Collection of One: the Party Shirt
Ode on a Grecian (b)Urn
Content warning. The first half of this one was written on my phone in the backseat of an Uber (while on LSD). My second self and (barely better) editor came in and cleaned it up on a following weekday and added the second part and some pictures. In part I, those edits are indicated for transparency’s sake with [bracketed italics]. If this sounds like all the fun and excitement of reading someone’s dream journal, that’s understandable and see you down in part II (or next week).
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I. House. Party. [alternate suggested title: The Sweaty Premise]
“I want to stay on that magic mountain,
with lost souls and beautiful women…”
-So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain, Father John Misty
[There’s nothing better than an invite from out of the blue.] A good friend, who is a Newport Beach bon vivant and party machine making his 40s look like something wondrous, reached out earlier to let me know there was a house party happening somewhere in Los Angeles. He’s restored my faith that I haven’t missed the window for Ibiza or something like yacht week in Croatia (autocorrect changed “yacht week” here to “tacky”—that’s fine with me, Tim Apple). [As I learned while I was at the party, he’s actually doing exactly that (going to Yacht Week in Croatia with his DJ collective of friends) at the start of summer.]
This house party is in the valley, just off Ventura Blvd. I end up driving past the place I used to work right after passing the bar—the closed restaurants reminding me all the time of so many lonely walks to the handful of lunch places I hated. [I look forward to outliving California Chicken Cafe.]
Ventura Boulevard might be the storied one of broken dreams. Maybe [definitely] that’s just Westside snobbery talking.
[It’s a spacious and well decorated modern home, and when you sit at the firepit outside the reflection of the flames in the giant windows makes it look like the turntable/DJ booth inside the house are on fire. It’s a nice piece of alignment]. The music being played is tech house, also some techno. [I prefer my dance music with lyrics, but any port in a storm.]
My Apple Watch [(which I try not to wear to stuff like this)] hits me with the ultimate roast after dancing for a few hours. Would you like to record this “indoor walk” work out that you’re doing? [I thought I was living for the moment, but it turns out I was just walking indoors.]
I forgot what it’s like to talk to people on bad or different drugs than you are on. I end up having a few people talking to me from way too close up while they do bumps of cocaine. [God, I hope people test this stuff, I thought this was on its way out.] I met someone who used to do visual merchandising for Brunello Cucinelli and learned the secrets to laundering cashmere at home. I’ll have to ask Davide Baroncini about all this when I meet him.
There are beautiful people and things in the world. As I jot down these words on my iPhone on the way home, autocorrect has changed “beautiful” to “botfly” and “way home” to “sunshine.” Things aren’t perfect, until they are.
Footnote: someone pay me the advance they gave Rick Rubin [for The Creative Act], I too can do zen koans.
The last song played was Estelle’s “American Boy” (Kanye verses omitted) and I’m reminded of the summer I met my wife, when this song was ringing out from every pub and club in London. [In the sober light of day, this was a very strange choice from this group of DJs given their usual preferred genres. It’s possible they felt some pressure to skew more popular at the end. In my altered state, that explanation felt much less plausible than something like ‘the universe is talking to me’]. My party shirt was made by [UK-based designer/brand] Paul Smith, incidentally the dancing shoes are too. A pair of white trainers [with a fanciful perforated medallion detail on the toe, in a nod to proper dress shoes], just like the ones I wore when danced and drank my way into an enduring romance. [Nearly 16 years later, I’d say the knack is to not then dance and drink your way out of it once you’re in it].
May we always remain crazy.
It’s restorative to go out and meet strangers. I just hope we all make it.
And somewhere on my street, the jasmine is blooming in the early morning.
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II. The Souvenir Shirt
How might one choose the right print/patterned shirt for an electronic music outing? To get more specific, what is a good shirt for listening to House music at night? With two small children at home (and with America’s obstinate refusal to offer disco nannies), I currently have one foot out of that world. Even so, I bought a shirt last year that I could wear to every. single. show. This doesn’t count daytime, poolside or cabana stuff of course—that’s a separate genre entirely. This is about night time. Or as George Benson said, “Give Me the Night.”
So you’re going out to listen to House music. Where you’re going, some people are going to be dressed like Bond henchman (the all black crowd) and then others will be dressed like they sprang to life from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (the fuzzy onesie and spirit hoodie crowd). Then there’s the people from the future (astronaut chic) and the past (no disco/70s detail would be out of place). Where should you align yourself within this great mixing of styles and tribes? I split the difference and just wear a shirt the DJ would be fine to wear. It needs to have color and pattern for a touch of fun, but it also needs to be breathable, and (critically in my view) executed in a sober color scheme. The crazier the pattern, the more grounded the colors should be. You don’t want people looking at the rave shirt equivalent of The Yellow Wallpaper and you definitely don’t want look like you got taken for a ride at Dan Flashes. While you also don’t want to be too aloha, something that came off the walls of either season of The White Lotus is perfectly fine. As someone who has put in considerable time in the field on this matter, I recommend you split the difference between the minimalists and the maximalists with a shirt like this:
Importantly, this shirt makes me laugh. The idea that I wear it to places where I am supposed to look cool is even funnier. It reminds me of the shirts that are purchased and proudly worn at Jazzfest. It’s sufficiently psychedelic when you’re in the venue, but not so dance-music-culture specific that you feel any self-doubt on your way to the show or getting that hotdog afterward. It’s a linen cotton blend, so it’s breathable. The specific pattern is also vaguely (insultingly?) European in a way I find funny. Paul Smith is based out of the UK, so what is his design team doing with all these broken up Italian phrases and silhouetted ruins? When I set out to find a shirt like this, his line was one of the first places I checked, as he tends to do irreverence/subversion well. It’s such a riot of visual nonsense I knew it was the one the instant I saw it.
The Italian phrase seems to be “lascia che la vita ti sorprenda” (“let life surprise you”). And on the back of the shirt, these strange polygonal men also show up doing some kind of jig/shuffle. Their Apple Watches are definitely recording their indoor walks.
As for the name of the shirt, souvenirs are “remembrances” in French. And this is where the shirt really shines. The details of a particular performance or venue might fade (if there’s any memory of them to begin with), but the shirt remains. The feeling that comes on when I pull it out of the closet is thrillingly pavlovian: it’s time to let life surprise you.
Internet Bycatch
Eternally rendering unto reader-Caesar what is reader-Caesar’s.
I have a love-hate with an object like this. A $6,000 leather laundry basket by Bottega Veneta. It costs what it does because of the materials and craftsmanship, but it's a kind of design choice I can’t understand. If you’re going to spend the time executing something like this, why are you making a laundry basket instead of a steamer trunk or piece of luggage? Maybe the point is that it’s art and you’re saying something about elevating the mundane (e.g., Tiffany’s ‘objets’). It just feels like it’s cynically made and marketed to those with narco-trafficking or oligarch money.
It’s Frieze week in LA. Make of that what you will.
New track from Flamingosis featuring Marc Rebillet. “Nobody feelin’ you, gotta’ feel yourself.” Kind of like an auditory Piña Colada. It would also be very at home on Will Powers’ 1983 album, Dancing for Mental Health.