Snake America Thirty One & An Half
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Little bit of a shorty this week because I feel like it. The following issues:
1.
Who can translate these, and what are they? Nice boots but I feel like they shouldn't be worn with light jeans, lest one look like you do pills and don't take care of yourself. Or, you look like a hillbilly. Are they one and the same? I bet people are breaking that rule right and left.
2.
Lot of ninja shirts, I wonder what the offer the seller accepted was. I wonder if these shirts are being used to outfit a softball team, or pocket-bike aficionados, or maybe a few sets of triplets and their wives who hang out with each other, keeping some spares in the car in case they all went to the beach or something. I bet I'll see a bunch of animals wearing these next time I'm in Vegas. Hopefully it won't be at The $3 Craps Table.
3.
Nice space age (?) rug and a nicer price. I have no knowledge of these things but some go for thousands and some go for very little. Some get hung on the wall. These ride the line between Carter-administration Queens living room and advanced Norwegian. No rugs like this, if I remember right, have gone for as little as this one. You can't even buy a placemat for this price.
4.
Same shirt as in (2.), unsold, none sold by the seller above. Maybe this seller bought them all from the other seller. Maybe it's a shell corporation and they're both the same person and he's trying to skirt the $10K rule. Maybe he should just get a job instead. Sometimes I wonder the extent to which there's interest in old, smelly clothing of indeterminate size and fit.
5.
Nike ACG is back. (all-conditions gear.) Errolson Hughes, the guy behind Acronym, the rich-people answer to Arc'teryx, designed it. It looks, at its worst moments, like something between Hood By Air and Arcteryx. At its best moments it looks like Acronym. Mostly it looks like indiscriminate gym gear with a raincoat thrown in. It has, aside from the logo in the screencap above, nearly nothing in common with the original ACG line, Nike's in-house Bush administration answer to Patagonia, Class 5, etc. Here's a representative piece of the early stuff:
Which is loud. Lots of the stuff also had earth tones, etc. It was an acquired taste. Here's what ACG looks like now, under Hughes' pen:
Very different. This collection reins a lot of ACG's original bad ideas in. Now ... I'm not saying that Air Mowabbs or purple fleeces are bad ... but they're certainly something, and it's nice for clothes to be nothing. ACG wasn't alone in being loud -- around 1990-ish, sportswear became ... different. New fabrics, exaggerated shapes, weird colors, etc. Purple band T-shirts. And, after NAFTA, a dip in quality. ACG's calling cards items were made then, and the line is transitional, if it's anything. Like Neil Young's Trans (USA 1983) LP, it's not for everyone. The new line is also not my shit, but why would it be? Historical preservation is a perverse thing to ask of a publicly-traded company. Their color palettes and legacy ... Everything but the ACG logo is effectively gone(1), but that's fine. Why keep old designs, with quality falling? My pal Adam Wray, who was at the launch, tells me the pieces have good workmanship, somewhere south of Acronym, north of Arcteryx and close to Veilance.
I wonder if the roll-neck-outdoor turtleneck quality compares to a purple ACG fleece or Air Mowabb from 1991. I doubt it. I'd sooner buy a cat than any of these things. It's a bad time to be a consumer. This line may be the canary in a mine. I wonder, once the good vintage runs out, if there will be anything new that isn't dogshit to dress in that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. For some people, it's Acronym. It definitely isn't for me. Soon it might be ACG Lab. Neither gives me much hope.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) Worth noting the pyramid lower-case letter design only became the exclusive ACG logo in 2009 when it spun out as a different brand--effectively Nike tried to do an ACG rebrand that fell mostly on deaf ears. Mostly displays in Transit, Dr. Jays, etc. Same colors, in and out in a season.