Some sort of embargo seems to have lifted because here come the Apple Watch reviews! As I’m unanointed by Apple, I haven’t experienced Apple Watch in the flesh, but I do have a few random thoughts and guesses.
John Gruber notes that why Apple made a watch is different from why they made the iPhone. People were generally dissatisfied with their mobile phones (I know I was) so Apple made one that was much better. But people who wear current watches like them.
But as Ive points out, this time, the established market — watches — is not despised. They not only don’t suck, they are beloved.
I’m one of the watch non-wearers Gruber discusses elsewhere in his review; I haven’t worn a watch since my Swatch band broke when I was 17. Part of the reason I don’t wear a watch is they look hideous. The more expensive watches get, the uglier they are. Have you seen the watch ads in the New Yorker or Vogue? Garish nasty looking objects. And men’s watches are generally massive, built for lumberjacks, linebackers, and other manly men, not for dainty-wristed gentlemen like myself. I tried on a regular men’s Rolex some years ago and it looked like I’d strapped a gold-plated Discman on my wrist.
I know, I know, not all watches. The point is that for me, Apple Watch looks like something I would consider wearing on a regular basis — imagining myself living in Steve Jobs’ living room has always been more my speed than J.P. Morgan’s library.1
The subtle notifications possible with Apple Watch (taps, drawings, heartbeats) are very interesting. Also from Gruber’s review:
You’re 16. You’re in school. You’re sitting in class. You have a crush on another student — you’ve fallen hard. You can’t stop thinking about them. You suspect the feelings are mutual — but you don’t know. You’re afraid to just come right out and ask, verbally — afraid of the crushing weight of potential rejection. But you both wear an Apple Watch. So you take a flyer and send a few taps. And you wait. Nothing in response. Dammit. Why are you so stupid? Whoa — a few taps are sent in return, along with a hand-drawn smiley face. You send more taps. You receive more taps back. This is it. You send your heartbeat. It is racing, thumping. Your crush sends their heartbeat back.
Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better…you wouldn’t have to call and your husband wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the “sweetheart ping” or “sweethearting”…in the absence of a prearranged “ping me when you’re leaving”, you could ping someone to let them know you’re thinking about them.
Glancing: An application to allow ultra-simple, non-verbal communication amongst groups of friends online.
It’s a desktop application that you use with a group of other people. It lets you “glance” at them in idle moments, and it gives all of you an indication of the activity of glancing going on.
A group is intended to be less than a dozen people. A person may belong to several groups simultaneously by running separate instances of Glancing. Groups are started deliberately, probably by using a www interface, and people are told the group secret so they can join (a “secret” is just a shared password).
But the thing that has struck me the most since the announcement of Apple Watch is the idea that if you’re wearing one, you’re going to be checking your devices a lot less. From TechCrunch last month:2
People that have worn the Watch say that they take their phones out of their pockets far, far less than they used to. A simple tap to reply or glance on the wrist or dictation is a massively different interaction model than pulling out an iPhone, unlocking it and being pulled into its merciless vortex of attention suck.
One user told me that they nearly “stopped” using their phone during the day; they used to have it out and now they don’t, period. That’s insane when you think about how much the blue glow of smartphone screens has dominated our social interactions over the past decade.
I’m in a meeting with 14 people, in mid-sentence, when I feel a tap-tap-tap on my wrist. I stop talking, tilt my head, and whip my arm aggressively into view to see the source of the agitation. A second later, the small screen on my new Apple Watch beams to life with a very important message for me: Twitter has suggestions for people I should follow. A version of this happens dozens of times throughout the day-for messages, e-mails, activity achievements, tweets, and so much more. Wait a second. Isn’t the promise of the Apple Watch to help me stay in the moment, focused on the people around me and undisturbed by the mesmerizing void of my iPhone? So why do I suddenly feel so distracted?
