Ferran Adrià could never be accused of being too straightforward. The celebrated Spanish chef made his name with dishes that were part science experiment, part conceptual art. Familiar dishes made utterly strange by a cocktail of tricksy humor and laboratory technique.
As Silviya Svejenova and colleagues put it, “Adrià’s artistry is in the contrasts (hot–cold, soft–crunchy, solid–liquid, sweet–savory), the concepts (e.g., foams), the techniques (e.g., spherification), and the creative methods (e.g., deconstruction).”
Deconstruction, in this case, means taking a dish and altering its physical properties (texture, appearance, temperature) until it becomes something utterly different. The aim is often to make food that looks alien until the moment you taste it, but then triggers a memory of something entirely familiar. Or you are presented with a total man-bites-dog inversion of the expected that somehow works. A vegetable course comes as a series of glossy gelatin blocks which reveal themselves to the tongue (but not to the eye) as distinct and familiar vegetables. “Kellogg’s paella,” a famous high-concept composition, involves saffron-fried puffed rice, served with a seafood broth to turn the Spanish dish into an imitation of American breakfast.*
The use of humor and disguise in cooking is far from new. Liber Cure Cocorum, a medieval English cookbook, gives instructions for lacquered pork meatballs disguised as apples. Epulario, or The Italian Banquet describes a pie containing live birds that fly out when the crust is broken. Adrià’s signature is the marriage of this playful attitude with serious interest in science and new ideas. He once called his work “stovetop philosophy”; the legendary restaurant el Bulli that he operated until 2011 “was a sort of gastronomic-philosophical media lab.” Inside, everything from memories to raspberries were broken down—deconstructed almost to the molecular level—and then reformed and remixed with cunning, wit, and a helpful chemist.
The heyday of deconstruction in philosophy wasn’t so different, despite the grandiose claims of its cultured despisers and self-appointed champions. It was about taking ideas out of their normal contexts, pulling and pushing them until they no longer fit in their original place and could be used in new ways. And like the cooking, it was accompanied by a love of humor, surprise, and scientific jargon.
When it comes to menswear, the term deconstruction can suggest a few different things. Sometimes it’s a synonym for unstructured: soft jackets, unfused shirt collars, and free-flowing dresses come to mind. But these strategies for casual ease have been around for generations. For the humor, irony, and inversion of culinary deconstruction you have to go from tailoring to streetwear and high fashion. Think ugly sneakers for beautiful people, ultra-rare but mass-produced box logo sweaters, and shockingly expensive clothes imitating commonplace uniforms (perhaps imagine a cobrand between a Parisian fashion house and a German logistics firm). To find comparable scientific prowess, on the other hand, nothing comes close to the specialist world of techwear.
The avant garde needs its workaday partners. Simple, nutritious food. Smart industrial design. Practical clothes. But these things in turn need people who push at their limits. What the ultimate limits are depends on your art. An architect must resist gravity. A chef is constrained by their imagination but also the health codes. (The true peak of avant garde cookery might be something delicious but fatal, a taste that must only be imagined, or else enjoyed but once.) For fashion, the immutable object is the human body, be it corseted or cosseted, built into a bold silhouette or lovingly draped. In that context, deconstruction is really just another word for dress up: playing with contexts, appearances and expectations in an effort to shock and delight.
* NB. not to be confused with this truly challenging recipe for chicken, rice and All-Bran® cereal.
It was a theory of social networking before social networks. In 1973, Mark Granovetter published an essay on “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Rejected four years earlier by one of the major sociology journals while Granovetter was still a grad student, it ultimately made his name.
Strong ties are connections to people close to you. Weak ties—no surprise—link to the opposite: friends of friends, people you see at the pub or the gym, perhaps some distant family. Granovetter’s idea was simple enough: weak ties matter more than we think.
