So what we're going to do first is we're going to look at a tweet that you are familiar with because you wrote about it. So I'm going to put the tweet in our little chat here. Okay. This is a retweet of a picture from film updates. It's a picture of Billy Crystal in like a big luxurious white sweater in jeans, like white dad sneakers, his like iconic outfit from when Harry met Sally. And then next to him is Ben Schwartz doing a similar look.
And the comment is from a user named Ellery Smith and it says the quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last 20 years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation. What do you spot immediately when you're looking at the differences between the two. The biggest difference. I mean, there's a lot of like aesthetic differences here. I think Ben did sort of a half-assed job of this before being totally honest.
But the biggest difference is what Ellery refers to in her tweet is that the sweater that Billy Crystal is wearing from Harry met Sally is just this sort of like voluminous fluffy comfortable looking thick like richly cabled sweater and then Ben next to him is wearing
a sweater that first of all has a different cut. It's cut much closer to the body. It doesn't have like the volume or the heft of Billy's sweater. It has a bunch of cabling on it, but everything about it just looks sort of like thin and flat and sort of less rich compared to the sweater that Billy was wearing. It's just a worse sweater, honestly.
This is the Culture Study podcast and I am Anne Helen Peterson. I'm Amanda Moll. I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic. We are talking about clothes and all of their very crappiness and why they are that way. When I started this podcast or announced this podcast, everyone was like, oh my gosh, please get Amanda Moll to come on to talk about anything. So sweet of everybody. I think that's a good sign. It's really nice.
So you cited this tweet in an article that you wrote for the Atlantic and used it as a means to basically start this national conversation. What did you know already when you started reporting this and what did you learn as you started investigating what is going on with sweaters now?
I worked in fashion for 10 years before before I started working at the Atlantic on a more sort of generalized beat. So how clothing happens is something that I have been like intensely interested in for a long time. But I read a book last year that came out last year called warn a people's history of clothing by Sophie Thanhouser. And that I thought was just like incredible and like could be a book about this tweet basically in a lot of ways.
But like the biggest thing is that the multi fiber arrangement, which is a piece of like mostly boring trade regulation between the United States and other Western countries and garment producing countries and other parts of the world expired in 2005. And with that expiration, it sort of changed everything about how the global garment industry works about how fast fashion works in the US and in Western Europe.
And about the quality of clothing that's available to consumers in those countries. And that is like the fulcrum on which much of this conversation hinges. It helps explain why the quality of clothing overall has gone down, why the workmanship that goes into a lot of them is just not as good as it used to be. And why the materials that they're made out of have changed so drastically in about 20 years.
Yeah, it's one of those things that I think people like notice and until someone articulates it plainly in a tweet or in an article like yours, they don't have that everything is illuminated moment until they actually read that right. So like I was reading your article and I was like, oh my gosh, my sweater is filled with like weird stretchy material that is like similar to stretchy jeans.
Like I didn't even think deeply about it. I'm looking actually at my closet right now and right next to one another, there are two mint green J crew sweaters. One of which was purchased for me as like my big Christmas present from my granddad in 2000 still going strong. And then the other one is a sweater from J crew purchased two years ago.
That like I kind of like because it's very resilient and it's not really pulling too much. But it is it feels like it's from a different company altogether different price points. But I think they probably in adjusted dollars are probably kind of similar. But like you can see that contrast even across the trajectory of one company.
Right. Like if you look at clothing made in the early 2000s or before versus clothing made now, you genuinely get a lot of differences, even from like sort of a surface level appraisal of that clothing. I when I go home to visit my family, my mom still lives in the house that like I grew up in. So there's still, you know, artifacts of my high school wardrobe and my college wardrobe in there.
And you know, you go through that stuff, you look at it, you try to figure out like, is there anything that I would like to keep from this like is there anything I should bring back to New York with me. And I always look at fiber tags because this is just something I'm interested in. And it's amazing to me how often I will look at a tag of a sweater from old Navy or from the gap or something like that from that era. And it is like 100% wool or it's wool and cotton.
Or something like that. And it's all natural fiber and you go to those same retailers today. And it's just very, very difficult to find something that's not at least part nylon, part acrylic, part polyester, part viscous, something like that. And 20 years ago when I was in high school, it was just so, so much easier to find those garments that like a really reasonable price tag.
