Late August, Object by Object
The Samsung versus Apple lawsuit was grinding through the courts that summer with the intensity of a theological dispute, and the tech press had fully committed to treating it as one. Who owned the rectangle. Whether rounded corners could be patented. Steve Jobs, barely a year dead, functioning as either prophet or villain depending on which blog you opened. The Galaxy Note II landed in the middle of all this—too large for a phone, too small for a tablet, running Android 4.1 with enough horsepower to actually feel like it was designed for people who use their devices rather than just carry them. Liking it felt like a minor political statement, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a consumer electronics purchase, but there it was.
On the fashion side, TAKAHIROMIYASHITA TheSoloist had a fall/winter collection doing what Japanese designers do better than almost anyone: taking the materials of the working world—nylon, leather, goose down—and rearranging them until they looked both functional and slightly unhinged. Browns, oranges, beige. The color palette of a dying forest, which shouldn’t work as a fashion proposition and somehow always does. There was a period in early-2010s Japanese menswear where the clothes seemed to arrive from a parallel timeline where workwear had evolved toward poetry instead of efficiency, and TheSoloist was deep in that tradition.
Sony was taking a run at the action camera market with hardware that was genuinely competitive on paper—Carl Zeiss lens, 1080p, real image processing—at a price point designed to make GoPro nervous. The more interesting question wasn’t which specs won but what the whole category was for. The premise of the action cam was: document the physical things, the jumps and descents and speeds. But that impulse was already doing something strange to experience itself. People were beginning to do things partly in order to film them, and then watching the footage to confirm that the experience had occurred. The camera as a form of proof.
Nixon’s The Player XL in gunmetal was the kind of watch that makes a specific claim about who you are: 48mm case, Swiss movement, heavy enough that you know it’s there. Watches were going through a quietly interesting moment that year. The smartphone had made them functionally useless for their original purpose, which paradoxically freed them to become purely intentional objects. You wore one because you chose to, not because you needed to know the time. The meaning had migrated entirely into the gesture.
And then dertbag, leaning hard into the tail end of summer with graphic tees bearing slogans like "NAHFUKIT"—the kind of shirts that commit entirely to being exactly what they are. No subtext, no brand mythology, no aspirational lifestyle scaffolding. Just the honest suggestion that you’re not taking any of this too seriously, which in late August, with autumn making its first moves, is probably the correct position to hold.