At the heart of Granovetter’s work was good old-fashioned survey work. He asked a sample of people in Boston who had just found a new job who helped them the most. It wasn’t those closest to them, he found, but those on the periphery: the weak ties. Thinking emotionally, we might assume that strong ties are most important for finding a job, since those people care the most about your success. But from a structural viewpoint, weak ties have a clear advantage: precisely because they aren’t the people you typically spend time with, they’re likely to be less similar to you. And that means they move in other circles—and hear about opportunities you don’t.
The finding is sometimes summarised as one more iteration of “It’s not what you know but who you know.” This obnoxious saying misses the point. For one thing, nobody ever traded facts for friends. They’re correlated. But anyway, Granovetter’s point was that it’s not who you know, but who they know.
Aside from the practicalities of getting hired, “Weak Ties” tells a quietly optimistic story: people don’t need an especially strong reason to help each other out. And our communities of support may be far larger than we realise.
The seduction of “strong ties” runs deep, especially with men (who often spend rather more energy on people they are hoping to work or sleep with than on friendships). It’s comforting to think that social life boils down to a few people whose names you definitely remember, but the truth is more complicated and diffuse.
In the UK, people still talk about the old boy network, meaning the connections between alumni of elite fee-paying schools, and other powerful institutions, who look out for one another out of group loyalty. This brings us to the other kind of “strong ties”: neckwear. You’d have to be graceless to wear the tie of your old school, university or regiment to a job interview as a selling point these days, but the metaphor still holds.
Alumni garments aside, what about literal weak ties? That is, the ones you hardly ever wear, but which make up 90% of any collection. These, too, shouldn’t be ignored. The fantasy of “five essential ties” is not so different: get the key pieces and you can ignore the rest. (Let’s say a navy grenadine, a repp stripe, two neats and a knit. You’re welcome.) There’s nothing wrong with minimalism, but I don’t think these listicles generate so many clicks because everyone wants fewer possessions. I suspect it’s the desire to have all eventualities covered. To complete your collection.
As everyone who as painstakingly assembled their “essentials” knows too well, that’s never how it works. Situations and tastes change, as they should. Getting dressed or building a wardrobe isn’t a challenge to be completed, any more than reading books or having ideas is something you should hope to finish by thirty. Ditto social relations. What’s the message here? Keep the hot pink tie you wear once a year at most. And have a beer with that guy you’re on nodding terms with (and try to remember his name this time).
The curse of the algorithm is also its genius: the goal is to make you watch one more video, but whether you click or not, it uses that fact to become even more persuasive next time. The forces of repetition win either way. It’s the inverse of channel hopping: rather than randomly skipping until something grabs you, it serves you a seemingly random but utterly calculated platter of options.
The whole beauty and terror of machine learning is that we don’t know what conclusions the machine will reach, and we certainly don’t know how it will get there. It’s smarter than us in some respects; in others profoundly worse. Where people are irresistibly drawn towards misery and outrage, it will serve them more than they could ever have imagined looking for. And if all you want is videos of animals interrupting each other’s naps, it’s got you covered.
One genre to rise out of the new media soup is the mesmerizing process video. These videos depict precise, repetitious activities of all kinds. They can be industrial, artisanal, or leisurely: making pencils, toothbrushes, or marbles on the assembly line; an old and unbelievably patient man sharpening knives; archery or darts. And if you display even a passing interest in one of them, the machine will serve you a million more. Down the rabbit hole you go.
These videos have the smooth predictability of the lullaby. Life may be chaotic, but every brush gets the same bristles. Every knife is sharpened with the same motion across the whetstone. If, like most modern professionals, you spend your days and minutes processing abstract information (accounts, regulations, timetables, and the rest), an outside observer watching you work would have no idea what you were trying to achieve. A straightforward, practical task is a welcome contrast. Whether they are making watches or hot sauce, the best examples demonstrate a casual mastery that might be as close as humans get to perfection.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with style. The answer is that my particular choice of rabbit hole is shoe repair. The format is always the same: some terribly afflicted shoe (worn into the ground, stained, dried out, and cracked) is stripped down, taken apart, and slowly rebuilt. The heel comes off, and then the sole (pulling out the nails, and in some cases, dissolving an awful lot of glue). Excess polish is stripped off, suede is shampooed, leather redyed and moisturized. New soles are sewn on (sometimes with a new welt), trimmed, sanded, colored and buffed. New laces and polish seal the deal.
