What goes up
The trajectory of brands is hard to reckon with. Nothing stays fixed. Goods that have been around for 500 years are now being munged through the fustigations of hive-mind globalism. Everything is scarce, or feels scarce. We buy in haste and sometimes regret it. Or we buy something and its meaning changes over time.
I think often of Kaikado, whose canisters predate Japan’s trade with the West in any capacity, and are now venerated by high-end design shops globally, with no appreciable change to their production volume. The brand is about as durable as they come, and I’m sure demand has never been higher. But the perception has changed. The fact that I, a Westerner, have 3 separate Kaikado canisters with different high-end Japanese teas in them, a 15-hour flight away from the country, is on face boggling. The world will change; Kaikado will shrug.
For different reasons, I think of Haberdash, for a long time the only good menswear boutique in the city. A pair of their tailored pants sits in my closet, but the store itself is long closed, replaced in spirit by a handful of hypebeasty competitors.
On the clothing front, I think also of Evan Kinori, whom I’ve written text about before. He is still active, but his pieces are deeply limited. A hoodie of his sits near the pants.
Neither are long for this world. If the pants or the hoodie are destroyed, I can’t replace them. Kinori no longer makes the hoodie. Only 24 others exist in that size anywhere. As for my Kaikado canisters, I can replace them, but it would be a pain in the ass, and none of them would have the same patina or scuff marks.
One develops a relationship with these sorts of objects, and watching them wear in over time is a form of mindfulness, of attention, of conscious use. The only thing uniting them is their durability – and yet they remain curiously transient at the same time.
I have previously advocated for waiting to buy stuff. Keep a “to buy” list where objects must wait six weeks before purchasing them. But if a brand isn’t around for long, or if you’re observing an object in person, you may not have six weeks to figure it out. In the face of scarcity, in the existence of preciousness, one has only their intuition to rely on – and a default to “no” when considering anything new. When Evan Kinori drops something, my size will sell out within six weeks.
No brand lasts forever – and more importantly, no brand stays fixed over time. I once bought a sweater from an Italian brand called Stone Island. Two weeks later, Drake wore Stone Island in a music video. My sweater was suddenly worth 4 figures; it elicited stares on the subway. I still wear it, but I removed the logo.
If I had bought a Kaikado canister in the fifties, it would signify vastly differently from a Kaikado canister now. You can buy Kaikado online now. It’s still interesting to own Kaikado, as it represents a clear choice around quality & durability, but it’s also no longer quite as special to own one as it did when you had to literally fly to Japan to make it happen.
Small-batch quality does not result in long-term, easy availability,by design. What is your relationship to scarcity, and what happens when the relationship itself is scarce? When we find something that is clearly precious, does that heighten the sense that we should own it? And how do we manage our impulse to buy something that is necessarily limited-edition and fleeting – not because of any artificial sense of scarcity, but because the act of craft itself is precious and limited?