I want craft, lasting quality, story, and beauty. It shouldn't be this hard.
Let's just let the bad brands die. Had to write this one.
I’m working on it. I remember when Everlane first launched in 2010. I graduating high school and really passionate about anti-trafficking ventures after learning about the work of Anuradha Koirala with her work with her group Maiti Nepal in Kathmandu. I was preparing for a photojournalism internship in Kathmandu that fall as the first stop on my gap year. I remember the cream minimalist website talking about each of the factories they were sourcing from, the pricing of what it took to make each piece, and their own markup.
The beginning of the transparency I craved - we all craved. Now all of that is gone and not a part of educating their customer. Now we have the Italics and the Quinces of the world promising us the same quality as the luxury brands that flout quality through high marketing spends. We have creators taking us to high street and fast fashion stores trying to educate us on seams, lining, fabric blends, and how much synthetic is alright? Then we have the Italian courts confirming what we already know, that bags that could be priced at $3,000 are made in sweatshop like conditions and even some of the other high design bags only are made of leather that is priced nowhere near that price. It can feel like everything is either made at the expense of those that make it, the planet, our health (looking at you pfas and all the plastic we consume), or as a joke on our wallets.
I walked past a pop up for a brand in Soho that makes kitchy sweatshirts and sweatpants and manages to charge $120 without any story. They say they dye the sweatshirts to get the right finish, but who’s doing the dying? There is no craft and honestly, no design.
I’m tired of it all. Brands are no longer interested in legacy and longevity. They simply are waiting for venture capital to come in and essentially ruin the product and the original mission so that the founders and founding team can cash out. I totally get it, but at the end of the day as consumer’s we’re drowning.
On the one hand, you have the conversations around over-consumption, consumption, underconsumption core (all of which I have touched upon at length in my content and here on substack) but in that washing machine we have expensive marketing machines and OG influencers telling us that either this plastic thingamajig from Amazon is the best or to go out and spend $800 on a pair of jeans while you’re waiting for your leather appointment to play the Hermes game.
I love things. I do. I’m a Libra and an aesthete. My mother is a skilled ceramicist who makes beautiful dinnerware for Michelin star restaurants with her hands. She turns something beautiful out of earth. It’s magical. She is for me the embodiment of craft with over 30 years of experience moving with clay. Her things are beautiful and I believe her things need to exist because using one of her mugs or eating off of one of her plates is a different experience. It has true soul. And she’s so skilled she can take that energy in clay and create the same piece over 100 times in one sitting. That’s craft.
Growing up with a skilled and artistic mom who makes objects, taught me to appreciate the maker. I’m tired of the designer who can be cerebral and think so hard about the shape and curve of something, but it is another thing to craft, to build, and to make.
Lasting quality and craft come from the voice of the maker. The weaver, the knitter, the person who has spent years honing their craft and understanding their product.
I wrote a few substacks ago about Mark Fischer’s Capitalist Realism and how we live in a world where essentially given our neoliberal capitalist regime, we are just not interested in making a good product - just expanding capital.
But, there are still brands that are interested in making a good product and I want them to float to the surface of all of our collective imagination. There are still brands, designers, and companies that are not full of sh*t. That’s the clearest way to say it. They have vertically integrated factories, craftspeople who know their medium. Or they are heritage companies that know their product so well as they have been making it for decades. It exists in food like my holy grail salt herbamare. It exists in boots like the OG Chelsea boot, R.M. Williams (which is now part of the LVMH family and that makes me sad but still a great boot for now).
I saw a video from a creator that I really respect in terms of their perfective on how clothes are made as they are a real educator, but the context of the video was to “bring back gatekeeping.” That consumers should educate themselves and then go out and figure out what works for them specifically for their body types and color analysis. But I disagree, we all deserve to be able to express our own personal style, but the quality, beautiful things that are made well, drape well, and might fit someone’s body type shouldn’t be gate kept because we as consumers are swimming through the sh*t swamp of the sheins of the world and not everyone has a special interest in shopping or even has the time and mental capacity to shop or might really be searching for more size inclusivity. Why would we gatekeep the quality stuff? No I want those brands and businesses to survive and if they’re doing it right then let them float to the top.
Not all brands are meant to succeed. Especially the brands that are outsourcing their logo to pay pennies on the hour for hands to make their clothes. We forget that our clothes are handmade. All of them. Sure the fabric might have been knitted by a robot but all clothes require sewing or stitching that touches hands.
I remember watching that Brandy Mellville documentary a few months ago called Brandy Hellville, finishing and having the thought that at every single part of the supply chain there was exploitation. The actual creation of the product in the factories and sweatshops. The girls who worked in the store. The young girls having their sense of body image shaped by some weird old libertarian Italian dudes via instagram for tiny sweatshirts. Then the exploitation in the whole fast fashion pipeline dumping more clothes than imaginable onto countries in exchange for development subsidies like Ghana. Then at the end, the environment as you see beaches choking under the fabric.
Let’s the bad brands die. Not everyone needs to charge $125 for a sweatshirt with a logo. I want to let the good brands rise above. The ones who love the craft. The ones who think about design. The ones that love the people they work for.
As an anthropologist, when I was doing my master’s at Cambridge we had a whole section of “Economic anthropology” and the idea of how the market solidifies social realtions and also the social relations that are made in manufacturing and our economy. It cover’s quite a lot. But, today so much of what we buy feels empty because there is no solidified social bond. It’s not like going to your local general store and picking up a new spatula and saying hi to people who work and own the business in your community. Target and Walmart wiped those out long ago. So brands try to make themselves into social personalities like we see on tiktok, hiring gen z marketers at a last ditch to remain relevant in comments sections and pretend like they are people. They are not. They then go to as many influencers as possible so that people try to recreate these social bonds by emulating the feeling like the product and the person are the same. It’s not.
I feel good buying from a brand when I’ve put in some research and I learn more about their company structure, environmental commitments, how they speak about manufacturing, what transparency means to them, etc. I’ve shared how I feel about Bosch, Saint James, A. Vogel, Sambonet, among others. I know I’m not solidifying a social bond in purchasing from them, but at least its a brand that is to the best of my understanding conscious of the people who work there and conscious of its customer in delivering a good product. And that’s the most I can ask for.
I’m ideating on some ideas moving forward with my content because I’m tired of it. No gatekeeping here. Just looking for the community of us that are tired of brands being full of sh*t.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.