How to Spend Money You Shouldn’t Have
The money isn’t doing anything sitting in an account. Whatever you think you’re saving it for, you probably aren’t. So here’s what was worth buying in September 2012, assembled without apology.
Nokia’s Lumia 920 arrived as a direct rebuke to Apple’s design philosophy—and specifically to iOS’s long obsession with making digital interfaces resemble physical objects, all fake leather and stitched seams and skeuomorphic nonsense. Windows Phone 8 went the other way: flat colored tiles, high contrast, nothing pretending to be something it wasn’t. The Lumia itself came in saturated colors in a market full of black and silver rectangles. If you wanted to look like you’d made a conscious choice rather than just defaulted to the obvious thing, this was the phone for it.
For the Air Force 1’s 30th anniversary, Nike partnered with Dover Street Market on a collaboration honoring the 1948 London Olympics—the first Games held after World War II. All white, clean construction, waterproofed. The kind of shoe that doesn’t need to announce itself. Available at Dover Street Market and select Comme des Garçons stores, if you got there in time. Most people didn’t.
British GQ named Lana Del Rey its Woman of the Year, which is either a serious statement about contemporary pop or proof that the magazine needed something to put on its cover and Del Rey was willing to take her clothes off for it. She did, completely, and the issue sold. The choice is defensible in a narrow way—she was the defining female pop figure of 2012, whatever you think of the persona—but framing it as "woman of the year" when the selection criteria appear to be "most willing to go nude" is the kind of logic GQ has been running on for decades. None of this stopped me from wanting to look at the pictures.
A Bathing Ape collaborated with Street Fighter II on a capsule collection of T-shirts, and they were exactly as good as that sentence sounds. If you spent any portion of your childhood memorizing Hadouken inputs, you understand the logic. BAPE knows what it’s doing with nostalgia—it doesn’t apologize for it or dress it up in irony. The shirts were cute and they knew it.
Photographer Alex Da Corte shot the latest Urban Outfitters catalog with The Selby, and the result was the usual beautiful-people-in-beautiful-apartments aesthetic the brand has been running since before it became a punchline. The catalog itself was genuinely well-made—Da Corte’s eye for color and staging pushed it past standard retail photography into something that read more like a photobook. It won’t change your life. But it might make your apartment look better, which is close enough.