These videos are bad TV in some respects. They have endless amounts of dead air because the explanations are short and the work is long. In fact, there’s little drama at all. Few complaints about the negligent wearers (who are, after all, the customers) or poor craftsmanship. Occasionally an expensive but flimsy Italian loafer will be subtly improved as it’s rebuilt.
No problem is too grave. The welt is chewed up and there’s nothing left to sew. The shoes got wet and the shank corroded like an old gate. The boots are so gnarled that you can’t tell if they’re calf leather or suede. However bad things get, tragedy turns to comedy by the end. Every job is different but by the end they’re all the same.
In our algorithmic paradise, something is provided for all so that none may escape. But as genres go, shoe restoration isn’t bad. It has the structure of a TV serial: disaster strikes, triggering a series of different but related challenges through which the damage is repaired and the world returns, for a moment, to the condition of perfection. And if this all sounds too wholesome for you, there’s always the “alternative” version: ASMR – GUCCI LOAFER RESOLE.
This year I broke a rule I didn’t know I’d made: no hats at home. It wasn’t intentional, I realized, but over the years hats, like shorts, had become things to wear only in warmer climes (which is to say: not Britain). There were a couple of practical reasons for the change. One was my aforementioned DIY haircutting woes; another was the travel restrictions which made longer-distance trips distinctly more complicated.
A day or two after breaking my accidental covenant, with a navy blue baseball cap in wool flannel (as I said, British weather), I realized the error of my ways. It was versatile, unfussy, and soon began to feel necessary. Why had I ever deprived myself? It’s not like I now had to catch outfield balls (is that right?) But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: rules on headwear run deep in Anglo culture.
You’re probably thinking that I mean social conventions, but sometimes the law gets involved. Collectors of unusual laws like to cite various state codes making it “unlawful to wear a hat or any other covering of the head which obstructs the view of other persons in any theater,” but most hat laws are more about commerce than fashion. The Hat Act of 1732 was a piece of colonial British legislation intended to protect domestic hatmakers from competition from their North American counterparts by restricting their rights to export products and take on apprentices. (Not to be confused with the Hatch Act, which concerns unfair advantages of a different kind.) On a happier and less monopolistic note, in 1879 a Michigan public health law created an obligation for railroad corporations to “provide a uniform hat or cap” for employees (though it also provided for fines if they didn’t wear it).
Then we come to the etiquette manuals. The high-toned De Benneville Randolph Keim wrote in 1889 that “under all circumstances of private life or public occasion the greatest courtesy is for a gentleman to raise his hat or to remove it entirely if the occasion be appropriate.” And when is that, you ask? Primarily when encountering ladies, but also “a civil officer of very high rank.”
Fellow manners expert Eliza Bisbee Duffey concurs. “A gentleman never sits in the house with his hat on in the presence of ladies. Indeed, a gentleman instinctively removes his hat as soon as he enters a room the habitual resort of ladies.” On the other hand, EBD also advises with great seriousness: “never lean your head against the wall as you may disgust your wife or hostess by soiling the paper of her room,” so you might want to take that with a pinch of salt.
Hat anxieties are surprisingly long-lived. A century later in Clothes and the Man, Alan Flusser declares gravely that “hat wearing, with its Old World flavor, carries with it a body of etiquette that should be respected. This is both the pleasure and the responsibility it gives the wearer.”
Hat etiquette easily becomes hat prejudice. This passage appears in a 2004 guide for graduate students, which I won’t name for the sake of the authors: “Baseball caps are very useful to supervisors since they are usually a good indicator of a student whose dissertation should be supervised by somebody else (preferably a loathed colleague).” One problem with baseball cap kids, we learn, is that they favor “any research topic involving the internet.” The authors are, perhaps to their misfortune, professors of computer science.
