Birds

Lest readers think that we are only concerned with sound, and to celebrate the week anniversary of the end of Fashion Week -- during which no less than two photographers asked to take our picture in an apparent bid to pretend that they had encountered a real live model and/or to test their photoshop skills -- we luxuriate in the snug smugness of the Critical Shopper, a person who is paid by the New York Times whose actual play clothes are likely rarely chewed "by the rigors of daily motion." The subject is a shop called Bird, with saunas for dressing rooms.

h/t to Alexis

In “The Recognitions,” the famously undercelebrated doorstop by William Gaddis, the virtuosity of a painter who makes counterfeit “undiscovered” paintings by Flemish masters is the vehicle through which Gaddis questions the genuineness of other forms of art, life and religion.

Much of the clothing at Bird appears to be recovering from its too-adventurous lives. To live vicariously through the scars on one’s casual wear is an interesting kind of psychic trompe l’oeil, suggesting that one has been more kinetically active than one really has. It seems a bit perversely bourgeois to demand a patina of robust character from our clothes in an economy in which garments bearing the marks of age are not an elective style choice for so many. But if your leisure is too demanding to damage your play clothes through the rigors of actual motion, Bird poses an interesting conundrum.

It is possible to look at these pretrashed jeans as more than just a look that sedentary poseurs borrow to mimic outdoorsy virility. They may be viewed as a declaration of taste, to wit: “I may not have had to fight feral, screwdriver-wielding 9-year-olds in the Outback, but I am wise enough to appreciate the pants of those who have.”

As the ghost of Gaddis argues, there is such a thing as a counterfeit so well done that it can be, in its way, more authentic than the “real thing.” When Lord Ha gives you a jacket, its wear and tear has been earned, however artificially. To legitimize the fictional distress of designer jeans is to step through the dressing room looking glass and leave one’s brain behind ... but destruction, too, is a creative act, is it not?