J crew is a great example of that. And I think that J crew is among the retailers that is trying to get back to like a more natural fiber based inventory as we currently speak and they've made some progress on that in the last like year or two, I think. But once so much of the garment trade moved to manufacturing overseas in poor countries, a couple of things happened.
The first thing is that you're hiring from a workforce that you don't want to pay very much and that you don't want to train very much. You just want to pump as much product out of these people's time as they can possibly make. So you get workmanship that's not as good. You get corners that are cut. You get people who just do not have like the long term skill acquisition that a more highly trained long tenure garment worker would have.
And then you also end up manufacturing in countries that just do not hold you to the same environmental standards as richer countries tend to hold manufacturing to. So you get countries where you can manufacture and use a lot of synthetic materials. You can you can make visco or rayon. Which I think my understanding is that it's basically impossible to manufacture that in the US because of environmental regulation here.
But you can manufacture it, you know, by the ton in countries where their government is willing to to let garment manufacturers sort of write the regulations themselves. And is it is viscous and like, are they like basically plastics? They're not plastics. Those are viscous and rayon are interesting materials. My co-workers Sarah Zang wrote a really interesting article about what you know all these sort of bamboo based fabrics are and that's how they're marketed especially in baby clothing.
Oh right, right. They're basically cellulose that gets extracted from often bamboo but other types of plants sometimes as well. And then highly highly chemically treated in order to make it soft, employable and make it into thread that can be used in clothing. And the chemicals that are required to make bamboo into something soft and something that you want against your body are like really incredibly caustic and poisonous.
And that creates a lot of, you know, groundwater pollution. It's bad for the textile workers. It's bad for the garment workers. But it's very, very inexpensive to manufacture. And because bamboo is very easy to cultivate, you can make it in really large, large quantities. So it sort of might as well be plastic on in that way.
The other thing that I really noted from your article was the point that like even places that are selling like the Instagram high end sweater, you know, like the $300 sazen sweater. I was like, certainly those will be fully natural fibers. And I went to the website and looked at the most beautiful sweaters. And it's like, nope, not at all.
Nope, anybody who's manufacturing it a really, really high scale, no matter how expensive their products are, you're going to find these corners cut in their manufacturing. I used as a, as an example in the story, this Gucci sweater that I found on their website that is $3,200 I believe. And it was fully half polyester.
And like there, there are good, there are a few good arguments from like sort of a textile technology standpoint and putting like a little bit of polyester in a knit blends. Like if it's done well, it can make a product a little bit stronger in certain ways. It can, it can change sort of some of the physical properties of the yarn in ways that like in certain situations you might want.
But if you're looking at that large of a volume of polyester, it's not doing anything that you want it to do. It is just cutting the materials cost of that sweater. And there's no like financial reason that Gucci has to cut the materials costs of a sweater that costs $3,200. You could make that sweater out of the finest materials on earth.
You know, you could pay those garment workers really, really well. You can treat the animals that create the wool really, really well and still make a profit on that sweater. But consumers are have been trained not to look at these things like our knowledge about the way that garments are made and what goes into them has been purposefully sort of curtailed by the clothing industry, by the fashion industry.
And this started like at the very beginning of industrialized fashion garment factories are not glamorous places. They weren't when most of them were in the US and they certainly aren't now. But they're not that much of a global model that most of them are in poorer countries with work forces that can be subject to worse conditions. And an important part of the fantasy of selling clothing is sort of severing the consumer's knowledge of what it takes to create clothing.
So it is we have been trained by a global industry basically not to understand what it is we're buying because it's not in their best interest that we understand. Right. And even using a clever subterfusers, I guess I would call them likes to claim the fabric for baby clothes bamboo fabric.
Like, oh bamboo, it's like pandas soft. Like there's all these different advertising connotations. And I'm sure that there is incredible amounts of market testing into the different names that they come up with for these various synthetic fabrics in order to make them sound like just another thing that you should pay more money to put on your body.
Right. They're absolutely is. And there's been also a move to shift fabric composition from the tags that are in like the back collar of your shirt to the tags that are like down closer to the hem. Yes, that you cut off anyway because they bug you. Yes, because there's there's 400 pages of information down there. And it's in a bunch of different languages. And because the same shirt that you're that you're buying is sold like all around the world.
