Why Some Things Look Better Used
Why Some Things Look Better Used
The day you buy something is almost never the best it will ever look.
Most things are sold at their peak. Photographed new, sold new, and downhill from there. A few things are made the other way around, and the Japanese have had a word for that idea for four hundred years.
Two Words, Then One
Wabi and sabi started apart.
Wabi carried a sense of quiet and spareness, closer to solitude than to luxury. It described the beauty of having less and choosing well.
Sabi began somewhere colder. It meant withered, lean, desolate. Over centuries, through poetry, it turned into something else. It came to mean the beauty that is visible on a surface after time has been at it. Patina. The bloom of age.
Put together they name a single idea. A thing is not finished when it is made. It is finished by being used.
The Tea Room
Sen no Rikyu, who lived from 1522 to 1591, is the figure most associated with it. He shaped the Japanese tea ceremony into the form still practiced today.
The fashionable thing in his era was imported Chinese ware, expensive and flawless, and owning it was how wealthy townspeople showed what they had. Rikyu turned toward the opposite. Rough local pottery, hand formed rather than thrown, dim rooms, plain wood and clay.
There is a story about him as a young man, told about him rather than by him. Asked to tend a garden, he raked it until it was perfect, then shook a cherry tree so that blossom fell across the ground before he showed it to his teacher. The flaw is what made it worth looking at.
What This Has to Do With Cloth
Almost everything.
Indigo sits on the outside of a cotton fiber rather than soaking through it. The core of the yarn stays white. That is the whole reason denim fades where a body creases it, and it is why a pair of jeans at year five carries a record of five years of a specific person walking around.
Leather does the same thing in a different language. It darkens at the points where a hand touches it and holds the shape it was asked to hold.
A garment wash is the same argument made deliberately. It starts the fade rather than waiting for it.
Designing for Year Five
This is a design decision and it costs money. Cloth that ages well is more expensive than cloth that photographs well. Indigo that has been rope dyed with a white core is harder to make than indigo pushed all the way through the yarn. Hardware poured in brass costs more than hardware stamped out of something softer.
None of that shows up on the day a piece is bought. All of it shows up later.
Clothes worth keeping and worth passing down are the only kind worth designing. Everything else is a photograph.
A Way Of Life.
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