Marked by the Market: shoe as stock and the ineffable mutability of capital

First, an intro for my fellow oldsters. If you're my son's age, and you grew up Web 2.0, this is unlikely to be news. Skip past the Pea Coat bit for questions I hope you find interesting.

Fast Fashion = clothes as Soft Goods

From the perspective of the planet, "Fast Fashion" is fashion's bad guy. Fast Fashion is the gob-smackingly massive part of the fashion industry with the worst ecological outcomes and the most exploitative labor situations at every stage of production. (More on that in future posts). Although Fast Fashion has been producing mind-boggling mountains of product at exponentially increasing rates in the past two decades, it isn't new; check out the history of Brooks Brothers if you're so inclined. And Fast Fashion will be increasing in scale in the coming years (see Statista link here).

Fast Fashion products are, for the most part, lose all their value in the market once you buy them. You can't resell Old Navy stuff on eBay and make even a modest profit; and you can't sell Shein stuff there at all. Being made of evil shit, and assembled by humans under some of the worst working conditions on the planet, ie Evil, your Shein garments have no need to keep any kind of value once you've paid for them. They're like a plastic water bottle--wear it once and throw it in the ocean. Or hey! Wear it again if you want. A top from Shein is a Soft, or Non-Durable Good, like unto a paper plate, or a plastic supermarket bag. Once you buy it, it has no value in any market anywhere.

Shoes as Durable Goods

Not so with the many apparel products of better-respected brands, like Nike. Head to StockX's app, and you can follow the fortunes of a particular year and colorway of a particular shoe by a particular designer, eg this Nike SB Dunk Low Tightbooth, here, and you'll see what I mean.

For a while now--for decades in streetwear time--the streetwear market has operated like a stock market. Particularly, a commodities market. Just as in markets for other durable commodities, like Bauxite, say (Dr. No, anyone?), one can buy a pair of Nikes; take them into inventory, and store them--or use them, but carefully, without damaging them--and then, at the right time vis a vis your original purchase, flip them for profit.

If you're a sneakerhead, this isn't news. Flipping shoes has been a thing since the '90s, when devoted streetwear/hiphop fans waited in line in Queens to buy Jordans etc, and later traded/bought+sold them with friends and fellow sneakerheads. A local market, in other words. A very human market. A quaint pre-Internet, physical market, independent of the global markets the birthed the shoe itself... one busy innovating.

Today one can make a living wage flipping shoes. Like other businesses existing within the post-retail spaces internet-based markets have coopted, it doesn't need much bricks and mortar. With markets like Grailed, this is true for any and all apparel products, not just shoes. Pending more research, I'm guessing that there are internet-based markets for all kinds of consumer goods that live between the Soft, Non-Durable Goods world and the Durable Goods world.

My premise here is that there's something going on psychologically, socially, culturally when we shift our clothing from Fashion = Utility + Self-Expression to Fashion also = Specific, Measurable Market Positions, like a stock on the stock market, or a Bond.

So if the Nike SB Dunk, or any other product of the global fashion industry can be a stock--where values shift radically and chaotically--what pieces of apparel are like unto US Treasury Bonds?

The Pea Coat

Check out this history of the Pea Coat here.

If you buy a Pea Coat on Grailed, use it with care and keep it well, you'll be able to sell it on Grailed again for a small profit, if you've monitored the market. And if you've waited long enough, the US economy might have gone through some inflation (as it did last year)--and your profit will be bigger. In fact, your Pea Coat will have acted like a US Treasury Bond. Like the Pea Coat itself, your item will have weathered an economic storm with you, keeping your capital warm and dry while the tempest blows around you.

Since you're a wise investor, you'll want to have a closet full of clothes that have physical utility (keep you warm in winter, cool in summer etc), psychological utility (they reinforce your sense of self etc), and social utility (in your clothes, in a given context, you'll feel the balance of individuality and belonging that you like). And in 2023, given that every item of apparel in your closet is also a position in a market, you'll want your closet to reflect your understanding of the shifting sands of global capital. Maybe you're all-in on Risk, and you're rocking designers not represented on Grailed. Or maybe you're all-in on Stability, and you're all about the "classics" of 20th century white culture, eg Ralph Lauren. Or perhaps you realize that clothes are like art, meaning that a Rick Owens greatcoat functions like an Andy Warhol print--a perfect container of extra-national capital. But at least you can wear the Rick.

If apparel can always be an investment, not a thing to be used up, how does our behavior in the apparel market change? What changes for us personally--psychologically, socially, spiritually? And what changes for us as a species? Meaning--is this shift in market behavior diminishing or exacerbating global climate change? Is this shift empowering more of us, giving us access to the power of equity, or is it disempowering us?

In the past, clothes were Durable Goods

In 1357, peasants like us mostly grew, processed and wove their own fabric. And if we bought four yards of Linsey-Woolsey (a medieval blend of linen and wool fibers), at an actual, physical market, it cost literally a fortune. In a land-based, agricultural society and economy, money was a whole different thing back then. In any case, textiles were crafted not into Soft Goods, like food, but into Durable Goods. You made a shirt for your partner, and a chemise for yourself. That shirt and that chemise were durable. They were going to last not for years, but for decades. Multiple lifetimes, even. You made clothing that was more like a Mack Truck than like a Latte. You transformed a Durable Good in its tradable, stock-like form--the woven textile--into Durable Goods that, while less tradable--less stock-like--were actually Durable. Your clothes, like a Mack Truck, were massively, heavily valuable: clothes that would literally keep you alive and in relationship with your neck of the woods, ecologically and economically, for the foreseeable future.

Not today. Today we mostly make clothes the way we make ice cream cones--watch the next Shein Haul vid on YouTube. And the clothes we make as durable goods, eg the past decade of denimhead stuff, these we treat like stocks.

What is happening? If shoes are separating into shoe-as-disposable-soft-good and shoe-as-Stock, where else is that happening? And how does it feel to live with The Market looking over your shoulder in this way?

There’s a thing about money which I struggle to grok. I understand the concept, intellectually. But it’s a shallow and a brittle understanding, because I don’t grok it… yet. It feels like the rosy fingers of a dawning understanding are reaching out to me through an image.

A vast ocean made of oily, iridescent gold, teeming with schools of glistening fish of all sizes, so thick with life that the fluid of the ocean itself is obscured by the endless churning and splashing of the fish themselves. The sky is as golden as the ocean, as if we see it in a permanent dusk. It is beautiful. But we are standing still in this image, and there is no ground here; no islands, no archipelagos as far as the eye can see. How? Where are we grounded?

In a way, this is a pretty simple metaphor for global economic activity in our version of capitalism, as it exists now. There is a liquid here, currency, in an ocean of activity that is so crowded that the liquid is little more than a lubricant for the organisms that are native to this environment. If you’re a little fish, there is no safety but that of the the school; and if you’re a big fish, there is no barrier to your consumption beyond the direction of your maw. It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful. Mesmerizing to watch.

How do you feel/know the movements of capital in your body?