Levi's New Frontier

Although I rarely wear jeans I do like Levi’s, which are an American classic. They embody some of the best American values: hard-working, long-lasting and inexpensive. They simply do their job well, again and again.

However, I doubt the wisdom of their recent business of partnering with men’s clothing shops to make special editions. These are usually based on proprietary “washes” which are usually indistinguishable to my, admittedly untrained, eye. The latest of these is with Brooks Brothers, following on their collaboration with J. Crew. Part of that brand’s effort to reinvent itself as a boutique provider of men’s clothing classics in addition to their own collection.

Brooks itself attempted to get into the denim business several years ago just as the designer denim market was reaching its peak. (And oh, how it pains me to write the oxymoronic words “designer denim.”) Those “five-pocket” jeans at least distinguish themselves by being made from longer-staple and thus higher-quality supima cotton. An assurance that isn’t to be found on the new pairing. The collaboration with J. Crew also offered some jeans made from selvedge denim which Brooks doesn’t appear to do, or at least doesn’t advertise. This is troubling because despite these drawbacks the new jeans are more expensive than previous products from either Levi’s or Brooks. I am certainly a novice when it comes to denim, but I’m not sure how much value is added with the new collaboration. It appears to be simply the pairing of two classic names hoping that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

We shall see what the market decides.

Not Quite Savages

While in graduate school, I repeatedly raided the library to take advantage of their collection of out-of-print books by Cleveland Amory. This old-line New Englander possessed many of the biases of his upbringing, but he knew how to put a point. He also wrote one of my favorite descriptions of the Pilgrims, whom it has become all too fashionable to mock in our comfortably distant and comfortably secure times.

Actually, and in severe point of fact, of the forty-one men who signed the famous Compact in the cabin of the Mayflower, though eleven were addressed as “Mr.” and a handful could claim “Master,” not a single one bore the title of “Gent.” And, of original passengers, no less than eighteen were included under the designation “Family Servants and Young Cousins.” Charles M. Andrews, in The Fathers of New England, puts the matter in no uncertain terms. “A group of English emigrants,” he said, “more socially insignificant could hardly be imagined. … Their intellectual and material poverty, lack of business enterprise, unfavorable situation and defenseless position in the eyes of the law, rendered them an almost negative factor in the later life of New England.”
These are harsh words, of course, and they not only fail to do justice to the Pilgrims who were, as a group, perhaps the greatest of all this country’s heroes, but they are also inaccurate about the actual accomplishments of the Pilgrims. These Pilgrims, ironically often blamed for the excesses of intolerance of Boston’s Puritans, from whom they were very different, number among their signal accomplishments the first teaching and practicing of the separation of church and state, the first practicing of freedom of religious worship, the first trial by jury extending to all people, the first abolishing of primogeniture, the first recognition of the rights of women, the first system of free public education and, indeed, the introduction of almost all of our system of equality.

Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society?

Fwd: Cicero

Earlier I was reading Cicero's Second Philippic Against Antony and one of the crimes he charges Antony with is that Antony had a letter from Cicero and read it out in public. Cicero doesn't deny authorship, although he does get in some good jibes about Antony's prior forgeries and the use of scribes, but crime aside, this accusation is particularly damning as it describes a strike against the gentlemanly code. As Cicero writes:

He read out a letter, this creature, which he said I had sent him. But he has absolutely no idea how to behave - how other people behave. Who, with the slightest knowledge of decent people's habits, could conceivably produce letters sent him by a friend, and read them in public, merely because some quarrel has arisen between him and the other? Such conduct strikes at the roots of human relations; it means that absent friends are excluded from communicating with each other. For men fill their letters with flippancies which appear tasteless if they are published - and with serious matters which are quite unsuitable for wide circulation. Antony's action proves he is totally uncivilized.

I found it fascinating (though easy to believe, upon reflection) that this breech of privacy was so condemned two thousand years ago. Today, with easily-exchanged email and easily-posted pictures the trust that we put in others is even greater. So too, must be the social punishment for betrayal.