Part of my recent love affair with newsletters includes the discovery of Blackbird Spyplane, a weekly update on fashion, style, and living a beautiful life that includes the occasional interview with a stylish and cool person. And sometimes, they get pretty deep on what it means to be an ethical consumer, too, like in the recent post You Are Not A Commercial For Yourself. (You really should RTFA (read the full article), it’s super worthwhile.)

Using an Ozu film as a jumping off point (see? they’re cool folks), the post explores the tension between chasing trends and coolness versus the genuine pleasure and affirming qualities of dressing well and feeling confident.

Sure, sick clothes can be a superficial object of vacuous consumerism and ego-affirmation. But sick clothes also affirm the creative ingenuity and labor of the people who made the fly s**t, weaving us into a social relationship predicated, at bottom, on celebrating and sharing what’s best and most beautiful about human creativity.
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Where things get muddy is when our healthy desire for beautiful man-made things — intimately connected to our healthy desire for connectedness & community — gets hijacked and zombiefied by manipulative, profit-hungry, fundamentally anti-social souls…
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Remember that buying s**t is not the same as having swag … Remember that having cool interests beyond cool clothes, and doing good deeds besides putting together sick outfits (which, to be clear, is a good deed), will make your clothes look better on you… Remember that you don’t even need to own things to feast upon their beauty. “Sight is sensory, after all,” Rothfeld writes, “and voyeurism can be voluptuous.”

And remember that a ravenous desire for cool clothes is tight so long as you keep it “gourmand” mode and avoid slipping into “glutton” mode, where, in the throes of a boundless acquisitive frenzy, you keep shoving food down your face without even tasting it, without thinking about how it got on your plate — without ever stopping to consider whether you’re enjoying it or not.

Which puts me very much in the mind of how far I’ve come in terms of choosing clothes with intention to fill needs or color palettes I’m looking for in dressing like myself, versus trying to mimic trends. After all, the looser clothes I grew up with are very much back in style. Plus, I care much more about spending more on longer-lasting, higher-quality articles of clothing versus acquisition of any kind. So…

How has your “style” changed with age, for better or for worse?

Are you “cooler” or “less cool” now than you were when you were younger? In what ways?

How have these evolutions changed your relationship to the clothing you own, wear, and shop for?