Hand mended socks as luxury items
The chicest thing you can be right now is not a consumer
There is a growing number of things that are now considered desirable that suggest a bigger cultural current of value. A book with scratched spine and penciled notes, wired headphones, a messy bag cluttered with receipts and little trinkets, a leatherbound notebook full of scribbles and poems, the wear and tear of a withered workwear pant.
Things that take time, things that carry the weight of history, things that have endured seasons and carry the scabs as receipts that things did happen — things that can be patched up, because you care.
These are not only aesthetic preferences, they signal a much deeper emotional truth:care is in extremely rare supply in a world running on a logic of extraction. Social security is being dismantled, wars are being started, media is running on polarization. An abandoning of causality, nuance and history seem to be the tenor of global politics. The only thing that seems to remain intact is the marketing funnel.
Markets have been optimized to make items either feel obsolete and out of style by the next season or they fade away rapidly and turn into garbage in front of our eyes. The perfect specimen for the consumer economy is anxious, worried to miss out, desperate to fit in and stand out. Their sense of identity depends on a never-ending feedback loop of scroll, purchase, shame.
Even luxury brands have followed the same social-media logic for the past decade: high visibility, viral moments, engineered desire. The anxiety of missing out has been the product as much as the object itself. But the mood is shifting. What feels rare now is not another hot drop of some limited edition, but serenity.
Having to mend your clothing and wear it for a long time used to be an indicator for poverty. Now it has become a luxury code.
What’s desirable is to care about your items, like you would want to be cared about yourself. To be cherished and maintained like a treasure, but not to be put on a pedestal. To be allowed to live life and to collect scratches and wrinkles along the way. Not to make you ready for replacement but to make you even richer and more beautiful.
Social media has lifted us into a flat and slick world, where cleanness became aspirational. Now to be able to afford some resistance to consumer culture has become the true status symbol. Acts of care and tenderness have become rebellion. Resisting the funnel signals autonomy in a world that is designed for conversions.
This mirrors Melville’s Bartleby’s quiet refusal: ‘I would prefer not to’ — a gentle yet firm withdrawal from a system that demands participation.
Aging is one of the few things where texture comes as a process, not a finish. Even Prada handcrafting frayed lapels can’t replicate the real thing. The craving for texture is also legible in recent runway castings, where we saw an influx of models over 50 presenting the collections of Gucci, Chanel and Miu Miu.
The chicest thing you can be right now is someone who is committed to something enough to fix it, when it’s broken and values it despite its imperfections.
(This piece draws on observations from the GUT reports FAITH and PUNK, available at globalurgenttrends.com)