The Weekly Roundup (week of 9.18)
Another day another think piece about the male loneliness epidemic.
1. Young Men Who Dropped Out of a Dating Pool
This is a very interesting topic and one that I think gets misunderstood and blown out of proportion, particularly by disaffected men who for the first time in history find themselves being outearned and out-competed in the professional world by women. I think it’s extremely straightforward if you take away all of the window dressing and conjecture people like to attribute these trends. This is purely Darwinian natural selection. You can learn a lot from the mating rituals of birds. Men aren’t so picky, and women tend to not marry down for good reason, backed by years of historical norms that prevented them from being financially or otherwise independent. That’s all there is to it. You’re not entitled to meet anyone. It’s not a right. It’s an earned thing you get to have if you prove yourself worthy. Men don’t have any right to get bent out of shape about this stuff, and sometimes I feel like writing about it in this condescending, “you poor thing” way is almost making things worse. Anyway, this trend isn’t going away anytime soon (if ever), and the more we as a society try to avoid thinking about hierarchy in the sexual marketplace as the most brutally intrinsic aspect of humanity, nature, and life in general, the more we miss the point and misdiagnose the problem. Read here.
2. Remaking J.Crew: Creative Director Brendon Babenzien on Year Two of the Brand's Reboot
On another note, here’s something much lighter to think about! This is a cool interview with J. Crew’s Creative Director and streetwear giant Noah Babenzian.
“A big part of the business these days is people who just have a vision. And you create that vision with whatever you've got. I think that's incredible, and I love the democratization it affords. People are, like, I see something, and I want to do it—and they put it out there. If that’s how you define ‘designer’, then by all means, I would be considered a designer.
I think I function in this anthropological space, more than anything else. Kind of being aware of where we are as a society, or, in the case of Noah, where I would like society to go. What would I like the value structure of our society to be, and how do I create that with the clothing, the business, the messaging. All of the pieces tie together to say, This is maybe how we should be. That’s how I function: pushing a direction of where I'd like us to exist.”
3. Inside Apple’s Plan to Change the Way We Watch Sports
A good look inside Apple’s plans to take over the sports broadcasting world.
Apple is methodically working their way into deals with leagues and broadcasters—a Major League Baseball deal here, a rumored Pac-12 offer there. Recently, the company has been rumored as a potential “strategic partner” for—or outright acquirer of—ESPN. “I think sports is something that is going to continue to grow in importance,” he told me, “but it's clear that the path that it's on now is not the right one. And so, what is it? That gave us an opportunity to participate, or to get in the game around it and see if we could shape the future of it. And we'll see. It's early, but I think the opportunity's there. Who's going to take it and what's it going to be? Not as clear.”
4. How Thom Browne’s Gray Suit Conquered American Fashion
But, in an industry known for chasing novelty, Browne has built one of the most influential brands by iterating on a single idea. His deceptively humble goal is, as he regularly tells his staff, “to make the gray suit look interesting.” Once a menswear cult label, Thom Browne has in recent years become favored among celebrities who wish to signal that they’re game for fashion risk-taking. In 2018—the same year the Italian textile juggernaut Zegna bought a majority stake in the brand, at a valuation of five hundred million dollars—LeBron James, a longtime fan, bought his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates matching Thom Browne suits to wear to playoff games. (The fashion critic Alexander Fury told me that Browne suits hold a special appeal among “big fucking straight men” who like the look of muscles bulging out of fine tailoring.)