I’m in SoHo (derogatory). It’s a weekend afternoon (also my fault), and as I mill, trapped behind a tenacious glut of sidewalk gawpers, I see a boy out on the cobblestone road with a look of singular focus and consternation. This is on Greene Street, and I wonder what he’s doing, why he’s so avid, what grade of fuckshit is afoot, and then I turn for the reverse view to find the friend. Of course, the friend. The one taking his picture. Eventually, they swap places.
They’re posing, I realize, by the Watches of Switzerland store. Under the Rolex flag. As though they ride as bannermen of House Rolex.
Please know this is not an indictment. I am a big fan of this moment.
It barely merits mention that they are both wearing quarter zips. Because they are. It’s a bit like reading words without vowels the way we all instinctively know. It also goes without saying that all three of us — me, the boy, his friend — are drinking matcha lattes.
This is life we’re talking about.
**
I noticed sometime in the fall that my screentime on The RealReal rivaled that on all my other doomscrolling apps combined.
And there was something about this that struck me — at least when I could gather enough self-awareness — as distinctly unwell. I would go to bed only to find myself 45 minutes later hunched over the kitchen counter, “night grinding” mouthguard in place, gleaming like a glazed donut from bedtime emollients, blue light streaming into my head, trundling through every sweater in the “most obsessed” view, monitoring the number of hearts on each of the raglan, double-ply, non-poly-blend designer crewnecks.
What my actual heart, my real-life meat-heart, desired was an investment sweater. An anchor to my winter edit. A sweater with an MSRP north of $1,000 in impeccable condition, in the right size, possibly in 100% cashmere with minimal pilling. A sweater I could layer under a fishtail parka or a belted wool coat without tugging at the sleeve or experiencing strangulation at the armpit.
I night-click to beat out all my enemies.
I prevail.
I wait.
The fantasy shatters quickly.
The sweater arrives shopworn. Lacking animation or vitality. Smelling vaguely of the inside of someone else’s house (cabbage? sage?). It feels discarded the moment it enters my atmosphere. It does not belong to me, but it’s here. Indifferent to every one of my wishes.
**
TOVE Studio, Cucinelli, Jamie Haller loafers, Attersee cocoons, LESET tee, FFORME tank, archival The Row, babaà turtleneck, KINTO flask, TOTEME, Repetto, Loro Piana, Max Mara, Charvet belt, Charvet dress shirt, those Dries sneakers, Margiela Tabi flats, Horsebit, Kallmeyer, LEMAIRE, High Sport. Quality knits, archival, selvedge, indigo, denim in punishing weights but inviolable cuts, classic neutral basics you will turn to season after season. We’re talking decades. Whatever patina grows up to become.
I know the catechisms well. I no longer know where they came from.
**
They try to tell me that Quiet Luxury is dead and it’s a lie. It’s inside me. It will not detonate like a spore; it lacks the drama or the myopia to destroy its host outright. Rather, it will continue to leech its influence like contaminants into groundwater forever and ever long after I’m dead. Quiet luxury is microplastics.
Even still, I am not here to tell you about colliding trends or where we live in the irony cycle. The semiotics of performing inconspicuous consumption in a way that is loudly identifiable by most people: sure, sure, sure. Fine, fine, fine. Mostly, though, it’s not a moral issue. I am not a creative consultant masquerading as an artist with a PDF to sell you.
I have muzzle velocity for consumption.
Yes, and.
And, yet.
**
I can’t wait to buy a Brick in order to buy fewer things!
**
The first time I bought a truly expensive article of clothing, it was a leather jacket of inconsequential weight and unenduring cut. I’d lost my job, and something about the austere glass exterior of the store felt jagged and hostile in a way that I found irresistible.
It was a swift bloodletting: the call of a void. In the hairsbreadth between self-soothe and self-harm. It was dazzling. I tried on the shearling jacket over my clothes. Blacked out, peering from unseeing eyes. I angled myself in the mirror as the blunt-bobbed sales associate looked on. I’d gotten it in my head that if the transaction happened as quickly as possible, I wouldn’t notice. Or she wouldn’t. Or my credit card wouldn’t. Or my joblessness.
When I walked out with a comically large shopping bag swinging at my shoulder, I was trembling with barely suppressed terror. I didn’t take the coat out that night. Or the next. Over the years, I wore it twice. The same number of times I could have paid rent with it. Or the number of laptops I might have bought instead.
**
This may sound deranged, but clothes know when you’re afraid of them.
**
This is not a jeremiad against designer. Or a condemnation of quality. Or even possession. I fucking love things. I yearn for things. I am very frequently and reliably fulfilled by things. I want an investment into things to solve the turmoil of making choices in advance of knowing their consequences. Is that so unreasonable an IPO? To hope for solutions? To fix my premise once and for all? I have this dream that if you recognize my clothes then I’ll never have to make a first impression ever again. I will retire from sartorial anxiety.
