the art of boredom
Month
We’re putting the finishing touches on our F/W ‘12 product lineup and working on the development of S/S '13–and we want to hear what you guys are particularly keen on these days.
What’s your favorite jacket model?
What type of shirt collar do you wear most?
What Suitsupply products have you particularly loved in the past?
What pieces can you not find anywhere (or for a reasonable price) that you’re dying to have made?
Agreed with many of the comments in the notes. I’d love to see more Copenhagen options, especially a double-breasted number (imagine the possibilities there), in cotton (not pique) and more cutaways in staple colors.
Plain and simple: soft-tailored everything + cutaways for days.
This bad article, nicely rebutted by John Gruber, uses a common argument against Apple: that, inevitably, other hardware manufacturers will figure out why Apple products are so popular, create their own good-enough copies, sell them for much less money, and relegate Apple to the same level of market obscurity that they held with Macs in the 1990s.
People also often apply variants of this theory when guessing how other huge players such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will fare when pitting similar products against Apple’s. For instance, Microsoft has effectively infinite money and overwhelming dominance in many software markets. Google has effectively infinite web traffic. Amazon is ruthlessly efficient to sell and ship products at lower prices than nearly anyone.
But all of the money, web traffic, and cheap cardboard boxes in the world can’t buy two huge factors that contribute to Apple’s modern success: time and taste.
Time
Time is twofold: nobody can time-travel to launch a product in the past, and nobody can change how they’ve allocated their time in the past.
No matter how much money Microsoft pours into Windows Phone 7, for example, they can’t travel back in time to 2007 when its limited feature-set and almost nonexistent software library could be more competitive.
And no matter how much Samsung, HTC, Amazon, or Google want to offer high-quality platform software, rich app ecosystems, and well-stocked digital media stores (except Amazon), they can’t change their unfortunate history of minimal investments in these areas over the years.
The iPhone and iPad were built on years of work, experience, relationships, and reputation. There’s a lot more software than hardware in these products. It wasn’t enough to just glue a glass screen to a battery and use an off-the-shelf OS — any hardware manufacturer could have done that. (And indeed, they since have, with some success in phones and little success in tablets.)
Taste
Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.
People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.
Taste in product creation overlaps a lot with design: doing it well requires it to be valued, rewarded, and embedded in the company’s culture and upper leadership. If it’s not, great taste can’t guide product decisions, and great designers leave.
No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.
(Steve Ballmer.)
Improving poor taste in upper leadership is almost as difficult as treating severe paranoia: people who don’t value taste and design will rarely recognize these shortcomings or seek to improve them. With very few exceptions, companies that put out tasteless, poorly designed products will usually never change course.
Anyone who wants to compete well against Apple is going to need good taste at the top and deep-rooted design values throughout the company.
Sounds exactly like some fanboy shit but it’s pure truth.
[y_h_b_t_i]: I’ve never been one to dwell.
The last part especially.
I am Asian, therefore I am cool. Thanks.
For many years, I felt that my youth had been wasted. I spent my adolescence drinking, taking dope, robbing, and fucking around, when I could have been learning to fluently read Sappho and Thomas Mann in the original. But, while I still feel that it would be wonderful to fluently read Sappho and Thomas Mann in the original, I no longer feel that my youth was wasted.
For with age comes the wisdom that it all comes down to ashes in the end. Mary Barnard’s rendering of Sappho, along with what little Greek I possess; William Trask’s rendering of Mann’s Die Betrogene: these are enough for one, such as myself, who was long ago written off for dead.
My youth, as I see it now, was spent as it should have been spent. I am alive, and as I write this, the pleasant morning of the vast blessing of another day, another breath, flows through me. I want now to learn to do the tango, so that I can dance in style on the graves of those of my peers, dropping dead around me like flies, who lived their youths, and their lives, properly and salubriously.
Mens sana in corpore sano, they say. But a sound mind in a sound body is but a plain and pretty flower in a plain and pretty vase. The world is full of such parlour pieces. Fuck them, and prepare thy dancing shoes, for, having survived my youth, and all that followed, I now enjoy the gentler madness to whose shore I have been delivered, and I look forward to tangoing in the graveyard, with you, my darling, or over you.
Nick Tosches