The promise of the Apple Watch is to make it more convenient to send & receive notifications and quick messages, although many of the reviews make it clear that Apple hasn’t entirely succeeded in this. In the entire history of the world, if you make it easier for people to do something compelling, people don’t do that thing less: they’ll do it more. If you give people more food, they eat it. If you make it easier to get credit, people will use it. If you add another two lanes to a traffic-clogged highway, you get a larger traffic-clogged highway. And if you put a device on their wrist that makes it easier to communicate with friends, guess what? They’re going to use the shit out of it, potentially way more than they ever used their phones.
Now, it’s possible that Apple Watch doesn’t make receiving notifications easier…instead, it may make controlling notifications easier. Like congestion pricing for your digital interactions. But that is generally not where technology has been taking us. Every new communications device and service — the telegraph, telephone, internet, email, personal computer, SMS, smartphones, Facebook, Whatsapp, Slack,3 etc. etc. etc. — makes it easier to 1) connect with more and more people in more and more ways, and 2) to connect with a few people more deeply. And I don’t expect Apple Watch will break that streak. The software will get faster & better, the hardware will get cheaper & longer-lasting, and people will buy & love them & use them constantly.
P.S. While I didn’t quote from it, The Verge review is great. But mainly I’m wondering…where are the reviews from the fashion world? I assume Vogue and other such magazines and media outlets received Apple Watches for review and their embargoes lifted as well, but after searching for a bit, I couldn’t find any actual reviews. And only a single major review by a woman, Lauren Goode’s at Re/code. If you run across any, let me know?
Have you been to the Morgan Library? It’s great, a lesser known gem of a museum in Manhattan. I went this past weekend, in fact. But I would not like to live in such a baroque place.↩
God, I hate linking to TechCrunch — I’ve only linked to them a handful of times and I complain about it every time — but they were the best source for this point. Apologies to my soul.↩
The conventional wisdom about Slack is that it’s rescuing us from the tyranny of email. But when everyone is on Slack because it’s easier and offers certain advantages over email, then what? What will rescue us from the tyranny of Slack? (A: Nothing. That’s the point…we can’t help wanting to communicate in easier ways with our fellow humans, so much so that we gorge ourselves like geese at the gavage. Whatever kills Slack will be a bigger, easier communications gavage. Rinse. Repeat. Until the heat death of the Universe.) ↩
Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean made a video for Mr. Porter about how to care for your new pair of jeans.
I remember reading his original post on the topic and boggling at the concept of wearing a new pair of raw selvage jeans for an entire year before washing them. (I still have never done such a thing. I’m just not that fancy.)
I feel very strongly that almost the entire city has copied my glasses.
Dry…clean. These words don’t go together. Wet clean — that is how you clean. I can’t even imagine the things they do at the drycleaner. I don’t want to know.
I have to say that one of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young. There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I’d just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It’s disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they’re wearing shorts? It’s repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can’t take them seriously.
Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut??
Of course, more people should wear overcoats than those damned down jackets. Please. Are you skiing, or are you walking across the street? If you’re not an arctic explorer, dress like a human being.
I, myself, am deeply superficial.
Feeling good about an outfit is the point at which that outfit finally becomes good.
First the actual Michael Bolton pops up in Office Space and now Derek Zoolander and Hansel are walking an actual runway show during Paris Fashion Week:
Is this what we have to look forward to for the next 10 years, late-90s/early-00s media remixed for an aging and increasingly wealthy Generation X? Bring it on?
Update: Here’s the video of the whole show; the Zoolander appearance happens right at the beginning.
And as if there were any doubt, the stunt was a promo for Zoolander 2, which will come out in 2016.
Update: At one point, Zoolander grabbed the phone out of someone’s hand and walked with it. Here’s the video of that.
The someone turns out to be Jerome Jarre, a big Vine star who gets paid by brands to do this sort of thing all the time so chances are it was staged. Sorry, there are no more genuine moments left, it’s all fake from now on.
I don’t recall if I ever tweeted about it, but a few months ago I had this idea for a service for the wealthy who wanted properly broken-in jeans but didn’t want to bother wearing them around for months first without washing.1 It’s basically a dog-walking service but for jeans. It was mostly a joke, but in the age of Uber taxiing kittens to your office for you to cuddle with, no such idea is truly off the table. Huit Denim Co. is experimenting with a beta feature called the Denim Breaker Club.