It is not a specialized product. It is not a product that its makers want to have any discernible history or any discernible context except for the marketing context. All right. So one of the questions we got is from Megan. And she says that she recently went to Zara because she needed something last minute. And like we've been talking about she was shocked at how much the quality had declined since she last shop there.
And she wants to know, is there anything consumers can do to actually drive change in this area? That's a tough question because the thing that's going to fix the fashion industry is regulation. It's not consumer behavior. But I think that like consumer behavior is also the thing that sort of makes people realize that regulation is possible.
And that there's an interest in the electorate for this type of regulation. So I think that like consumer behavior is not something that like directly affects change. But I think that it has to change if we want a better world.
If we want things that serve our needs better. And I think that like that is possible. So what I would say is that like the best thing you can do when the simplest thing you can do is stop buying that stuff if you can avoid it or just like try to reframe your approach to clothing away from the one that you've been sort of socialized into by these brands.
Because like everything about the fashion industry is sort of made up. And like I love clothing. I love dressing up. I love the aesthetic possibilities of it all. But it's important to draw distinction between that and the constant treadmill of consumption that clothing companies have convinced us we need to be on in order to achieve the sort of like personal expression and enjoyment of our of our day to day wardrobes and of getting dressed and of being out there.
And that's not the way we're going to be in the world. And we're going to be able to get a lot of things out in the world and presenting ourselves to other humans. I think that those things often get conflated, but they're not the same. One of the best things that you can do for yourself is to develop taste.
And to believe in your personal taste to understand what it is that you feel good in and what you like wearing and understand that especially as you get into your 30s and 40s and beyond the need to adhere to trends to adhere to changes in expectation is just something that you can opt out of in large part.
Yeah, there is a certain amount of it that you can't opt out of because clothing is a social language. And it's how we communicate that we understand, you know, the expectations of us in the workplace in social situations and romantic situations. But I think that there's a way that you can sort of roll with that and still keep your personal taste in your personal point of view intact.
And the goal of trend marketing is to draw you further and further away from your personal understanding of how it is that you like to look and how it is that you feel comfortable looking in public. And the more that you can do to get back to that to sort of understand how your own personal relationship with clothing is something that you can do to resist this sort of constant bid for your attention for these companies and for your dollars to beyond that.
I think that when you do need or want something new changing your consumption patterns is possible for a lot of people. One of the things when I was writing my story about sweaters that basically everyone told me that I interviewed for that story is that when they want a new sweater when there's like a gap that they would like to fill in their wardrobe, they shop secondhand, they look on eBay, they look on poshmark, they look in local thrift stores.
Because you're going to find older brands that are better made that are made out of nicer materials that are more likely to be 100% natural fiber. And like sweater styles don't change that much over the years like if you find a good maybe a little bit of a poofy shoulder and then the poofy shoulder goes away. Right. That's like the extent. Right. And like and there can be also I think some aesthetic pleasure in being a little bit out of fashion in that way.
Like people respect that I think more than more than we expect them to. I also think the other thing that people can do is participate in resale a little bit more. And whether that's on a site like poshmark or consignment or which for a lot of people is frustrating, certainly frustrated for me like every time I've ever gone to a What's the name of the store that's like for cool kids that like you bring your clothes and they don't take anything. Buffalo exchange. Yeah, Buffalo exchange.
And but where I've found success and I think that people would find success even if they don't have a larger Instagram following is just by putting stuff online and also only like putting it in an Instagram story and being like in pricing it pretty low. And only selling stuff that like I would be proud to give to a friend. And that allows me to be like this isn't going to the garbage. It's not going to good well where it might also go into the garbage.
There's going to be a new home for it and like I didn't necessarily quote unquote recoup my investment. But it has a home like it's getting a second life. It's getting a longer life. And also having that in mind to when I buy stuff like is this something that I would feel comfortable selling to a friend or selling to someone who follows me on social media. Then okay, that's okay. Also like Facebook buy nothing groups can be great.
Yes, there's a real opportunity to you know take some pictures list some stuff in there and like people don't necessarily they don't pay you for it. But it goes to somebody who like looked at it and decided they actually wanted it instead of into a landfill or something like that. And the friend I have who I consider like the best dressed is someone who as long as I have known her she has bought and sold all over clothes on eBay.