But these haughty complaints pale in comparison to the obsession—verging on madness—around the close of the nineteenth century concerning straw hats. Specifically, when in late summer to stop wearing them. Many American towns and workplaces declared a straw hat (or white hat) day each year, after which their use was punished with mockery and sometimes destruction. By the afternoon on white hat day 1877 at the New York Stock Exchange, “at least one-third of the brokers doing business on the floor were bareheaded, and dozens of crushed white hats were whirling in the air or ornamenting the gas brackets,” one newspaper reported. Local papers around the North East and Midwest observe heated arguments, mayoral interventions, and on occasions, riots.
In 1895, the Autumnal Straw Hat Association formed in Boston to defend victimized headwear. Thankfully, we have little need of their services and every reason to indulge on a sunny afternoon all year round. Now I just need to see about the shorts.
Unless you’re a professional, practical work comes in two forms: the kind that needs doing and the kind it’s fun to attempt. How big each of these categories are, and what they contain, depends on your personality and preferences. I like to cook, so that’s a hobby; I have less appetite for decorating, so that’s work. I am faced with cutting my own hair at the moment, so that’s a disaster.
Economists sometimes define hobbies as inefficient work. In other words, if you could pay someone to do your gardening and thereby gain time or money, that’s an efficiency. And if, in spite of the efficiency, you’d rather do it yourself, that’s a hobby.
Aside from the fun or relaxation of doing something practical, there’s also the chance for insight. I’ve been repairing and adjusting clothes, largely by trial and error, for a while now. It started with losing a button and replacing it using one of those little kits you used to get in hotels. After that, a loose seam or a trouser hem. Good DIY demands patience with your imperfections and a desire to overcome them. But it also teaches you how things work: the way that a running stitch will undo itself the first chance it gets; how seams tug and twist the cloth if they’re not quite balanced.
The Italian designer Enzo Mari died last year. He was known for his Autoprogettazione system: a kind of self-assembly project that supplied the pieces and principles to create many possible designs. This is not the IKEA kind of DIY (where you’re locked in to making an identical product every time) and it’s not even IKEA hacking. As historian and curator Glenn Adamson wrote, “Mari wanted to put the means of production back where he thought they belonged: in the hands of the people. He therefore conceived a family of forms that could be made by anyone out of cheap lengths of pine and some nails, using the simplest of joints.”
Mari’s designs flowed from his politics. It’s sometimes summarized like this: he cared about design from the point of view of producers, not consumers. But he wanted everyone to be a producer. This means seeing workers as craftspeople, not interchangeable labor. But it also has practical wisdom: who really knows what makes a good table? Me, browsing a showroom, or the guy who builds tables? I’m going to fall for a thin veneer of quality every time. The carpenter never will. Mari once explained in an interview: “my values concern the quality of work. When I am asked what is the best thing I have done, I never think of the best form, but I can describe situations in which l have been content to work.”
For the amateur, the enemy of quality is impatience, for the professional it’s cost. But beyond the inevitably limitations of precision and skill, to be a hobbyist is to experience work as a kind of joyful diversion. This raises the question of whether professional work could, under the right conditions, also be joyful. Not easy, but then little of value is easy. But joyful in its difficulty. I think this is what Mari was getting at. The best designs, and the best products, are the ones that permit the best conditions for making them. Products whose limits equal the limits of our ingenuity.
The promise of modern branding has always been complicated. On the one hand, brands have existed for centuries as a kind of maker’s guarantee. Medieval English merchants would attach their names to bales of cloth, using their reputation to vouch for the consistency and honesty of the product. On the other hand, since the arrival of mass production, branding has been used to distinguish a manufacturer’s goods, elevate them, and insist on their exceptionality. These are mixed messages: Coke is always Coke, but having a Coke is always special. (Hence the unofficial tagline of its rival: “is Pepsi ok?”)
Nowhere is this tension clearer than in the Domino’s Pizza branded Rolex Air King.
Domino’s began in 1961 when Tom and James Monaghan bought a small pizza shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan. One store led to others, and in 1967 the brothers took on their first franchisee. So the story goes, Tom wore a Bulova in those years with a little Domino’s logo on it, and one particularly crass franchisee asked him what he needed to do to get the watch. Monaghan set him a $20,000 sales target, which the guy met, and he duly handed it over.