**
“Show me that Balenciaga look,” says the casting director to a shirtless Harris Dickinson in Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund’s excellent 2022 film. The actor’s gorgeous, golden head collapses into a self-serious moue of hostility. “H&M again!” an unseen voice instructs. Harris’ expression blossoms, cracks into a toothy grin, eyes vacant. “We’re just kidding. We’re so cheap. We’re so happy,” the voice affirms. Then, “Balenciaga’s back. Fiercer than ever. We are stone cold. Oh my God, get away from us.” The lip is stiff, the look smoldering. Head held still. “H&M is here again!” The face unfurls, guileless.
**
The thrall of Quiet Luxury for me lies in voyeurism. Tourism. Visiting. Othering the shirt, the pant, the sweater that is beautifully crafted by any measure but only worn convincingly with insouciance. It’s when you’re cosplaying as High Net Worth for the sense of security it confers, despite your lack of health insurance.
But striving for Quiet Luxury is only as good as the queue for the viral pastry. The airport lounge that mocks rather than justifies the credit card’s annual fee. So much reaching, grasping. So little pleasure.
This is not Quiet Luxury’s fault. I just want it to be magical — to deliver me.
**
The middle class is dead. There is no terrain between Kirkland and Kallmeyer. Once you clamor for luxury, trying to escape the binary that finds you below the 10 percent, it’s no longer quiet. It betrays your station. It tells on you.
Quiet Luxury was a term manufactured for poor strivers. The truth is, if you can’t afford a The Row sweater, you can’t afford to wear a The Row sweater. Certainly not with aplomb. Not the way it was intended.
If you’re gifted a The Row sweater, it’s a bit like being a nepo baby. People disparage the wrong thing when it comes to nepo babies. They also deploy the wrong arguments in defense of nepo babies. Nepo babies can be just as smart and hardworking as run-of-the-mill babies. None of this is the point. They just have more pluck. Failure as a concept occurs to them less frequently.
If a The Row sweater is free of charge, it is more likely to come in a delightful color.
When the luxury is quiet, which is to say nuanced, truly debonair with the languid lassitude of an aristocrat on a chaise, it’s velvet rather than crepe. Shawl collar instead of notched. There is no need to play it safe. It is unburdened by the tax of cost. Suddenly, there’s humor in it.
Quiet luxury is sneaky. The stealth is that it happens to be hilariously expensive. It’s Dada. It’s why Chrome Hearts is a cousin rather than a foe.
**
What I could do is just go buy a fucking sweater. At a flagship brick-and-mortar with a one-word name that has a good mouthfeel. Or some fancy French or Italian person’s name. Or an old-fashioned department store. I would do it at full price at the height of the sweater’s combed glory, all the fibers running in smooth, unmolested tributaries, smelling and feeling new and full of promise the way twentysomething cheeks burst with collagen.
**
What I end up doing is buying a babaà turtleneck. I’m aware that this is off-piste from the argument. Also, it’s on sale. I buy it in that one shade of blue. And on a day so cold my head throbs, when the air is spiky in my nostrils, I wear it because everything is so bright I can feel it in my teeth. I wear it with a fur hat and, instead of feeling any ambition at all, any sense of pursuit or resolution, I wonder if, when I’m coatless, I disappear against the backdrop of the clear blue sky as though standing in front of a green screen. I feel like my furry little head with staticky hair and my legs are all that can be seen of me, and it makes me feel truly delighted. The sweater admittedly is also a little scratchy. But it’s terrifically warm. I wear a turtleneck in exactly the same color underneath it, and this feels hilarious to me, too. As though I can peel off layers to reveal skin in a blue just shy of ultramarine.
There isn’t a version of it that pops up in my brain absolutely riddled with metadata. My brain is actually quiet.
My brain is so happy when it’s just a lump of fat in a skull.
**
It’s funny, but I never know the piece is an investment piece until long after the acquisition. They don’t tell you that. That you can’t actually plan for it. They pretend you can when they give you their discount code or referral link. But you can’t. At least I can’t.
It’s not about the expense or the cost per wear. It’s that you spent so much cumulative time with it, alongside it, under it, inside it. In a dance. A dialogue. A thread that runs the length of life.
**
My most prized possessions: a shrewdly cut vintage blazer, the failsafe dress for any wedding, the suit that bestows the confidence of forgetting entirely what I am wearing even as the event itself becomes memorable. I hadn’t known what they would become until I was remembering them. Until they already were what they would be.
**
The Rolex SoHo quarter-zip boys are sweet in their mutuality. There’s real tenderness in how unselfconscious they are about posing for each other. They hold their wrists seriously, presumably at the exact spot where their timepieces would go if they had them.
I hope they get their watches one day. I’d like to know if it feels remotely satisfying. If the watches give them pleasure every day, whether they get ones with sensible, daily-wearing bezels or not.
If they look down at the time, even at their Omega or Seiko, a flash of memory crossing their faces, I hope they recall how wonderful it was to hold their wrist with a friend who had once done the same.
