I'll be your internet
There’s a billboard near the Manhattan Bridge Arch that shows a very square handbag edged with Gucci-esque bamboo and the tagline, BARNEY’S SAID OUR BRAND HAD “NO DIRECTION” and reading it made me cringe because Barneys is not spelled with an apostrophe. And then on closer inspection, it made me cringe because at least in this image, there is nothing obviously disproving Barneys’s point. The implied narrative, I guess, is that the fittest brand (between a century-old department store and a five-year old bag line that went viral last year for a tote printed with the words “End Systemic Racism”) survived. Still, the ad lacks the frisson it was after. Besides the typo, the contradiction it presents isn’t adequately illustrated because a square is the most directionless of all shapes.
For her wedding, my friend designed lighters that say the names of the couple and the word “forever,” which is maybe a clever way of saying, whatever forever means. Lighters do take forever to empty, but not literally. And then, nothing is literally forever, least of all the classic wedding favors: bubbles, rice, bouquets and tea candles from table settings, etched champagne flutes. Another friend, a fashion designer, had T-shirts made for her wedding party, which is pretty common, but these were so cool, all the guests wanted one, too, and so they became limited edition designer objects that people had to closely guard on the beach the next day. It made me think about how personalized T-shirts are as forever as it gets, really, especially since they’re even better when they’re all faded and thin.
I mentioned working with Rosetta Getty earlier this year, and just in time for the holidays, the collection (Resort 2021) is now available. For the project, I wrote a short story, which informed the look book shoot and in some cases, the clothing itself. A few T-shirts, pants, tunics, and scarves even have lines from the short story printed on them, in my handwriting: I’ll be your internet, My whole life was living up to this moment, Would be lost without New York. I like the idea of people wearing these floating phrases that could easily be mistaken for bad translations from sentimental stationary or souvenirs, but that mean something to me, since they were said by my characters.
This isn’t me pushing merch—I don’t get a commission for sales—but it is, I suppose, self-promotion. I very much like to see my words in the wild, I admit. There’s spotting my books in store windows and there’s ad copy I (collaboratively) write for billboards and screens, and then there’s this middle ground, a distinct type of thrill that I imagine veers towards what celebs feel when they see someone eating a fast food order named for them. Meaning it feels good, but also uncanny, as part of the world in which we live and meta-live. I wonder how Simone de Beauvoir would feel seeing her headline, “femininity, the trap,” on a Christian Dior T-shirt styled under a corset in its Pre-Fall 2022 look book (debuted this week), or how Roland Barthes would like the Hermès scarf that used the text layouts (but not the text) from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments as a graphic design in 2015. I wonder if all the French theorists would be asked to work as brand consultants, were they alive today. I wonder if they would do it, and at what price.
Rosetta Getty has worked multiple times with Bernadette Van-Huy as an art director and consultant. Van-Huy is a founding member of Bernadette Corporation, who are personal heroes of mine, not only for their novel and films but for their fashion show and editorial renditions, which perfectly capture, in parody, the allure of such projects, generally. I think I’ve brought it up here before that Van-Huy lately always wears the same Planet Fitness T-shirt in photo shoots, which is the most anti-fashion thing I can think of and therefore hyper fashionable, its meaning only traceable to an anti-fashionista eye. Where on the fashion approval matrix is a T-shirt with a line written by me on it (specifically, if I am wearing one myself)? I’m certainly too inside the process this time to know.