Ten Objects, No Apologies
My approach to getting dressed is deliberately boring: UNIQLO sweaters, DIESEL jeans, adidas Originals on my feet. Decision fatigue eliminated, mornings recovered. The shoe is always a Superstar—has been for years, probably will be forever. For the version of me with an extra €200 and no sense of proportion, the adidas Consortium Superstar "Made in France" exists: a limited edition available through select Consortium retailers, hand-finished in France, for the collector who finds the standard run insufficiently precious. I want it. I shouldn’t want it. That gap has never once stopped me.
On the more defensible end of wanting: a vinyl sticker set of classic game controllers—Super Nintendo, N64, GameCube—illustrated by Jasmine Prasad. Pure nostalgia made portable, available for sticking on laptops or walls or whatever surface needs to announce that you have feelings about the GameCube controller, which was close to perfect and deserved better than the console’s market performance.
Hiroshi Fujiwara’s fragment design collaboration with Beats by Dre is probably the only version of those headphones I’d wear in public without a prepared explanation. Beats have always sounded to me like sitting inside a bass bin—relentless low end, zero nuance, engineered for impact over fidelity. Fujiwara’s aesthetic is clean enough that it almost neutralizes the embarrassment factor. Almost.
The Mercedes-Benz SL 63 AMG World Championship 2014 Collector’s Edition is for the person who spent thirty-six years refusing every unnecessary purchase and is now prepared to spend all of it at once, on a car named after a Formula 1 season. Dedicated to Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Costs more than most people’s annual salary. Wears that fact with complete indifference.
PlayStation turned twenty, which means I’m old enough to have genuinely formative feelings about Final Fantasy VIII and Gran Turismo and Grandia—games I played in a bedroom that doesn’t exist anymore, on a console that weighed more than my current laptop. The PlayStation 4 20th Anniversary Edition, dressed in the original grey of the PS1, cost €499 and sold out before most people knew it existed. Good news from Sony for once, between the data breaches.
The Ferrari FXX K is what happens when engineering ambition and unlimited budget stop apologizing for themselves. The most extreme road-adjacent car Ferrari has ever made. Some objects exist purely to prove something is possible—this is one of them. Looking at it too long feels slightly irresponsible, which is probably the point.
Issue six of WASD arrived—the German print magazine for people who take games seriously as a cultural form rather than a consumption habit. Printed on paper, €15. I still carry a quiet grief for TOTAL!, the Nintendo magazine of my childhood, which had a warmth that gaming press lost somewhere around the turn of the millennium. WASD is the closest thing that currently exists.
The adidas Originals Forum Mid "Triple White" is exactly what it says: the Forum, in all white, no distractions. The Air Force 1 alternative from Herzogenaurach. For the person who treats clean footwear as a moral position rather than a style choice.
Monopoly: The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition, available from Forbidden Planet for around €35. I love Monopoly in the way you love something that reliably makes you miserable—it takes forever, I always lose, I spend the final hour furious at everyone present for daring to land on my streets when I’m broke. I play it anyway. Risk is the better game objectively, but it doesn’t come in a Zelda edition, so it forfeits by default.
And then there’s the Harley-Davidson Dyna Guerilla, customized by Rough Crafts. I sometimes wonder what version of my life exists further down some other road—no fixed address, just engine noise and distance, everyone I know receding in the mirror. The Dyna Guerilla is what that fantasy looks like when the aesthetics are fully resolved. It doesn’t look like transportation. It looks like a decision you can’t take back, which is probably the whole appeal.