Like I don't know if I've ever known her to have something brand new even. She is someone who just has like incredible personal taste like has decided decided long ago what it was she likes and like does not really waver when it comes to trends or what she's supposed to be doing. And like she's a woman in her in her 30s who lives in Brooklyn just like I am she lives in sort of like the trend capital of the world.
But she saves a lot of money and she always looks incredible and she always looks like herself. And she was doing the resell thing before the zoomers thought it was cool when she gets sick of something or decides that she doesn't have any use for it anymore she ebays it. A lot of being like sort of well dressed and being perceived as well dressed as just having the courage of your convictions when it comes to getting dressed. And like that's that's hard like people people.
Yeah all kinds of different ways about their bodies they feel all kinds of different ways about like the cost of getting dressed and how to use their money and like how will be perceived at work. But the people who ultimately are thought of by everyone as being sort of like incredibly stylish are the people who are not as concerned with trends. And I am here to tell you today that you do not have to really care about trends that is that is a young woman's game.
First of all, none of us are in high school anymore and trying to sort of and like when you're young you're sort of figuring out what it is that you feel good in that's like one reason that it makes a lot of sense to sort of jump around trends because you're trying to figure out who you are. But at this point in life I feel like try to be comfortable in who you've learned yourself to be so far and try to dress that person and not the person that that Zara wants her to be.
Okay our next question is from Chris who did not know that you were going to be the guest on this episode but he linked to your sweater piece and he asked this. So now that we know sweaters are mostly garbage. How do we go about buying okay sweaters? I wear men's tall sizes which makes finding sweaters even harder. Do you have any advice for me? Okay I think I know what you're going to answer here but I want to hear your tip.
Well what we already discussed about looking at eBay looking at consignment stores stuff like that is all like great advice but if you need something new and if you are a size that was not commonly made in the 80s or the 90s or before like that might be the case it's the case for me I'm plus size. What you probably want to do is find like smaller labels smaller stores and sort of rely on them.
Yeah. The United States is still full of sort of like interesting knowledgeable small retailers. They're harder to find than they used to be. In my sweater story I mentioned Oconnells in Buffalo which is a you know a long standing long time menswear store in Buffalo that has a sort of rickety web presence in a charming way. And people that like run in work at stores like that are excited to help out people who have questions and who need guidance.
I have no problem believing that you could call Oconnells and be like I need a I'm a men's tall. What do you carry in a men's tall if you don't carry it where do you think I could find it and I have no doubt believing that they'd be excited to help you out or tell you where they think that you can get more options. And wool sweaters don't have to be like fantastically expensive. A lot of the ones that Oconnells carries cost less than $200.
And like $200 is a lot of money but a lot of retailers jcrew gap et cetera that are sort of like mid price mall retailers are going to get you up around $100 for a sweater anyway. And a lot of times it's going to have plastic in it.
So if you can sort of and this is the point at which becoming a little bit more discerning in like how often you're shopping and what it is you're buying can be useful because buying like one really gorgeous marino wool sweater instead of like three or four like random things from jcrew or from whatever it is that you might be inclined to shop is going to be like in your long term best interest.
My partner Charlie who's also your coworker his solution has been to find a maker of like Irish sweaters you know like the Irish fishermen sweaters they look like that like that Billy crystal sweater. And they're bulky like they're not and felt that it's not the word. But they are amazing sweaters and so like every two years he gets one and they're there what makes him feel like him in the winter.
So it's like the perfect solution when you're looking at any any kind of garment. I think a good rule of thumb is to look for garments made in places that people need those types of garments.
Scotland and Ireland and New Zealand produce a lot of incredible wool they have a lot of sheep and they have the climates where people need garments like the ones they're creating so there are still like you know sort of like old style heritage makers in those countries that are making sort of like the old style garments that you're not going to find in your average online retailer.
But they're out there and they're available and this is again one of those situations where like these sort of like small companies that care about the product and care about ensuring that the product can continue to be made for a long time that people understand why it's different are oftentimes quite willing to help you out if you need something if you need advice if you're looking for something in particular.
