in Germany - you know the Germans always make good stuff.”
We laugh at Vince’s transparent shilling for a $20 rag, but then wax poetic about all the style and elegance represented by the “made-in” label on a $2,000 rag. It reminds me of people who spend a week vacationing in Paris and come back telling everybody that “the French” do this or do that. Of course, the Germans do make good stuff. But not always. And if you’re assuming that any Italian garment will give you whatever it is you have in your head as “Italian style,” then you are begging to get suckered.
Part of modern life seems to be self-identification through consumerism - I buy such and such a thing, therefore I am such and such a person. When were we are from, both physically and culturally, matters less and less, people grasp for identity in what they buy. Imbuing products with some indelible national identity, and along with that the ethos of an entire people and history, seems to be a natural complement. Brands spend lots of money to emphasize their origin myths as a shorthand for their quiddities. But it is a cheap and facile sort of identification, and easily mimicked by unscrupulous profiteers.
So does it make any sense to care at all about a product’s provenance? Well, I do. I care about knowing the people who have had a hand in making my clothes. It’s not about the label, but my personal relationships with the people and places involved. Of course I realize that this is a time and money-intensive process, and not everyone has that luxury. But some brands and retailers care about it too, and try to bring you as close as possible to the people who make your stuff, rather than distancing you from it by re-branding everything with their store label, or hiding behind the need to safeguard industry secrets.
This in itself is its own sort of illusion. Everyone presents themselves how they want to be seen. But some stories are better to believe in than others. And these days, whether a brand considers itself, or even whether it should be considered, Italian, or American, or English, or French, is just not a big part of the story. Maybe there are some people who care about whether Eidos is “really” an Italian brand or not. But this conversation has gotten stale for me, and I think in the end, the focus on assigning to each brand a particular country’s stylistic identity only benefits PR budgets. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just spilled a beer and need to find my ShamWow. Those Germans really do make great stuff.
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Omar Little, the shotgun-toting stickup man who was Barack Obama’s favorite character in The Wire, famously said that “A man got to have a code.” I think most people believe this. The world is a complicated place, but it should be navigated, so this thinking goes, using a limited set of basic truths, from which all others are derived.
In mathematical proofs these are called “axioms.” You get your audience to agree to a set of axioms that seem obvious, and then you lead them down a logical path. At each step, you say, if you agreed with that last thing, then you’ve clearly got to agree with this next one too. Eventually, with enough steps, you arrive at whatever it is you wanted to convince them of.
There are less formal axioms floating all around us, unweighted by mathematical proofs but much more consequential. The Ten Commandments are a set of axioms for righteous behavior. As is The Golden Rule. Aesthetics tries to formalize basic criteria for what is pleasing to the senses and what is not.
These distillations seem to simplify and clarify difficult judgments of what is right and wrong, or what is beautiful and what is ugly - a life hack, just like learning to distinguish real gold from fool’s by biting it. Using axioms would also seem to make your decisions consistent, and therefore coherent.
But these advantages are mostly illusory. Axioms usually either lead you into conflict with your intuition - and at this point the intuition usually wins, nullifying the value of axioms in the first place - or become so demanding as to eliminate every option available to you.
The Golden Rule is an example of the first problem. Probably most people would agree if you suggested that you should treat others as you would like to be treated. But it’s easy to come up with examples where this advice is ridiculous. Should all masochists then become sadists? And all sadists machosists? Should all suicides become homocides? In these cases, our instincts mutiny, and we reject The Golden Rule.
You might ask why shouldn’t we just call the above cases exceptions and follow The Golden Rule the rest of the time. You could do that - you would basically be adding the exceptions to your list of axioms. But remember that the axioms are meant to supplant your intuition - to act as a rational guide based on abstract reasoning when your unthinking intuition leads you astray. Going back and editing your axioms whenever they lead to a conclusion you disagree with undermines the whole point of having axioms. You might as well just follow your intuition from the beginning.
There’s another, deeper problem with this method - your intuition has already shown you that your axioms do not generate good advice in every situation. This should make you question whether your axioms give you good advice in any situation. When the conflict between the axioms and common sense becomes too great - as in the case of suicidal people and The Golden Rule - then we notice. But there may be many other conflicts between what our axioms tell us to do and what we really think is right that are less obvious. Since axioms are supposed to be infallible, failure anywhere raises the possibility of failure everywhere.
But suppose you really wanted to stick with the axiomatic approach, and just thought you needed to improve your axioms a little bit by adding a couple more. You’ll soon run into another problem: there is no way to follow all the axioms at once.
My favorite example of this comes from economics, but it is broadly applicable. Suppose that as a society we have to decide together what our community will look like - who gets what, who has which rights, etc.. There are various options that we could choose. Every person in our society has a ranking of all these options, from their most favorite to their least favorite. Now we want a way to figure out which option is the “best” one - that is, we want a way to look at all the rankings that everyone has over the different options, and based on those, create a social ranking, from best to worst.
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that there is NO way to do this that satisfies a fairly short list of axioms that seem necessary to insure common sense and basic fairness. The axioms are somewhat technical so I won’t go over them in detail, but basically they say that everyone has at least some input, no one person gets dictatorial power to just choose their favorite option, and you never choose an option if there’s another one that everyone likes more. Seems fairly innocuous, but even this is too much. There’s no way to construct a social ranking that respects even these basic properties. This is a mind-fucking tyrant of a theorem that makes you question the very existence of right and wrong.
Maybe you think you already know what’s right and wrong, but you want a set of axioms to support those views. Then Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem suggests that whenever you think you’ve found the set of axioms that’s right for you - since it supports your own viewpoint - there’s another very attractive set of axioms that tells you that you’re wrong. Your choice of axioms is just a restatement of your already-existing preferences. They provide no more fundamental reasoning or justification than mere preference.
And that’s really the difficulty with not having axioms. The most fundamental and meaning-pregnant decisions in our life - what’s right and wrong, what’s beautiful and ugly, what’s good and bad - are unjustifiable. It seems like you have no core values. After a lot of hard thought and consideration, the best explanation we can give is, “I don’t know, I guess that’s just the way I see it.” The reasons are felt rather than thought. And to some people, this robs those judgements of their meaning and righteousness. It’s disorienting. But I think this is the world we live in. The lives that we live in. There is no handy shortcut to knowing what the right thing to do, if such a concept has any real meaning at all.
Living by a code may seem to give you immediate access to the truth, pure and simple. But as Oscar Wilde said, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
