clothing for the life of the mind

Something I think about a lot is how when I was in graduate school, I had to attend this weekly lecture seminar. The first year students shopped for snacks, so we would go to the Trader Joe’s on 3rd Ave and buy fruit and dips and babka (everyone was crazy about babka). One week, the guest lecture was about exorcisms. I can’t remember any of the details of it but I do remember the famous geography professor David Harvey sitting a few rows ahead of me and falling asleep instantly. I think he snored a little bit. He woke up just in time for the q&a and raised his hand immediately even though he had slept through the whole lecture. He was like, interesting presentation, but can you please describe how this activity is monetized?

I’m not sure how exorcism is monetized exactly because I think I blacked out at that point. But even though this is intended to be a mediocre punchline because Harvey is a Marxist and all Marxists care about is economics, it’s also true. Everyone should probably ask themselves that more often. How is this activity monetized?

I told myself I would only write about broadly relevant things, but I’ve been really bothered by a certain book/fashion collaboration that dropped recently. At first, I couldn’t really figure out why exactly other than the fact that I thought it was tacky. Books and fashion are two of my favorite things in the world. And I would much rather skimp to buy secondhand designer clothing that has trickled into affordability than buy fast fashion (with the exception of my guiltiest pleasure, Brandy Melville). But I dislike the Rachel Comey/NYRB collaboration both because I think it’s kind of ugly, and also because it feels like an embodiment of a certain strain of culture that’s kind of insidious.

Aesthetically, I just think it’s bland. For comparison, I still think all the time about this Rachel Lee Lura collage dress that I would probably have spent any amount of money on if I had it. It incorporates real family photos behind layers of transparent silk. It’s really beautiful and creative and cool and also wearable.

I think part of the problem with the Rachel Comey pieces is that no one who works in anything literature adjacent will be able to afford them (with the exception of the independently wealthy or unusually successful). This puts them in a less interesting (to me) category of signaling something, that you read, that you know what the New York Review of Books is. And while I’m sure they’re very well made and hang very beautifully on the models, aesthetically they feel deeply uninteresting. A kind of irony that’s more self-important than self-aware.

The New York Times covered this drop in an article which unfairly made everyone sound bad (except Vivian Gornick who stays perfect). In their coverage, they drew a mindless but still startling equation between people who wear Rachel Comey and people who are bookish. Rachel Comey, who has hosted a cultural salon night and put activists on her runway, also makes this equation on her website, where she describes her consumers like this:

The Rachel Comey customer is not one person, but an array of self-realized people well versed in art, culture, and politics; freethinking people who are confident in their identity; architects, artists, gallery owners, actors, writers, and community leaders.

This is also a running theme in Comey’s PR. In a profile in The Cut, her assistant described their creative process as “just sitting together and talking — about politics and culture, and for who and why we’re making something, and is it relevant in their lives.” She contrasts this with the usual, more visual process of fashion design. In the same article, Maya Rudolph is quoted as saying, “I think it’s important that she’s doing her own thing in her own way […] That’s what she stands for. And it’s what a lot of her intelligent customers stand for as well.”

Trying to create disembodied fashion or clothing for the life of the mind is an unusual goal. In her book, Sleeveless, Natasha Stagg writes that “Fashion, unlike painting or sculpture, cannot stray too far from the body if it wants to make an impact in its designated venue.” Utilitarian clothing, created solely to be functional like some athletic or protective gear, is particularly designed around the body. And a lot of beautiful clothing built off of visual references is also highly functional and comfortable and designed for daily life.

If say, Praying is clothing for baby influencers, Rachel Comey is clothing for people with highbrow jobs and lots of opinions. Probably a lot of education as well. I think there is an aesthetic coherence between the designs and the messages of the Comey line, just like there is in most of Praying’s designs. I don’t dislike Rachel Comey clothing overall — I have a pair of her jeans I bought on The Real Real for about $70 in 2019 and they’re very durable and fit well. But it does embody a kind of sexlessness, a more colorful and quirkier nod to Joan Didion’s style maybe. Some of it has shades to me of Man Repeller style. She makes a lot of platform wooden clogs and jumpsuits and flowing dresses that you could wear on a beach vacation. Maude on Euphoria wears Rachel Comey to indicate that she is the self-aware narrator, the one who will piece together the entire mess of Euphoria’s storylines, and to indicate, just a little bit, that she’s not like other girls.

And I think fundamentally, that’s why I dislike this Rachel Comey collection so much. It supports an aesthetic vision of people who want to signal that they’re a bit too smart to care about clothes or to care about beauty or visual things. They want to say a little bit self-deprecatingly that they like to read. I’m not saying everyone who likes or will wear the collection is that kind of person, just that that is its aesthetic vision. And I think that attitude is the worst of literary culture, because of course you are an embodied person whose body matters as much as your mind, and everyone’s clothing choices are meaningful, even if they mean going to the Gap and buying fifteen of the same shirts to never have to think about it again. That is also a statement!

I also think this vision supports a kind of anti-femininity that I wrote about before, mashing up intellectual accomplishment with desirability in a way that makes me uneasy. Most of all, it feels anti sub-culture, perspectiveless. It doesn’t invite you to be in the world, out in public, surrounded by other people. And it doesn’t invite you to be innovative or particularly interesting as good fashion and good writing do.

Writing for Ssense, Ayesha Siddiqi endorses the ethos of club fashion as radically egalitarian. “While the future is being gambled away by preceding generations,” she writes, “perhaps it’s defensible to act childish, and even better to look insolent. […] If you want to dress for the weather, where you’re willing to place your body will matter more than what’s on it. The season for doubt has passed.”

I met a professional economist and told him I learned everything I know about economics from Karl Marx and the Planet Money TikToks. He answered straight-faced that he had never come across either of those things in his life. I still don’t know what they teach you in economics school. How to monetize things, I guess.