Recognizing the motivating potential of co-branded luxury timepieces, Monaghan later turned the bet into a formal reward program. The prize wasn’t a Bulova, but the product of a certain English watch company formed in 1905 and re-incorporated in Switzerland in 1920: Rolex. The result of this marriage was a special Rolex Air King—pristine silver dial, no date, crisp baton markers complementing polished silver baton hands—printed with the red-and-blue Domino’s logo. What was the runner-up prize in this celebration of profit? An Hermès power tie, of course.
The Domino’s Air King is an exquisite artifact of 1980s corporate excess. Reagan was in, it was morning in America, and nominal GDP would double over the decade. Weakened antitrust regulation led to a wave of corporate mergers, there were major tax cuts for the richest, and inequality soared. What could better capture that moment than the alliance of big pizza and the only watchmaker that’s universally recognized as expensive? It’s no coincidence that Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the children of Reagan’s economics, signaled his own loyalty to the cause by declaring that anyone who doesn’t own a Rolex by 50 is a failure (despite the fact that he wore a Patek).
The Pizza Rolex is somehow both cheap and expensive at the same time. Its sweeping second hand and polished curves say one thing very clearly: I have sold a lot of pepperoni. The collaboration horrified one kind of watch enthusiast and delighted another. It suggested that deep dish and high horology were not so far apart. That luxury, like the mass market, was ultimately a game of branding. This may have been a step too far even for those enriched by it. Domino’s continued to award Swiss watches to its most successful managers but in 2005 moved its logo from the dial to the bracelet. The age of the Pizza Rolex’s proud, ugly beauty was over.
There’s trouble afoot in British cheesemaking. Simon Spurrell, a purveyor of small-batch Cheshire and Stilton cheeses, has been voicing his frustration that any order from a European citizen now requires a post-Brexit health certificate costing roughly 50 times the price of a decent cheddar. Sales to individual customers have become impossible virtually overnight. On the other side of the refrigerator, British consumers are noticing a paucity of Époisses and Pont-l’Évêque. Those in the fishing industry report similar woes, including a reduction of four-fifths in exports and a crisis in particular for the shellfish business, whose offering is prized by French restaurants but shunned by the local crowd.
These stories have instantly become political fodder, of course. Those who deplored Brexit immediately developed a passionate attachment to small dairies, while the other side denounced them for their unpatriotic wish for this sceptered isle to swap a little of its honest, waxy cheeses for something a little more sumptuous. Cheese nationalism is one of the more absurd consequences of recent events, but the way that broader cultural questions get attached to imports is nothing new.
We tend to fix on those that involve individual consumption or experience: food, music, ideas, religious practices, TV formats (the Dutch have a lot to answer for since giving the world Big Brother in 1999). On the other hand, we tend to overlook those so old or widespread that we rarely think of them as imports (in Britain that includes potatoes, Russian service, Arabic numerals, and the royal family).
There are many reasons to resist new imports, some more salutary than others. On the one hand, it can be simple xenophobia or rejection of change; on the other hand, it can be a serious attempt to preserve a frail ecosystem from an imported behemoth (as when international chain restaurants with ingenious tax arrangements wipe out the family bistro). And asides from self-interest of one kind or another, there are concerns for those involved in (and coerced into) overseas supply chains. Food has been especially prominent: there have been campaigns to boycott chocolate producers with dubious labor practices for as long as I have lived; Fairtrade International emerged in the 90s from attempts to improve conditions for coffee producers. But this is nothing new. In the eighteenth century, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among many to refuse “the luxury of the sugar cane” on the grounds that it was, as a newspaper of the time put it, “polluted with slavery and steeped in blood.”
