First photo of “heritage-inspired” Scotish label D.S. Dundee. Read an article about them here: http://www.selectism.com/news/2009/11/26/the-process-ds-dundee/#more-28505 (sorry my links options aren’t working).
Second and Third photo’s are from J.Crew’s impressively developing designer gallery, which features items that have been carefully designed and created as a partnership between J.Crew and over 25 designers/labels. It’s brilliant really. Everyone knows that J.Crew’s eye for “classic” has been honed to perfection so it comes as no surprise that their ability to pick out both iconic brands and items from those brands to partner on, is flawless. This heavyweight, waxed cotton late 20/30’s style motorcycle jacket is by
the iconic and heirloom-quality, Belstaff from Staffordshire, England.
As an aside: Do the two guys in these photos (D.S. Dundee and J.Crew with Belstaff) look, not just similar, but like the same person? Interesting.
In other news, it is apparently officially the Christmas season. I can barely believe it. As this year rushes past with extreme force, and unsettling speed, I find myself once again in Southern California for the majority of the coming Nativity month. This will be my third Christmas-time looking out the window and having a hard time remembering whether it is Septemeber or April or truly December. It’s odd, that that lack of seasonal change bothers me so much, growing up I always thought I’d love it. At home in my beloved midwest I always dealt with a certain heaviness. “Seasonal-depression” they call it, I call it feeling human. Feeling ones physicality and relationship to the natural world in overly-honest, terribly-finite terms. It was the bone-gripping cold. The grey landscape. The grey sky, hung with grey clouds frozen in place. The grey cars caked in salt. The grey ground, frozen so solidly, so deeply that you could barely run on it without feeling that awful stinging, resounding pain shooting up your calves and through your heels (like when you jump from something to high and land strangely).
Don’t get me wrong, there is wonder and warmth and beauty and deep-down satifaction to be found in those difficult midwest winters, to be sure. When the sun starts to set with that deep winter haste and you’re only just on your way home from high school and you pull into your snow caked driveway with a certain amount of fishtailing that makes you feel like a champ, or maybe a twenty-first century version of the covered wagon style settlers. And as you glance in the rear-view mirror at the way that billow of exhaust and steam from the back of the car look in the last couple minutes of daylight. And as you stomp and slide your way up the driveway and front walk through the branches of the trees around the house that are weighed low with snow and ice and notice how warm and inviting your house looks, hunkered down into the snow, shoulders shrugged and arms wrapped around itself, constant and steady steam rising off the roof, glowing windows. (And of course hundreds of other moments just like this.) And the hope, always, of spring, the excitement for summer. Spring, she always comes sneaking and peaking around the corner just when you’ve given up hope that there will a spring or summer ever again. When you’ve given up hope that the grass will ever turn green, and the trees will ever brandish their leaves against a sun that lasts longer than six short hours. Then suddenly there it is, spring, it happens in one day it seems, when suddenly on that usually dark drive home from school you notice the orange/red glow of pre-dusk, you reach for the first time in three or four months to turn down the heat and loosen the scarf around your neck, and as you pull into the driveway and hear that squishing sound of tire against wet pavement, and you’ve open the door and started stepping out almost before the car is even turned off and suddenly you smell it. Earth. Dirt. So pungent, so thick in the air, you know it will probably stick to your clothes and with a strange surging feeling through your gut and chest you realize that the grass is turning green again. And all is well with the world.
I guess that’s what I miss, seasons that bowl you over with excitement for their coming, seasons that just for their being could make you cry, seasons that wear you out, seasons that make you more honest, seasons that remind you of your humanity. Seasons that invite you act and play and participate in activities that belong solely to them.
Maybe oneday I’ll learn to create my own seasons here in Southern California, or maybe I’ll learn to be better at recognizing the subtleties of the ones that already exist. But for right now… I’ll look forward to returning home in just a couple weeks bundled in jackets and hats and mittens and earmuffs and long johns and boots and scarves.
