Ersatz: Module 3

01 In the beggining: Basic overview of a garment

My relationship with clothing probably starts with the white tee. I was in the fifth or sixth grade, still youthfully rotund and blissfully unaware of clothing as anything other than not being naked, and pocketing for all the things I might want to carry around (the latter really carried over into adulthood).

My memory is hazy, overlapping with all the hand-me-downs and oddities given to me at the time, but it was probably an Adidas Climacool tee, which very neatly slotted into my wardrobe of hiking pants and random white sneakers, maybe Reeboks. But that memory represents a turning point, one where I realized garments could feel a lot of ways. It was a shirt that lived up to its name; colder to wear than most other things I’d owned up until that point. The ease of a white tee is something I still carry with me today; even after I’d switched to cotton tees, they always felt breezier than the darker shirts I owned, and worked with practically anything (dress codes notwithstanding).

At their most basic, garments exist for functional reasons, and this was exactly my frame of reference, but a seed was planted then, and slowly grew whenever I’d come home from school and zip off the legs of my pants to sit in the sala.

Some of these are “simpler” expressions of how garments can be executed, or at least what we’ve decided to call simple compared to some of the other things we’ve managed to find. When we source items to add to our offerings, we always try to find things that shine through the effectiveness of everything they do, even if there is no complex pattern. There’s a lot to be said about that kind of graceful execution and utilization of textile.

Sometimes it makes me think of when I didn’t know nearly as much, when some things were just nicer to wear than others, and you couldn’t quite put your finger on it: it was just done right.

02 Later on: Relationship with Clothing

Generally, if you start to think more about how a garment can be done or made “more complex”, it follows that your relationship with clothing has started to deepen. There’s nothing wrong with the pure use-case for clothes, but for those who invest time and effort into learning about and caring for our garments, the relationships and emotional bonds we form towards these objects are often very meaningful.

My first serious garment purchase was a jacket, when I was around 14 or 15. At this point I’d moved on to wearing jeans (straight or bootcut, nothing else) with all of my white tees and rotated between two pairs of shoes: red Chuck Taylor highs, or a pair of Adidas Superstars. Both were hand-me-downs, albeit comfortable and welcome additions to the life of someone who’d begun to realize clothing could affect how you felt, how you moved in a space, and perhaps most surprisingly at the time, how others could perceive you. At a time when getting along with your peers and being at least interesting, if not attractive, was something that filled me with trepidation and made me feel pressured, finding ways to be comfortable with myself was of the utmost importance.

Realizing that clothes could do so much for this comfort changed how I felt and thought, and so on my birthday, I asked for this black cotton double-breasted jacket, with epaulets. Sort of the band variety, but it fit me flatteringly and accentuated my shoulders, things I’d become aware of as I grew older and my body began changing: gone were the days of bonjing joy, replaced instead with a lanky uncertainty.

I felt safer and contained in the jacket, and it tied in nicely with my looping The Black Parade. It felt like I’d expressed several things just by wearing the jacket. I meandered through this feeling, wanting to learn about clothing and feeling flattered whenever something I wore got compliments, but at some point I realized the most interesting things were the clothes themselves: shapes, forms, closures, the tactility of nice hardware and textiles, all of it started to draw me in.

Maybe two years later my older brother started working at a now-defunct store called Greyone Social, where I met people who exposed me to the world of things like high-end Nike and Adidas collaborations, raw denim, Taka Hayashi Vans, Visvim, and Porter products. The idea that garments could be pushed to this extent, with this much attention to detail and care for the process was a revelation, and I was reeling.

I had come full circle, growing into a deep interest I had to navigate on the (nonexistent) budget of a high school student. All of the social dimensions took a backseat as I lost myself in hours of research, finding joy in simply learning about perspectives and execution. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to source things without being reminded of that time: learning, and the joy of discovery; things that would have intrigued me without feeling too “difficult” or veering into “runway art” that I didn’t yet fully comprehend.

03. Nowadays: Reconsideration

My interest in clothes grew at a time when the internet was different enough for me to feel lost nowadays. There was a lot of “legwork” or “research” involved, so it took me some time to eventually warm up to the idea of clothing as art. The only thing I really miss about that time was the thrill of the search; incomprehensible blogs and photos of all these exciting garments, often with thorough write ups that left me wondering what I might have lost over Google translation.

Setting foot into that conversation; learning about the countless ways clothing could be art, was a radical departure from where I began, and really put into perspective just how much was going on out there. It was a huge world, and everything I could possibly discover, everything I was yet to learn about, excited me.

One of the very first garments that did this for me was a Rick Owens jacket. It was in the way it interacted with my body; what it flattered, what it concealed, what the high armholes did for ease of movement, how subtle all of the (highly complex) seams were, and what the pocketing felt like. It’s a far cry from what I’d wear in this day and age, but as I stood there taking the feeling of it in, something really clicked: this was a world in which so much could be done, and I wanted to know how people were pushing the boundaries. 

Eventually all the words settle into similar patterns: the joy of learning and sharing, the security and comfort of clothes you love, their roles as intermediary between you and the rest of the world. The clothes may (sometimes) get more and more complex, but always for the sake of expressing someone’s vision. 

It feels like the three modules we’ve put out thus far have become an iterative exercise: a way to refine and build upon some of the things that really inform how Ersatz moves: a library of garments, appreciation for clothing even if that appreciation takes different forms from person to person, and a celebration of garments as the coalescence of a designer’s vision. 

I hope all the words I’ve offered thus far do justice to everything we’re sharing with you.