So our next question gosh I just love we have so many dude questions about fashion. This is from someone just thinking about care of clothing and his name is Ted so let's go for it. Why do so few of us seem to iron our clothes or have them professionally cleaned or laundered. Is it a time issue a money issue or some sort of deliberate statement.
Gosh I was ironing on a ghost busters logo onto my ghost busters costume earlier this like last month and I realized that was the first time that I had used the iron in like nine months. And I think about this all the time right like I love my clothes when they're ironed I hate ironing the apparatus for ironing are so cumbersome.
But also I live on an island there's no such things dry cleaning and even when I lived in New York and dry cleaning was all over the place like I would pay to have my clothes laundered but I wouldn't pay for them to get dry clean. What are your thoughts on why is it just like the spread of stuff that's more ready to wear that doesn't need it but all that linenship needs it. I don't know yeah where do we go here.
I think that part of it like this is a question that spans like several generations of history I think because I think a lot of it goes back to women getting jobs. This is like this sort of like laundering and ironing and mending and tailoring like these like little care tasks domestic care tasks that go along with maintaining your clothing are things that women did for a really long time.
And if you go back further like making clothing spinning yarn making textiles and then making clothing out of them was all like that was women's work long before industrialization. And it is it is like real work it is it takes elbow grease you're standing up you're doing physically skilled labor ironing things is not easy you have to it takes skill it takes experience.
And it takes the tools and space necessary to do it. And I think that as women went into the workplace a lot of those skills were not passed down to daughters. I think for reasons that are both like sort of practical and that are emotional because like a lot of our mothers did not want us saddled with that work. My mom didn't teach me how to cook because she hated cooking and she didn't want me stuck in a situation where I had to cook for everybody just because I had been taught.
That's so interesting because you know when I think about it I learned to iron. I think I was mostly bored. And my mom had been like sending out my dad's shirts to get pressed. And she said I'll pay you a quarter for each if you press each of these shirts. It's so little money but you know when you're a kid you're like yeah I'm super bored anyway. And I'll learn how to do this thing. But I think that that speaks to one she never did it herself or like refused to do it herself.
And two that there's like I think a lot of families have to do this sort of analysis of like well. If the shirt has to be pressed like if men are going to be wearing these shirts that need to be pressed who is going to do it. Are we going to send it out? Is someone in the family going to make time in their lives to make it happen? And I also think there's this shift in menswear that like there are fewer things that need to be pressed just generally.
That that also opens up all this space. So if you don't have a whole bunch of things to take to get pressed to get dry cleaned then it disincentivizes taking that one thing. Right. The history of clothing in modern times is a history of casualization where we are less and less put together quote unquote in ways that require this sort of precision that ironing and dry cleaning give us. And then also with that and with the sort of shift in women's labor from unpaid to paid.
You get materials technology that sort of fills in those gaps and you can see this happening in other areas of domestic work as well with like dishwasher's and washing machines themselves and things like that where the sort of changing lives of women are sort of met by technology.
There's also this like the materials technology has changed brands are always looking for an opening to market a new product and to develop something that might like be marketable to a particular need that they've sensed. So materials technology has advanced in a way that like wrinkle free stuff is more common.
A lot of this is because plastic is added to clothing in some way. So a lot of things that would have been not washable at home in the past or that would have needed hand washing can now be thrown in the washing machine. A lot of things that would have required ironing before now as long as you drive them with heat. They are much less wrinkled. So you get just like a lot less need to do these like particular skills that you like might not have been developing anyway.
I have this this romper that absolutely needs to be like deeply steamed and pressed. It is sat at the bottom of my hamper just like you know I dump it out and then I put it back into the bottom and then I do my laundry and I put it like it just I'm not kidding you 18 months. Oh I have a romper it's very cute.
You know I have stuff like that too and I live down the street from a from a dry cleaner I live in Brooklyn like there's places to get your dry cleaning done all over the place but it's just not like a part of my routine. And it feels like a special task and like I have lots of other tasks I need to do so it's one of those things where it's like it's far enough outside the realm of normalcy because the composition of people's wardrobes have changed.
The value of any particular piece of clothing has gone down so much so there's there's not as much people own more pieces of clothing than they ever have before. What is the real motivator in taking this thing to get dry cleaned and paying $10 for it to be dry cleaned if it only costs $30 to begin with and like you've got all this other stuff in your closet.