You are going to break our selvedge jeans in for our customers.
You will have to agree to not wash them for 6 months.
You will have to agree to update what you get up to in them on HistoryTag.
And before you get them sent to you have pay a small deposit, which we will refund on their safe return.
When we get them back, we will expertly wash them.
And then we will sell these beautiful jeans.
You will have 20% of the sale.
So in effect you will be paid to wear jeans.
Have to admit, that’s pretty clever. (FYI: HistoryTag gives individual pieces of clothing tracking codes which you can use in social media. A Social Life of Clothes, basically.)
Nothing is created or destroyed, it is merely transformed. This adage is fulfilled in every respect by the Butler jeans concept. Customers are encouraged to bring their old denim jeans to any A.P.C. store or send it to the online store, where they will be exchanged for a new pair at half price. Broken in naturally over time, their attractive patina created and preserved in accordance with washing instructions, the jeans thus reappear, beginning a second life. But not until they have been washed, mended and marked with the initials of their former owner by our workshops. Each pair is therefore truly unique.
I was one of the first breakers. They are the best jeans I’ve owned. I got involved because I’ve known David for a long time, as I used to run a clothing company. He told me about the idea and I signed up, paying an £80 deposit.
“When I handed them back, of course they smelled bad. I wore them every single day for six months. Literally. I don’t wear a suit, you see. I live in Belfast and I work in Hollywood down the road, and I cycled to work every day. I went to the rugby in them with my thermals underneath. They got soaked in the cold and rain, and so they spent a lot of time hanging and drying above a radiator. One day, when it was warm, I went and lay on the beach in them. I went to the supermarket in them, I cooked in them, I drank in them. I didn’t spill anything serious on them, thankfully. I also carved spoons in them, so by the end they were pretty covered in wood shavings.
Methods of breaking in a new pair of unwashed raw selvage jeans vary, but as an example, Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean waited an entire year before washing his jeans for the first time. And yeah, you can buy them broken in, but jeans aficionados insist the proper way to break in jeans is by wearing them.↩
After much futzing about in Photoshop, I came up with the perfect simple design for the limited edition kottke.org tee shirt, featuring the familiar blue gradient that wraps all the way around the shirt. The shirt is made of fabric, has sleeves, and features a hole for your head. It’s everything you need in a shirt.
For about 50 years now, I’ve wanted to do a kottke.org t-shirt. But I could never decide on a design I liked enough to wear. A few months back, I came across a service called Print All Over Me, which uses a process called “reactive dye digital printing” to seamlessly cover an entire t-shirt with a design, and I had a tiny eureka moment. After much futzing about in Photoshop, I came up with the perfect simple design for the limited edition kottke.org tee shirt, featuring the familiar blue gradient that wraps all the way around the shirt.
The shirt is made of fabric, has sleeves, and features a hole for your head. It’s everything you need in a shirt. Due to the unique printing process, the shirts are custom-dyed, cut & sewn to order, cost $38 plus shipping, and will only be available to order for the next two weeks. After that, poof. Order yours today.
(BTW, when ordering, select the “Print” option under “Back”. For some of the other shirts PAOM offers, it might make sense to not get the print on the back, but for this shirt, it’s the whole point.)
Three dancers from The Australian Ballet share their prep routines for their pointe shoes.
Take-aways: Ballerinas’ feet are really not attractive, they soup up their shoes in all sorts of unusual ways, but the end result is beautiful. (thx, fiona)
This year, your back-to-school shopping may have included more devices and downloads than pieces of attire. According to the NYT, today’s teenagers favor tech over clothes. One retail analysts explains how his focus groups go these days: “You try to get them talking about what’s the next look, what they’re excited about purchasing in apparel, and the conversation always circles back to the iPhone 6.”
