It’s the last issue of the year! What a feat for us all. Before we get to our regular content, I want to thank you for sticking it out with me through the year of news. For the more than five years I’ve been publishing this thing, writing to you—and considering what might tickle or enrage you, or get you thinking—has kept me sharp and engaged, and it’s been a balm to process this year in particular by sharing these morsels. (Let’s also hear it for the email exchanges that follow each issue. Keep ’em coming.)
I’ll also take this opportunity to tease a small change or two to the newsletter come January— truly nothing major, but keep an eye out. For now, by way of recap of the entire life of this newsletter and not just 2020, please enjoy the large and unwieldy archival playlist, which I hope will be a fun exercise in nostalgia and not a plunge into emotional purgatory in the way of my Spotify Wrapped. (If it is, though, I want to hear about it in detail.) Now, on to the rest.
It may have been a year full of lows, but it has been exhilarating to watch the pandemic build a gateway for perfectly reasonable things* that didn’t seem like they’d ever come true (here’s lookin’ at you, WFH). One of my favorite developments is the rise of male sewists, which is what we call people of all genders when we don’t want to call them “seamstresses.” A number of (Gen X and Millennial) gents have been sewing their way to social media fame with quar-time productivity and perfectly-fitting threads, dismantling the craft’s lady silo with each new garment. Perhaps the most hopeful part of this story is that several of these guys are taking off on Tik Tok, where the real youth live, untethered from the olds’ gender norms. Here’s hoping they see the craft and, um, follow suit.
*We are still waiting for other perfectly reasonable things, of course, many of which are more fundamental (equity, justice, health care?) than the things we’ve achieved.
On the other end of the male activity spectrum, golf, which had reportedly been struggling in recent years, is having a resurgence as people (that is, rich men) Covid-relocate to their vacation homes full time. Will the stand-around-outside sport stick around once we get our other activities back? Or, to rephrase that question, can golf courses just become parks already?
Now, before you go out and buy handmade golf polos for the men in your life, I want to touch on some other issues regarding people who sew. No doubt, you’ve been bombarded by “shop small” messaging this season, which is all well and good, but as Mia Sato wrote in The New Republic, is not the ethical OxiClean you’ve been led to believe. Supporting individual creators is great if you can swing the cost of a handmade item, but it actually does nothing to address the exploitation of workers in the global fashion supply chain. Like, when you buy from Joe on instagram, Joe makes some money, but there are still thousands of people in factories who continue to be overworked and underpaid. That’s not a problem you can fix by diverting your funds (particularly when you consider that this move entails having funds to divert in the first place); the idea of “fixing retail” by buying directly from producers is roughly the same as expecting to fight Covid by telling people to wash their hands. (Goes without saying whose hands need to be washed in this scenario (it’s the industry bosses’).)