The last thing I'll say is that I live in a house that was built in 1904 and it has tiny closets and like a lot of people who live in older houses they bitch about the closets constantly. When really what it is is a reflection of the fact that like that closet was a big closet when the people lived here before right like they were like this is ample space for two people's clothing.
Now I have to like lug the fall clothes up from downstairs and that to me is just a testament more than any other of how like as you said like the real wage comparison with how much clothes costs like how that's changed how our understanding of like how many types of clothing that we need has changed all of that sort of thing. Okay, so here is a great segue to our next question which I don't necessarily agree with but it's going to be a good like wait it for us to have a conversation.
So one of the prompts that I gave to readers when we were coming up with questions with was just this very open ended wire clothes the way that they are. And we've gotten into the substance and the fabrication of clothes so I think we should talk a little bit about style. This question is from Sarah. I love the recent push to make more clothes comfortable and younger generations embrace slash insistence on it.
But why have we gone so far from clothing that's flattering why wear leggings that show every role and cellulite temple why wear colors that make your skin look bad. Why are glasses so big.
So I think this concept of flattering is something that people have begun the work of unpacking but it's almost like diet culture in that it takes a long time to move away from even that idea of like flattering is a static thing right like that there is such thing is like this is a flattering silhouette and this isn't like when I talk to Heather red key a couple of weeks ago about her book about butts like she did this whole section about bustles.
And how you just put like a huge second but on your butt and that was considered incredibly flattering. So how do you think about this question and just the general idea about flattering and also I think there's a lot of millennial stuff going on in this question too. Yeah, I think there is.
Like the first thing I would say is that when it comes to looking at other people and deciding if what they're wearing is flattering or appropriate or whatever like you've got to kill the cop in your head stop it like just stop it knock it off. It's like the grandma in your head too right. Yeah, you've got to you've got to kill that voice in your head that goes it is inappropriate if I am presented with information about somebody's body that I don't necessarily find enjoyable.
Because like when you're when you're looking at someone who's like you know wearing a tank top wearing a short skirt something like that and you can see the bones and their shoulders or their collar bones sticking out or something like that that is just as much like visceral information about their bodies as being able to see someone cellulite or being able to see like a fat roll or whatever.
But like one of those is good and nice and like the other one is somehow inappropriate like those are just two bodies those are just bodies with different shapes and different parts and different compositions and one of them is not inherently superior or more valuable to view than the other one. And I think flattering is like a fake concept in so far as it it is like a negotiated collective understanding of like what we expect out of people's bodies.
So in order for something to be flattering you have to know what standard you're holding it against. And the standard often is that you know someone should have a small waist and medium sized hips and a medium sized bust and be tall and not be too muscular but also not be too fat. And that flattering things are things that mold your body or negate your body in some way toward this shared ideal.
And I think that when you look at something and go that's flattering that's I'm flattering why is this person you know not more ashamed of their cellulite why aren't they covering it up. I think that you are assuming that everybody has the same understanding of what they should be trying to accomplish with their clothes that you do and I think that that's not true and I think that faster we understand that that's not true the better.
Because like I think it's just really, really limiting I feel for people who look at clothing and look at other people and think this way because I think it suggests a lot of sort of internalized shame about like what they're allowed to wear and what they are comfortable showing to other people and what they are comfortable doing with their clothing.
But like clothing is is an imaginative thing clothing is something that gives you a lot of power to tell the world about yourself or not tell the world about yourself in like whatever ways you choose. And it's it's a way to demonstrate your feelings about our understanding of a particular situation you're in which like you know comes up a lot when you're getting dressed for a wedding or is a guest or as a ride or whatever.
Like this is this is a really powerful language that we have and I feel for people who feel like they are not allowed to like speak fully with it or through it. Yeah, because that's a really limiting thing and that's a really hard way to look at your own body and it's a hard way to look at other people's bodies and look at other people's self expression. Also what people are reacting to in this is that like looking at something that is different than what you're used to seeing is challenging.
And when I see garments that are not on a body that are just like laid flat in like a stock photo or whatever when it's something that I am not expecting to see in something that I have not seen in the wild or like a new idea like I find myself going I don't know about that. That's a little bit much that's I don't know if that would look good. I don't know like who that looks good on.