Clothing tells a similar story. It’s common knowledge that cotton came to dominate the world textile markets on the backs of enslaved Africans and their descendants, who farmed vast plantations in the southern U.S. and the Caribbean. Less well known is the fact that the indigo used to dye it was produced in similar circumstances. In South Carolina, indigo was so crucial to the plantation economy that it colored the state flag. In the present day, even the multinationals who are keen to champion the diversity of their customers on Twitter are fiercely resistant to improving the rights and conditions of their cotton growers and garment makers in East and South Asia, or addressing the mountainous dumps of their waste in East Africa.
As usual, it’s a mistake to think that consumer choice will (or should) solve the problem. The real solutions will be structural. One bright spot, according to some analyses, is that the naturally monopolistic tendencies of manufacturers will, in the end, force multinational buyers to cede profits back down the supply chain, increasing the bargaining power of workers. Still, there’s always a good case to favor small retailers who work with small suppliers and care about production as well as consumption. And perhaps to get into the cheese smuggling game.
Borrowed branding has a strange appeal. The most egregious example might be Franklin & Marshall: not the small liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but the Italian clothing brand of the same name, which for years produced athletic clothing with unlicensed Franklin & Marshall logos, before finally going straight and cutting a deal with the college. Their hoodies, sweatpants and tees sold well outside of the United States, and low-end fashion retailers in the UK are still trying to shift boxes of them. For the rest of the world, it was a believable heritage logo with a dash of New England money and collegiate athleticism. In the US—where business was decidedly less successful—it was just someone else’s gear.
This illustrates a more general point. If uniform is sufficiently obscure, borrowing becomes playful rather than posturing. My favorite piece of sportswear as a kid was a rugby shirt I found in a small (and now tragically closed) factory shop in a small English village. It was stuffed with seconds and new old stock for minor sports teams and school clubs, and for some reason, old replica kits for minor international competitors. This is how I ended up with a Romanian national team shirt in canary yellow. Not the kind of rugbies that fashion brands sell to preppy Anglophile poseurs, with hard plastic buttons (unlawful in the professional game), but a real, rip-stop, rubber-button, cotton jersey. Well, a real replica, let’s say.
My brother, meanwhile, developed a taste for the kind of fake soccer shirts that you might find in any southern European resort town during the summer. Not mere knockoffs, you understand, but the kind of fakes that are scarcely believable, because of either how obscure the team is or how ludicrous the printer’s errors are. It’s not far from the things that excite philatelists.
The best of these borrowings resemble a broken hyperlink: it points to something that no longer exists or was never there. Old political campaigns, long-gone bookstores, bankrupt and fraudulent financial firms and commemorations of victories that never came to pass.
OPG offers a kind of inverse nostalgia: it’s charming because it represents the lives you haven’t lived and those you have no intention of sampling. This is why I can find no joy in Zara’s “BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE” slogan sweater (thanks to the caprice of fast fashion, that link may already be dead). It’s also why there’s something missing from fake graphic tees advertising imaginary diners, sports clubs, and holiday destinations. I’d rather wear a cap repping an unknown but real agribusiness than an invented horticultural club.
Crucially, OPG should never be used to enhance status. For one thing, it never works. Using branding that you are entitled to is bad enough (because who wants to look entitled?) College cufflinks for Gen X and “clever” tote bags for millennials are common offenders here. The honorable exception might be school t-shirts at the gym, where educational paraphernalia impresses no one. The episode of The Office where Dwight proudly wears his Cornell sweater (as a prospective applicant, not alum) in order to enrage Andy, who’s convinced that his status as a Cornell man proves his superiority, is a study in the petulance of both the entitled gear wearer and illegitimate OPG. The most objectionable form might be militaria: if you’re patriotic, wearing a uniform you’ve not earned is an insult to the ideal of service; if you’re not, it’s the worst kind of hollow nationalism.
It’s true, there are many ways for the whole game to turn sour (caps with sportscar branding are like fragrances from fashion designers: they exist to sell a cheap taste of the real thing at ten times the margin). But at its best, OPG is a seductive cocktail of referential fun and obscure collecting. And in the unlikely event that you meet another fan of that Albanian spa or second-division Colombian soccer team, you’ll have an instant friend.
