Snake America Thirty-Six
Snake is a bi-weekly electric magazine covering for-sale eBay items. This week: a very worn chambray and 1970s East German sneakers. Subscribe
eBay: Washngton Dee Cee 1940s chambray shirt, worn: Just like with a psychedelic, exposure to the infinite and related permutations of chambray shirts can change a person's perspective. There was an interview with Lungfish, the old Baltimore band(1), in a City Paper about 15 years ago, or it might have been a review, where the author, I think Joe Gross, explains how the band's reliance on nearly-identical sounding guitar riffs--similar tempos and notes, only a couple semi-tones different--makes their music meditative and almost psychedelic. I'm not entirely sure about that. Sometimes the guitar playing on different songs sounds like finger exercises when playing piano for the first time, or going over a blues scale up and down the neck. I think the author was thinking of Quadrophenia, (UK 1973). (In which The Who repeated similar hooks throughout different bridges between songs. My only statement as to whether that album is psychedelic is that, then and now, Rogers Daltrey and Staubach are easy to confuse.) But he has a point. Repeating chords differently all over an album can make a listener go back to the first one when it's re-introduced. Under some conditions, that passes for psychedelia. Stretching that train of thought to the traditional chambray shirt--that jeans-looking garment sailors used to wear and now people in Murray Hill buy and which was sold first at the Naval Commissary then in Japan, then RRL, then J Crew and now The Gap--is more of a stretch. But the shirt left and came back and left and came back more than a few times. Searching "chambray" in The New York Times' NYTimes.com/Search yields May 8, 1863 as earliest reference, to the family name of a military historian. Chambray surfaces again 10 years later, in a report on the opening of a women's clothing store. The search page yields "about 1,057" results, though most references from 1897 and 1898 were to a racehorse, Pink Chambray, who ran at Brighton(2). Sample headline:
THE RACES AT BRIGHTON; Fields Were Very Light and the Racing Not of a High Class. TRACK SWINDLERS CAUGHT Detective Pinkerton Believes that He Has Succeeded in Putting a Stop to the Depredations of a Clever Gang."
... if I had a Times Select account, I'd tell you how he (Pink Chambray) did. The name--not the horse's--refers to the city of Cambrai, in France, the first place where such shirts (and dresses, etc.) were indigo dyed. Sailors wore those blue and white shirts in the 1940s and there aren't many photos of teenagers wearing them in the '50s. (A Life archives google search for teens and teenagers reveals mostly other things.) 1960s chambray shirts had bigger collars, and then they went disco, and by that point the white cross-stitch disappeared. A "blue chambray shirt" search yields just 22 results on NYTimes.com, the earliest of which is to an article, Fire Department, from 1938:
Probationary Firemen a School: Khaki trousers, blue chambray shirt (two detachable collars), white athletic shirt.
Which sounds about right. The auction linked above is to as traditional a chambray shirt as there is. But it's completely filthy. It looks great. The seller seems to have a barn full of these. He's sold many before. Maybe he ran a fire brigade? My friend Nick said he once saw someone covered completely in mud wearing otherwise brand-new Nom De Guerre from head to toe. It was about 2005, below 14th Street. That story stuck in my head and I still think of that image. Nom De Guerre really hasn't aged well, and neither has the non-filthy chambray. I'd say the only way to wear a chambray in 2015 without association--not discussing any bad associations in this space--is if it's covered in mud and dirty, and torn, like here. Then it's just a dirty shirt. Why throw out the baby?
eBay: East German cheap-garbage sneakers, cheap Buy it Now: These are an arresting pair of shoes:
They look like they're real cheap. Real garbage quality. I thought the shoes were made of leather--auction says synthetic--but either way it's the cheap kind. Is there synthetic leather this cheap looking? Is there synthetic leather that's cheaper than actual synthetic leather? It's hard, gummy and looks brittle. The more I look at these the more they look like a Nike--or Reebok, etc.--that's on a store shelf now. Their leather--is it synthetic?--looks the same. It's pretty amazing the cheapest way to keep workers from catching frostbite these don't look that different than what's on 34th, or Mercer Streets now. Or that you can't tell if something's leather anymore. Even under communism, you need shoes.
Pissy-yellow midsoles. Many old Nikes (25 years old at least, though 20 will do if there's enough mold in the room) originally with white soles have seen their soles turn piss-yellow like these. Though these are uniformly yellow, and oxidized sneakers have a bit more of a ... marbling? Ahead of the curve? The shoe looks its exact age, but it also looks sealed and imprevious to time. I'm not sure there's a German word for that, but there should be.
The upside-down swoosh is not entirely a swoosh, but it's backwards and upside down enough to act as an antipode. It's easy to imagine that Burger Schuh Fabrik, (the name of the "company" which made these(3)) could have succeeded in business with some lucky breaks. Their logo looks better.
Toebox got a nice shape. Kind of weird people have fatter feet now. Vans, Nike, everything is fatter now. Not obese, either. Just fatter.
Iron Curtain clothing was real conservative and athletic. Swishy wind pants, zippers, good for the wind. I also like that the seller is taking offers on an 8 GBP item. He is selling according to his abilities--not his needs. Recommended.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Marines ring sweatshirt; Nike Trainer Posites (both active)
Snake before that: WWII aviator boots; Rich Person Pen (both active)
(1) I am sorry to digress into music. Lungfish is a band from Baltimore, but they can be replaced here, if you'd like, with Husker Du's "Dreams Reoccurring/Reoccurring Dreams," or some of Spacemen 3's "Dreamweapon." Or--even--the first Side By Side 7" where the sixth (I think) song sounds like the first one.
(2) England? I don't know.
(3) Looks like they started in the 1890s...and finished in 1992. Unless mein Deutsch beschissen.