I think that that is a really natural process for people when confronted with new aesthetic ideas and but it's also like a real opportunity like whenever I find myself reacting to something that way. I'm always like okay, like what what is bothering me about this what is totally what is different about this what is rubbing me in that reaction.
It's kind of like I used to tell my students when I was teaching film history like when you're watching something that's avant garde you can't think about watching it the same way that you would watch a blockbuster. Like the most interesting part of watching this film is watching your own reaction to it. Right. It's a real opportunity for introspection and for me that's been part of like killing the cop in my head has been doing that like you said.
And then also I've just followed a lot of people on Instagram who are doing interesting things with fashion is almost like a normalization process. Right. It's seen all sorts of people who feel really at home in their bodies and in the fashion that they're choosing is like a different way of understanding even what that word flattering could be like what a flattering was wearing clothes that make you feel like you.
Something that has always struck me is interesting and that I don't think that people totally understand but that I learned while working in fashion is that people who work in fashion and who care deeply about clothing and who are really interested in trying new things and who are really stylish and who are like the person in the room where you go like I wonder where she got that or like I wish I could wear that.
Like those are the people in life who are the least judgmental of other people's fashion choices and there's pleasure and dissonance to you know part of this question is like why would you wear colors that quote don't look good on you or glasses that are so big if you think of fashion is more of an experimentation and unless of how do I look like other people then it becomes clear like there's something really fun about doing something that doesn't work right and I think that something that.
Gen Z has sort of seemed to embrace that older people people of other generations could could stand to take an interest in is the sort of embrace of these like sort of disparate slew of like aesthetics of like cottage core or dark academia or like whatever like all these entire different ways of like allowing yourself to be a little bit cost to me and be a little bit campy and be a little bit silly with clothing.
I think is really good and healthy and fun I wear glasses in my favorite glasses for a long time have been like aviator glasses and I think of them as like Jeffrey Dahmer glasses or Ted Bundy glasses there was once 70 serial color that wore the the aviator glasses that you look like.
You look like some sort of sex criminal in them know it's fun to look like a sex criminal but also you look like my fifth grade teacher Mr. Bearlocker had those glasses and they have very they have very positive associations. Yeah, I like it.
Yeah, it's something things that are like purposely a little bit ugly are like some of the most interesting aesthetic propositions in life I think because they are what people emotionally respond to they are they are what sort of challenge you to open your mind.
If I were the Jeffrey Dahmer glasses and I still hot I think I'm still hot so like what does everybody else think about this just challenging the world to like to like understand me as a person who is like both attractive and a young woman and who wears the Jeffrey Dahmer glasses. Yeah, that's how I think about Paul mescal's like kind of rat tail situation that he's got going on right now he's like what if I did this and I still am I still incredibly hot the answer is yes.
Right, I think that there's a lot of fun to have there and I think that whether or not you want to participate in that fun like is totally up to you like you don't have to you can wear whatever it is you feel comfortable in. But I would say that try to give grace to people who are having fun with things and who are not taking things serious in the same way that you are.
Because like that it's just like life is more fun that way and give yourself some grace to right like I think giving other people grace allows you slowly to give yourself grace as well so yeah I think that that's absolutely true and like on a like a material perspective if you want to know why like stretch things are more common why.
Leggings are more common they're easier to manufacture and easier to size like a lot of the material reality of our clothing goes back to fast fashion and how do you make things that are inexpensive it can be sold in large quantities and like adding stretch to stuff is like the fastest way to do that.
So if you are a paid subscriber stick around because Amanda and I are going to do advice time we're answering a question about how to shop when everything sucks Amanda this has been such a delight where can people find more of you if they want to find more of you on the internet.
Well I am a staff writer at the Atlantic that's everything I publish goes there I still put my story updates on Twitter at Amanda mall and I'm also on blue sky under my full name so I have an Instagram account but it's private I have something for myself.
If you're actually Amanda's friend if you get to see lots of football updates but sorry guys it's just for me if you want the same amount of information about Georgia football that I put on my Instagram you can just follow Georgia football at Georgia football on Instagram and you will get basically the same information that I that I disseminate that way.
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