For most people, it’s new-clothes season. But I don’t believe in buying cold-weather clothing while it’s still hot out. I prefer a wear-it-out-of-the-store kind of shopping experience. Which means that all of the sweaters and outerwear I want will be sold out by the time I’m ready to buy them. Oh, well.
Here are some things I’m thinking about right now.
A confounding new brand that I love
I’m not sure how I first encountered BbbLllAaaHaa, but I’ve been following the brand closely for about a year now, watching how satisfyingly consistent and cohesive it is and how quickly products sell out.
I love everything about this brand: the opulent and overstated labeling, the tightly constrained collections often based on a single color of one fabric, the highly functional clothes, the strange name.
What I like most about it, though, might be that it’s fully committed to a vision that is not at all obviously commercially viable. Everything in life is so overly optimized, strategized, and market-tested. Bbb just is. And it seems to be working. I’ll be clicking fast when this next collection drops.
A watch that I never thought I’d want to wear
A good brand makes you reconsider your own style choices. And everyone has a plastic watch coming out this week that made me nostalgic for the days when I hunted for vintage Swatches on eBay. I don’t wear a watch and had no intention of starting to. But here we are, and here I am making room on my wrist for everyone’s Mono Watch.
everyone was founded in 2022 by Ryo Miyoshi, who was previously director of the great boutique 1LDK — a regular stop for me whenever I pass through Tokyo. As the name implies, the brand doesn’t have a particularly specific vision — just a very specific approach to developing product.
This, to me, is the model for brands of the moment. Fuck storytelling and world-building. I’m so sick of it. Just make good clothes, make them meticulously, and treat them with dignity.
A tennis brand that I actually like
Shade was started by Miraj Patel — one of the founders of the nu-GORP label Gnuhr — as a response to his experience working for outdoor brands that were mostly concerned with efficiency and vibes and didn’t care much about overusing synthetics or creating an abundance of waste. Shade is a small-scale brand that does things only a small-scale brand can do: meticulous design and construction, limited runs of hand-numbered editions, and a visual identity that feels more like an art project.
As he was developing Shade, Miraj — like many of us — fell under the spell of tennis. So, much of the clothing’s functionality and the brand’s imagery is centered on the sport.
I’ve always preferred to wear “regular” tennis clothes when I play. Typically, that means adidas shorts (the 7” Climacool Ergo short is the best tennis short of all time imo) and any random vintage cotton tee. But I just got Shade’s long shorts, and I’m really into them. Great fabric, interesting construction that doesn’t sacrifice comfort or create a weird silhouette, and a raw hem with bar-tack stitching at various intervals along the side seams so you can cut them to your preferred length. All Shade garments come with some version of this customization option, which might sound kind of wonky and annoying (like, don’t make me decide how long the shorts should be) but is actually executed in a smart and cool way.
The importance of ritual
They’re saying that Supreme has returned to form. I’ve certainly clocked more people wearing the brand lately, and this week there was significantly more buzz around the new collection preview than there has been for a while.
It’s interesting that Supreme’s stock rises and falls like this because the reality is that Supreme is probably the most consistent brand of the last 20 years. The quality of the product has always remained very high for the price, the “Fuck Em” attitude never changes, the referential design sensibility varies only slightly, the caliber of collaborations with artists and other brands is steady. And every new collection is released at the exact same time in the exact same way, twice a year.
The cornerstone of Supreme’s collection rollout scheme remains the preview grid, a seemingly endless product labyrinth that reveals every item the brand will release in the coming season. Supreme started doing these standardized online previews and lookbooks in 2011, which was when the web store first expanded to cover the EU and UK. (Supreme didn’t even have a web store until 2006, which might sound like a long time ago but was actually very late.)
I love the preview. I haven’t bought anything from Supreme in years, but I still click through every slide out of habit. Once upon a time I’d be screenshotting the pieces I was planning to buy. The rigidity and predictability of how Supreme managed these rollouts — air-tight, sending the same emails at the same time in the exact same format — turned pretty standard promotional marketing into a kind of ritual. And rituals became central to the success and identity of Supreme: the preview ritual, the drop-day ritual, the Nike and Vans and Timberland and North Face collaboration rituals.
For rituals to be effective, they need to be imbued with some kind of deep cultural meaning. I’d like to know the traffic numbers on Supreme’s preview page leading up to the first drop to see if it still has it. I bet it does.
A final thought
You have to be a total weirdo to wear a black T-shirt. Not going to explain it.
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