Perth text
They’re from Perth, but what else is even in Perth? You hear Perth and think of some sort of mirage. Unlike other Australian cities, Perth is never recommended to you. There is no distinctive culture of Perth that finds its way into your consciousness: no major foodstuff, no museum, no landmark, no thing. It is just Perth, an ontology of Perthness unto itself. Is Perth nice? Surely people like to live there, or we wouldn’t have Perth at all. But, like, is it Anchorage nice or Playa del Carmen nice? Is Perth big? Describe Perth to me, you beg the void, and only silence is returned. You think of that Bon Iver song for a split second before you remember that the rest of that album contains fictional place names. Is Perth real? You’re pretty sure Perth is real. Perth might be the furthest possible major city from Chicago by plane. You search this to confirm. It takes 31 hours to get to Perth through Dubai – and 19 to get to Cape Town through IAD. Okay, so no contest. Perhaps this is why you know nothing about Perth. Are you ignorant? You’re not ignorant. This is Perth’s problem, not yours.
The company is from Perth, the raw material is from Japan, and the stores that sell the stuff are from everywhere. There is no way any of this could have happened without globalization, of course. There is a flagship, yes, but as you read this there are probably no customers inside of it. (What time is it in Perth?) The operation is propped up by the system. Presumably the owners like Perth enough to double down on it and throw all of their work on a container ship to slowly trundle halfway around the world. You are left to question the logistics of running a fashion label from Perth. You contemplate a high-end house’s tote bags that list all the cities they exist in: New York, Milan, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Perth.
In the take of Barney’s collapsing and further online consolidation that everything with a pulse is correctly suspicious of, boutiques have atomized into a small, queered punk mist, everywhere and nowhere. They all have different names and they are all ungoogleable, passed around message boards like secrets in a world where there are no secrets, only illegibility. Photograph the interior of one of them and you would never be able to clock where it is located, with one exception. When you have a brand that exists as brand, as aura, as Perthness, this non-placeness is where you feel most at home.
None of this would matter particularly much if the Perthian objects themselves weren’t staggering. Unlike many of their brethren, they are both delicate-seeming and meant to be worn hard. The fashion of it all is artifice plunked on top of a deeper structure of engineering & utility. The owners recommend you machine wash at home, in defiance of god. Nobody else has to know that you’re wearing something 6 years old that you’ve absolutely flogged across 4 continents. It’s something you keep to yourself, knowing that, yes, you spent a lot on this thing, but your cost per wear was kept shockingly low as a result of the deeper relationship that you built with the object. This is what should happen and never seems to happen in practice. You try a few brands and retreat to workwear that doesn’t give out. Through all of this, you wonder whether rich people just buy delicate things to wear a few times and toss, and whether that is the whole point of high-end fashion. (They do, and it is, frequently.)