Must We Elevate The Everyday?
How a massage got me thinking about messaging.
WHAT THE FUSS?
Unpacking the elevation to privatization pipeline.
A selection of my favorite towels and dishes!
The third episode of Gay Genius, featuring artist and style icon Scott Csoke, is out now on Spotify and Apple.
Lulu and Georgia did a gorgeous little gifting suite for their new Sarah Sherman Samuel bath collection at Spencer’s this week, with organic cotton towels available in “Cinnamon” and “Matcha.” I got two solid bath towels and two striped hand towels in cinnamon, an ocher-adjacent red-brown that almost matches the color of my bathroom walls. They’re finished with a super-chic contrasting overlock stitch and were very kindly embroidered with my initials. I guess I’m a monogram girlie now??
After being sufficiently gooped and gagged—I think the soft goods are my favorite part of the SSSxLG mash-up—I was scanning the product copy online and came across what has become, to me at least, one of the most triggering phrases in contemporary design and lifestyle marketing: “elevate the everyday.” As in, these towels will elevate everyday experiences like bathing and hand-washing. (Joke’s on you, I only bathe like twice a week!)
It sent me down a rabbit hole. Care to join?
What We Talk About When We Talk About The Everyday
I get the impulse to romance the ordinary. This is how “wellness” got so big. It’s much more effective than being like, “Damn, Jane. Shitting again? There’s a Prime button for that.” But I do think there’s a trend, or maybe just a linguistic tic, of positioning basic human needs (hygiene, shelter, sustenance) as luxuries, which makes it that much easier for oligarchs to swoop in and privatize them, or at least make privatization seem unavoidable. Talking about turning everything into a “practice” or “ritual” squirts sideways out of the same problematic fountain.
And it’s not just in product and marketing copy. The Times reported this week about “a surge of interest in artisanal tabletop products” in which one of the interviewees describes, “pairing her collection of ceramics and tabletop objects with homemade food as ‘one of the most intimate, kind, supportive acts.’” Literally has any sentence ever worked so hard to elevate the everyday? Like, eating has to be at least slightly alien to a person for them to articulate cooking food and putting it on a plate in those terms. Has Ozempic made eating such a foreign concept??
There’s an affected primitivity to it all, as if partaking in these ancient rituals—people have been eating for millennia, according to lore—can bring a person that much closer to something ineffably human. But the key word here is affected. We seem to exalt precisely that which we can’t avoid about ourselves because the impulse to do so is the only thing separating us from our basest mammalian selves. Our animal needs are simultaneously the biggest threat to our humanity and the only thing tethering us loosely to it. Did I mention Ozempic?
I bring this up because of AI, and the fact that copywriters and editors will be out of jobs and replaced by tools that will uncritically deploy language in exactly this way for the ends of the aforementioned oligarchs, all of whom would like us to think that enshittification is inevitable. I bring this up because I think it’s increasingly important to contextualize these issues in…well, the everyday, so that we can be conscious of them and think through them critically.
Annnnd I bring this up so that I can shoehorn in a shit ton of affiliate links, obviously, because I am DEEPLY HUMAN (evolved from a particularly horned-up line of pigs) and have to temper all of my big boy brain activity with shiny things. Boop!
TFW You Succumb To Elevating The Everyday
The Lulu & Georgia towels are available here, and if the overlock stitch is doing it for you the way it’s doing it for me, Zara Home has another style you should check out. Baina launched their “modern tartan” collection this week; love the colors but the pattern looks best imho as a bath towel. I got the Tekla towels from my girlfriends at L’Ensemble; if you want to save a few dollars you could get the brown striped Tekla washcloths and the solid cinnamon Lulu & Georgia towels as they complement each other really well. Frama makes a pretty hemp-cotton blend solid towel set that happens to be on sale atm.
And, of course, when I heed the primal urge to generously couple my beloved ceramic pieces with homemade food, I reach for my dinner set from Carolina Irving & Daughters. I love the colors of the Heath for Herman Miller dishes and think Cabana and Porta have some really great pieces with PERSONALITY. Lastly, Aziza Mirzan, whom I met last week at NADA Ceramics, makes some great dishware and, for those of you who’re local, has a storefront in Williamsburg.
FUSSING ABOUT…
Does anyone have an extra special relationship with their Chanel SA and want to secure me these fucking pumps that I can’t stop thinking about??
Daddy Zuck bought a $170M mansion in Florida done by Drake’s architect. It’s almost 30,000-square-feet and I hate every inch of it. Dan Rosen made the case far more eloquently than I can take the time to here.