All the designs featured are actually available for sale — here’s that I Pooped Today shirt — just click on the “See all styles” button for adult options. Ok, just one more:
Maybe I’m the last person in the world to see these (I don’t go out on Halloween or to clubs or do anything cool really), but these Black bar censorship sunglasses are a little bit genius:
The objects of their desire — what they track on eBay, rhapsodize about on their blogs and search for in faraway lands — are bottles of old nail polish. More specifically, discontinued varieties that come in colors no longer available but that are still out there, sitting forgotten on the shelves of manicurists and out-of-the-way stores, just waiting to be found by some lucky lemming who will add them to her collection, cherish them and post them on Instagram for other members of this unlikely subculture.
One white whale for those in the know is Starry Starry Night by Essie, often abbreviated SSN. The navy blue pigment, spangled with silver glitter, is beloved for its “buildability,” meaning that in just a few coats one can achieve an alluring depth.
The vocabulary around nail polish collecting is as colorful as the polishes themselves: “lemmings”, “unicorn pee”, “frankensteining”, “lacquerhead”, “dusty hunting”.
Finally! A Japanese company called Type is selling eyeglasses that evoke the Helvetica and Garamond typefaces. It’s like webfonts for your face.
I joke, but those Helvetica Black Regulars look pretty nice. I wonder what some of the older Raygun-inspired GarageFonts typefaces would look like as glasses? (via the verge)
David Munson, CEO of Saddleback Leather, gives some advice to those who want to rip off his high quality leather bags…basically how to save money by cutting corners, using cheaper leather, etc.
We flew drones over Mississippi. We got mugged in Chittagong, Bangladesh. We met people whom we’ll never forget — the actual people who make our clothing. At every location we had radio reporters and videographers.
It’s maybe the least Kottke-like Kottke post imaginable, but “How to unshrink a wool sweater” still holds up for me after more than a dozen years. It’s a personal anecdote with no links, deeply focused on domestic service journalism instead of the liberal arts or technology or society. But it kinda, sorta changed the course of my career and my life.
Jason had noticed my site linking to his before, but we actually emailed about the sweater post and I was totally geeked out that he replied to me. It cemented the idea that I could participate in this medium, even though I was years behind the experts and pioneers like him. And from that point, it was a short journey to making all of the friends I’ve made online, and discovering so much more about what we could do online.
So while there are the planes-on-treadmills and girls-on-bikes are the crowdpleasers for other Kottke fans, on Jason’s birthday I wanted to point out a post that’s simple, useful, memorable, personal, and effortlessly combines midwestern earnestness with big city pragmatism. In other words, exactly what I’ve come to expect from my friend Jason.
Yes Lady provides a loan within half an hour at 80% of the bag’s value — as long as it is from Gucci, Chanel, Hermès or Louis Vuitton. Occasionally, a Prada purse will do the trick. Secondhand classic purses and special-edition handbags often retain much of their retail prices.
A customer gets her bag back by repaying the loan at 4% monthly interest within four months. Yes Lady says almost all its clients quickly pay off their loans and reclaim their bags.
The company recently lent about US$20,600 in exchange for a Hermès Birkin bag, but Yes Lady’s purse-backed loans start at about US$200.
Jon Caramanica talks with Kanye West about his work, his past, his impending child, and all sorts of other things in the NY Times. I started pulling interesting quotes but stopped when I realized that I was copy/pasting like 96% of the article. So, you only get two:
I sat down with a clothing guy that I won’t mention, but hopefully if he reads this article, he knows it’s him and knows that out of respect, I didn’t mention his name: this guy, he questioned me before I left his office:, “If you’ve done this, this, and this, why haven’t you gone further in fashion?” And I say, “I’m learning.” But ultimately, this guy that was talking to me doesn’t make Christmas presents, meaning that nobody was asking for his [stuff] as a Christmas present. If you don’t make Christmas presents, meaning making something that’s so emotionally connected to people, don’t talk to me.
And I don’t want to ruin the amazing last few paragraphs, but I just had to include this:
I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z.
“These are primarily fashion items and art items,” Harvey tells me. “I’m not trying to make products for survivalists. I would like to introduce this idea to people: that surveillance is not bulletproof. That there are ways to interact with it and there are ways to aestheticise it.”
