The men’s Fair Isle sweater in peony from J. Crew’s FW26 collection will not be remembered as a turning point in American fashion. Originally priced at $168 and now available for $75.60, it’s a ‘tweener garment. Too “conversation piece” to wear casually; too casual to inspire much of a conversation. Even so, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett used it to make a statement… on Twitter.
“It’s something a Sorority girl would wear in the 80’s.”
That’s not wrong, but swerviness was, of course, the point. In a typical season, J. Crew introduces hundreds of new SKUs that iterate on successful products or test a design-team hypothesis about what might resonate. Most don’t work because, as William Goldman famously put it when describing a different creative industry, “Nobody knows anything.” But the only way to find the new thing is to create new things and see what, if anything, appeals to the people who buy new things – some of whom surely bought the sweater, wore the sweater, took shit for the sweater, looked at themselves in the mirror in the sweater, and… winced.
For culture to move forward – and for an economy built largely built on discretionary spending to run hot – someone has to look stupid.2 Generally speaking, that someone is part of the urban cultural vanguard, the expressive consumers this newsletter affectionately refers to as the Oat Milk Elite. That’s not because we’re invariably right about the new thing, but because we’re willing to be wrong. That’s in contrast to the inertial consumers, conservative, outer suburb F-150 owner, browsing one of the two J. Crew Factory outlets in Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District. Those folks are invariably right about the last thing, and unwilling to be wrong about the new thing. We are culturally insecure overthinkers; they are culturally assured underthinkers. And if that sounds like a minor distinction, it’s not. It’s why people go to culture war.
Consumer politics are not reducible to some brands going woke. In fact, the politicization of consumption is, more often than not, more an expression of differences in approaches to consumption than differences in political values. Expressive consumers try new stuff because of what it might say about them. Inertial consumers stick to “basics” and “classics.” The sociologist Sam Binkley describes inertial consumption as governed by “a logic of naturalness and common sense… responding instead to the more immediate and practical logic of simply ‘getting-by.’” Expressive consumption interrupts that flow. It insists on not just thinking, but overthinking.
What these inertial consumers understand – even though they don’t generally express it in these terms – is that expressive consumption is dangerous work. It requires research, vigilance, and the willingness to look like a tool. It transforms every errand into a test and lays Oat Milk Elites open to Joan Rivers–on-the-red-carpet–style critique3.
Critique, which to bullying is as a rectangle is to a square, is how taste gets refined, so people whose self-identity is wrapped up in taste-driven expression don’t generally mind being critiqued. Those whose identity is more wrapped up in work or faith or protein consumption do. Make fun of an exurban car dealer’s Dockers and – even though he wasn’t paying much attention when he bought them – he’ll try to murder you with a tire iron. Mock an art dealer’s carefully considered Yohji Yamamoto culottes and he’ll treat it as a conversation starter.
Yes, homophobia is a wrinkle here. There are a lot of exurban car dealers out there who don’t want to look gay. But that aversion is often more about pink sweaters than power bottoming. Unlike anal play, new clothes aren’t good for all time zones. With one exception, the inertial consumers in Burchett’s district follow that oldest of New England chestnuts: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
That exception is, of course, a red hat. But it’s worth considering that topper twice. It’s expressive, sure, but it’s not personal. In fact, the MAGA hat is an expression of fandom that has barely changed in a decade. If that’s unusual – definitely not something Taylor Swift’s merch folks would allow to happen – it’s also by design. Trump’s team understands the threat of new things and is politically antagonistic to almost all forms of expressive consumption.
Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of strategically weakening the dollar to boost U.S. exports—a strategy that has worked for China and Japan. The problem is that 70 percent of U.S. GDP is driven by consumer spending, compared to something closer to 40 percent in China. America is a consumer – and, given spending trends, one might even say a luxury consumer – society. New things matter. Oat Milk Elites have money.
Because Oat Milk Elites do have money – albeit less than we once did – the “go woke, go broke” formulation is wrong a lot more than it’s right. When it’s right, the problem is generally that there’s no new thing.
The canonical failure here is Gillette’s 2019 “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be” campaign. The two-minute online spot explicitly inverted Gillette’s old slogan, “The Best a Man Can Get,” replacing it with a lecture about toxic masculinity. It was released not as a television ad but as a digital short film. The backlash was immediate. The video racked up more than 1.5 million dislikes on YouTube.
Gillette had violated the contract of inertial consumption. A brand that had long provided men a way not to think demanded that they violently introspect themselves in the aisle of a Walgreens. Gillette wasn’t punished for being political. The discourse became political because Gillette had asked inertial consumers to behave like expressive consumers.
(Editor’s Note: During Gillette’s big push, I was the Editor of Fatherly, the sole parenting publication for men. Naturally we got some ad dollars. We also put on an event during which I found myself in a corner with the CEO of Gillette. When I mentioned that Gillette’s old, hypersexualized ads featuring Brooke Shields had been art directed by my mom, things got awkward. He mistook my fun fact for some sort of confession.)
These cultural dynamics can lead to unexpected outcomes. There’s a great viral Instagram going around right now joking that no one guessed that the left would get beer and football in the “national divorce” – or that the right would get electric cars. That’s funny, but the irony dissolves once you remember that beer and football chase new audiences with novel products (Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl) and messaging (Trans people sometimes go to bars). Tesla, by contrast, is not in the novelty business. Yes, the Cybertruck seemed novel at one point, but it’s been clear since not long after the red cap debuted that it’s a horrifically engineered spiritual successor to the Hummer, a vehicle marketed almost exclusively to and by exurban car dealers.
There used to be more overlap between worlds. Think Playboy. Think Terry Richardson. Think Vice. Hell, think pornstars with character arcs on Entourage. Transgressive media and the gag/guache economy – premised on intentional bad taste – was common ground presided over by the collective id. But that space collapsed for a simple reason. As Olivia Oscar Wilde put it: “Everything in the world is about sex – except sex. Sex is about power.” Boobs are political so when politics got more divisive, boobs got more divided (as it were).
These days, many companies in the new-things business recognize that they’re not going to attract inertial consumers and lean into lefty politics because it de-risks early adoption for expressive consumers. The founders of the superlatively named sleepwear brand Irregular Sleep Patterns announced this week that they would be unapologetically political going forward. Yes, the timing is understandable, but the message is strategic. Political marketing reassures expressive consumers that even if the product fails aesthetically, they can fall back on good intentions. Conscious consumerism backstops expressive consumerism.
Arguably, this was what made the whole DTC boom of the early 2010s possible. Harry’s and Casper and Warby Parker all leaned in on politics because they were selling the new thing. It worked really well right up until they’d raised so much money they had to try and sell their new things in Knoxville.
At 43 years old, J.Crew is still selling new things because if it doesn’t it will go out of business (not immediately, but medium-term). That’s why the backlash against the peony Fair Isle sweater can’t solely be understood as a justifiable reaction to expressive consumers being too much. The gentleman from Tennessee was dog-whistling knitwear because J. Crew failed to do what he and the inertial consumers who elected him demand: Stop time itself. Yes, that sweater was pretty gay, but the real concern was that someone in New York might wear it and look good.
And, rest assured, someone did.
