To Dress a Fisherman
Utilitarianism, and what it means to Wear.
The safest, most decidedly realist way I feel I can live my life is by admitting my tastes are to some extent ridiculous, intense, and overpriced. I recognize my willingness to subscribe to the bizarre and give in only because I know I will wear it. This is all perfectly well and good when I’m in a vacuum, but if someone, say, asks for advice on a jacket they should buy, the situation embarrassingly escalates.
This happened last month (I have not stopped thinking about it) and I began recommending a variety of old-fashioned Baracutas and Barbours, herringbones and tweeds, and blazers favored by modern British gentry and both of our fathers. Vintage is a safer space for these recommendations, mainly because they can be found for (relatively) cheaper. These “classics“ are adored by a sect of menswear style editors because they never seem to go out of style, represent older and grander masculinity, and last forever.
I know about these brands and like them because they have been copied, and my shame is that it is the copiers who have my real respect, attention, and wallet. These scholars of Western wear and vintage garments are the source of my obsession and the source of minute vintage deconstructionist study. So I told my friend about that little shop in New York and all the insanities I found there.
I write this during the close of Paris fashion week and cotoure week. The world of fashion is at a fascinating middle point in which moneymakers and trendsetters have either been stripped of their head designers (Gucci, Vuitton) or crippled through sudden losses of clout (Balenciaga). These brands recycle the aesthetics of the past to account for the lack, referencing Tom Ford and Abloh until the leftovers run out, while the other leading houses concoct exercises in minimalism or performative activism in the fear of recession. Purveyor of excess Vetements declares they are now minimalists, Beverly Hills ready Bezos-dressing Casablanca announces their show is about the Syrian refugee crisis, Kidsuper *shivers* decides to stage a runway-comedy show.
True talent and innovation are found in the critical darlings relegated to the outside, the Avante, and the niche. After all, these brands have never created garments designed to move mass products, they make small amounts for those who care. These are exercises in what it means to wear and dress, not self-serving exercises in “brand storytelling” and scrambling attempts to dress for trend or market. The garments and fashions that resonate in a world approaching a recession, uncertainty, and required sustainability is a focus on how one can wear, and for how long.
Nepenthes New York is a long storefront on west 38th in midtown Manhattan. I visited on a dizzyingly humid day before Soon Tofu at BCD nearby, gazing at long racks of old clothes and wooden racks of boots and brogues. Nepenthes is a 1988 company out of Tokyo that began sourcing made-in-US products like New Balances and Levi’s to Japan. By 1999 Nepenthes had expanded to New York with a store and two different in-house clothing lines called Needles and Engineered Garments.
Each of these projects is rooted in the joining of America with Japan, with reproduction, reconstruction, and obsession. Needles focuses both on the world of western wear with reconstructed flannels, cowboy shirt cuts, and suiting, alongside a more popular and heavily branded line of tracksuits. Newer line South 2 West 8 focuses on the outdoors, utilizing technical buckles, jackets with dozens of pockets, and pristine parkas. Engineered Garments is not the most popular line, but it is perhaps the most secretly Avante. Engineered Garments took the most straightforward approach to American and European workwear. Co-founder Daiki Suzuki writes that to make EG designs he would take vintage designs such as a blazer Miles Davis wore, a brooks brothers suit, or a WWII-era military parka and “add some things and take some off, balancing it out to make it look new” The result? Garments that seem like arcane vintage that somehow seem totally wearable, storied, and dynamic.
I never “got“ Engineered Garments until I went into this store. The clothes are expensive, simple, and unassuming. Their decided un-flashiness makes them near impossible to comprehend on a digital scroll. Next to some bright Marni mohair or terrifyingly jagged CDG blazer, the simple elegance of a pair of denim flight pants or military green moleskin blazer is lost. In person though, I felt as though I was parousing the mind of a meticulous collector. Beyond the classism and agelessness of everything there, each garment seems primed for wearing. Take a blazer for instance: you have the option of multiple simple colors, and then varying materials dependent on weather and preference. Nylon, ripstop cotton, moleskin, etc. Since the references for such pieces are always the casual and everyday blazers of the 60s, their is an effortlessness to them in spite of their attention to detail.
However, there is always a deep end. Engineered Garments also produces its share of outrageous patterns, bright colors, and obscure Swedish motorcycle jackets redone in nylon. Even these more “fashion“ rooted objects of outwardness are not designed for only show - each detail is a piece of vintage storytelling. This is to say that each pattern exists because of its connection to ethical craft, to history, and to that which has been tried and true. These inversions are what reveal the difference between reverence and subservience. The timelessness of a silhouette does not make it so sacred it is untouchable.
I left the Nepenthes store with stories, with new worlds, and with an excitement about rare brogue patterns and suit cuts I never thought possible for me. I also left empty handed. My friend put it well, Engineered Garments is good for “inspiration“. Like many fashion brands, this is a certain degree of subservience to a philosophy to accept the price of Nepenthes. No clout will come from your heavy multi pocketed work shirts or rippling cargo pants, it must come from within. The platonic ideal of the Engineered Garments aesthetic is ultimately that of the time worn fisherman, the 60s Ivy league flaneur, and the self actualized storied. This may not be what occurs the second you try on a jacket, but it’s what the lookbooks tell us to fantasize. In many ways, it is these honyed visions that remind me just how exciting it is to wear clothes. To transform them and be transformed by them.
Even as I caved in and showed my searching friend Engineered Garments, I knew in the back of my head that there was another. There is always a scarier, larger, more ominous fisherman. In this case, it was Kapital. David Sedaris writes about Kapital, lovingly proclaiming If I had to use one word to describe Kapital’s clothing, I’d be torn between “wrong” and “tragic.” He goes on, “The clothes they sell are new but appear to have been previously worn, perhaps by someone who was shot or stabbed and then thrown off a boat. Everything looks as if it had been pulled from the evidence rack at a murder trial… How do they get the cuts and stains so . . . right?”
Kapital is the final frontier of wearing. It is a philosophy which adores the old, but the part of aging which can be ugly, awkward, and inadvertedntly beautiful. The garments are rooted in the same exported Western garments that inspired Suzuki, but Kapital rejects the concept of exact reproduction. Their mission combines Japanese materials, crafts, and visible repair techniques like Boro, resulting in slews of limited or one off masses of stitch, story, and distress. These garments are often tough. They are composed of the strongest raw denims meant to last centuries, the softest fleeces, and the most raggedly tough canvas. Engineered Garments may turn you into a weathered fisherman, but Kapital will make you look like one digested by a whale, jacket still intact. It may be “tragic“, but its magic is that it holds together anyway.
We’re back where we started, and rightfully so. The question of wearable garments will always lead to wearable aesthetics, and it is often those who experiment in the most wearable of garments who end with the most bizarre of aesthetics. Fashion is only as gauche and unnecessary as it is irrelevant or uninterested with inspiration. If even the most indulgently simple Prada or the oddest, tattered, savings shattering Kapital sweater can do that, isn’t it worth it?
By the time I know, I may already be out to sea, explorer jacket fastened and my boro denim soaking the ocean spray.