I imagine that at some point, anti-drone clothing will eject chaff as a countermeasure against incoming drone-launched missiles. (via @DavidGrann)
The only clothing I ever tried on before buying it was from Gucci. But many of the online purchases were fantastic-the patent leather trench coat from Burberry, a cropped leather jacket from Versace, a brown leather jacket from Ralph Lauren, a studded leather jacket from Cavalli, boots from Jimmy Choo, leather gloves from Ines in Amsterdam and Madova in Florence. I bought dozens of stretch jeans and leather leggings and leather pants that sculpted my lower body the way I wanted, with no room for speculation. I bought dozens of leather gloves that actually did fit like a glove. I bought dozens of boots, some with a flat or low heel that any man can wear, some with five-inch heels that only a man with real balls could wear.
Lisa in general liked the rocker look. But there were times I was too outrageous for her taste, and she began to feel like she was living with a hoarder. The kids liked the flair, maybe, but there were times they seemed embarrassed, or simply stunned. My friends, particularly those from Philadelphia, were appalled and confused and amused. With the exception of Lisa, nobody had any real idea of the extent of my addiction.
Too many of the purchases were sheer compulsiveness multiplying into more compulsion like split atoms. I bought an orange leather motorcycle jacket and matching orange leather pants from Alexander McQueen that made me look, well, very, very orange. The same went for a blue ensemble that made me look, well, very, very blue. I bought dozens upon dozens of leather jackets-bolero-style, waist-length, above the knee, below the knee-in which the gradations of difference were microscopic. I bought a pair of knee-length Stuart Weitzman boots and then two weeks later bought the exact same pair because I had forgotten I bought the first pair. I bought at least a dozen items that cost over $5,000 each but did not fit, the hazard of online purchasing, since sizing by high-end retailers is often like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I bought items I wore once, or never wore at all, the tags still hanging from the collar. Yet I returned very little: The more the closets in the house filled, the more discerning I became, the more expensive the items, the more I got off on what I had amassed.
Artist Phillip Stearns makes blankets and tapestries out of glitch art. Some of the source images are taken from intentionally short-circuited digital cameras.
All items are woven in the US and cost $200 and up (plus shipping).
The Flint and Tinder folks are back with another Kickstarter campaign and this time they are selling a hooded sweatshirt with a ten-year warranty. It’s a premuim-quality sweatshirt, made entirely in the USA, and if rips or comes apart at the seams in the next ten years, just send it to them and they will mend it and send it back.
The Flint and Tinder team overheard a conversation in a factory we were visiting. Someone was talking about using coarse thread with delicate fabric. Doing this accelerates the process of wearing holes into a garment as it goes through the dryer time and time again.
It’s a common trick of the trade. It’s one of several techniques companies secretly use to ensure that if you like what you’ve bought, you’ll be forced to replace it soon.
In the manufacturing industry, this is known as “planned obsolescence.”
It doesn’t have to be this way though — far from it. Eager to prove a point, send a message, and make a sweatshirt that could last a lifetime (the way your favorite sweatshirt should), we set out to make a premium piece that’s so well constructed customers would rather have it mended (free of charge, of course) than replaced.
What are all those models in the J.Crew catalog doing anyway? By cleverly piecing together narratives from catalog photographs, Meghan O’Neill imagines that they are solving crimes, misbehaving on honeymoons, and such. Here’s the most recent episode:
Yesterday I was pairing the socks from the clean laundry, and figured out the way I was doing it is not very efficient. I was doing a naive search — picking one sock and “iterating” the pile in order to find its pair. This requires iterating over n/2 * n/4 = n^2/8 socks on average.
As a computer scientist I was thinking what I could do? sorting (according to size/color/…) of course came into mind to achieve O(NlogN) solution.
And everyone gets it wrong. The correct answer is actually:
1) Throw all your socks out.
2) Go to Uniqlo and buy 15 identical pairs of black socks.
3) When you want to wear socks, pick any two out of the drawer.
4) When you notice your socks are wearing out, goto step 1.
Stay Connected