Shop Matters

Hippy dippy would appear to still sell well, if cool stockist are any indicator. 

I’ve written about Birkenstock’s before and return to them because they’re an interesting piece of footwear. They have a variety of contexts outside of men who write about clothes on the internet and their odd ideals of how the “piece” was worn in the past. Yet, one of those contexts that the Birkenstock clog is partaking in is men who write about clothes on the internet. The cool, hard-to-find Birkenstock model, The Maine, is carried at a number of “hip” establishments. 

They’re carried by Oi Polloi, Albam, Unionmade, and... 

Zappos?

Zappos? The Amazon hydra head? The non-hippy-dippy, non-coffee drinkin’, non-Warby Parker wearin’, non-jean tearin’, and non-cool factor sharin’ corporation that ships your mom’s walking shoes to your front stoop?

Are the hard-to-find Maine’s just a shoe that you wear to church? Have they fallen from the graces from the sartorially esoteric pantheon and down to Champs trash available to *gasp* people whose favorite restaurant is Cracker Barrel? #elimanningwear

Have they fallen to where kids whose blog posts are just made up of rhetorical questions feature them?

Either way, the question I find entertaining is the following: Does the shop matter?

Does it matter in person?

Does it matter when you're ordering on the internet?

Being a cheap-ass, my subjective answer is no.

Though I am unsure if everyone will answer exactly as I do.

Ken Burns

Watching a lot of Ken Burns requires quite the attention span. One could interrupt me a la “at a loud party style” with a loud interjection:

OH GAWD I LOVED ‘THE WAR’

I LOVED HIS BASEBALL SERIES

ASHOKAN FAREWELL

And then divert the conversation somewhere actually interesting a la “some NYT editorial about new epiphanies a new mother has because no one in the world has ever been a mother before so this is really uncharted territory.” Which will be good, because Ken Burns is boring and not a great small-talk subject.

Some people like boring, or what they would say is beauty in details only they can see. These people are (insert interest)-philes and a subsection is the targeted audience of this piece.

Well, Ken Burns likes to include photos, over a century old, of people in baggy, slightly short clothing covered in dirt in his films. The clothing sort of hangs on their short frames and you can tell it had as much wear as the photo has a century into it’s existence. There aren’t a lot of places you can get clothing that makes you look this dated. It would be silly, really, to sell it OTR. You’d look like a re-enactor, a notoriously weird group of people who spend weekends traveling to historical towns and doing things like churning butter -- which is reasonably absurd like writing about clothes. Most would have this sort of thing custom made from deadstock material or from a mill like Woolrich. Or you can buy it from Mister Freedom. It’s not cheap. It’s a bit silly. But the online store is the only place you can buy stuff like it. Unless you’re in Hollywood. 

Hacendado Jacket

Ranchero Shirt

Hacendado Trousers

Drover Blouse

Gunslinger Denim

California Blue Jeans

NOS Chambray

An experimental sartorial theorist could give you a scheme like, “wear it with all modern pieces and it’ll get incorporated into your own modern sartorial era,” which could very well work but I don’t quite know what one would do with this stuff once one gets ahold of it. Wear it in public? Pan slowly in and out with a video camera and have a haunting Ashokan Farewell piece play in the background? Get someone with out-of-date prescription glasses to talk about them on camera? 

It’s cool and Christophe Loiron’s vision appears to be boundless. It looks like really wonderful stuff to me and has for as long as he’s had a website. Each collection appears to be reasonably unique but with comparasions between them (which makes sense given that each collection takes into account different time periods). But maybe it’s best to leave sleeping dogs lie. Or “It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake.” 

The recurred past may be similar but it is never the same.