I spent the weekend trying not to think too hard about the deep red state’s latest coup attempt, lest I throw myself in front of a bus. Happy new year?
In other news, I bought SKIMS last month. Billed as “solutions for every body,” SKIMS, née “Kimono,” is notably the brainchild of one Kîmbërly Kårdàshían. When I told people I was thinking of buying SKIMS, they were like, “Do you really want to support Kim Kardashian?” Which, ok, no? But I worry about consumption politics, which in the age of Venmo and Instagram Stories seems to be mostly just optics, which is to say that all of our spending is now fertile ground for crisis PR. But we have to keep spending to reify our fragile notions of selfhood, which, speaking as someone who once offered a photo of Kylie Jenner to a nail technician as “inspiration,” means SKIMS is now the beginning and end of my identity. It really DOES get better!
An ad for the brand’s “sleep short” appeared in my you-know-what feed, the first image in a promotional carousel from Nordstrom, of all places. Nordstrom doesn’t make me wanna fuck, which means it doesn’t make me wanna shop, so I exed out of that window and went to the SKIMS profile via my explore page, as if I was literally 70 years old. I clicked through to their site and tried searching for the same short, which I, by the grace of Hailey Bieber, eventually found in my size.
I’d been spiritually in the market for fashion bike shorts as a “going-out” item pre-lockdown, so it makes sense that I would pivot to bike shorts as loungewear since Staying In Is The New Going Out™. I ordered just one pair in “Onyx” (why not obsidian, Kim?) seeing as they’re not a need, per se, and I don’t plan to use them as underwear — though they are, ostensibly, just that. You may find yourself asking: so are they not…a pair of boxer briefs? To which I would reply: the experience of them is not a pair of boxer briefs.
SKIMS is positioned as loungewear for people who understand lounging as a lifestyle and, simultaneously, an aesthetic: complementary to pilates and adjacent to Peloton, or at least having money and not knowing what to do with it. Like you’re continuously getting ready for a party that you decide to skip when your besties show up with a bottle of Veuve and a 35mm camera dangling off the wrist of a girl named Pippa. SKIMS hollows out the syllables in “party” so that they’ll play more ergonomically throughout the cream-colored chambers of your chill palace; they leave no imprint on the passenger seat of your boyfriend’s Tesla. Why not just crash on your couch when your couch is a literal dream sofa? (Retail price: $3,500.)
These are basics that have been optimized for a world shaped by comfort, hard edges removed or, preferably, hand-hewn into oblivion: every interaction a transaction, every person a point-of-sale. Loungewear is an inverse armor. We wear it because it reflects the insulation that defines us, our callous interiority made plushly external. We lounge because no matter how bad it gets we assume we’ll watch the fires from afar.
Well, the fires are now consuming us, but at least my spending habits have been de-platformed. You’d think a society so hellbent on being continuously sated would be less uptight about sex and drugs, but I digress.
The remainder of my sweat attire comes from Uniqlo, which is my shit, though my limited further research into “men’s underwear” quickly took me down a Lululemon rabbit hole. Did you know they developed a pair of “cock coddler” pants for men? (My terminology.) Officially they’re “ABC pants,” which stands for Anti-Ball Crushing, the idea being that they provide “just the right amount of room where it matters.” One reviewer (I told you, a rabbit hole) noted that they “look good on instagram posing after your swing,” which really tells you all you need to know.
I guess the moral of the story is that loungewear is violence, but so are golf pants. Sometimes you need to see the fires up close — and sometimes you need your balls crushed.
What I’ve been listening to this past week:
Vanessa-Mae’s 1996 The Classical Album. (No vocals while I work.)
Phoebe Bridgers’s Scott Street. (I put the whole album on and forget about it, then this track comes on and kinda pulls me back into the room.)
Mitski’s ‘Be The Cowboy’. (I’d never given it a chance before, for shame.)