Quiet, luxury!

The emperor's new fleece

Nothing gets me to click like a headline asking, ‘Is such-and-such outrageously priced item worth it?’ The answer given is inevitably yes, or else why write about it. I have never once clicked on one of these and gotten the accurate answer which is that when you think of all the other stuff you could do with that amount of money, maybe this thing is not better than those others. It always reads as an ad, even if it isn’t that, or not technically.

“Is a $910 Fleece Actually Worth It?” So asks New York Times fashion reporter Jacob Gallagher. A man named Jonah Weiner—who is not, as I had first conflated, Jonah Lehrer—says it is. Why? Because he really likes it.

Weiner bought the woolen fleece despite, per his own remarks, not being readily able to afford it. He did so both because ooh shiny and because of the very modern thing wherein you are not merely investing in quality when spending up on a garment but distinguishing yourself from the tacky poors who don’t care about the environment or don’t have $910 for a sweater (yes there’s a third way; I’m getting to that).

There is also a cohort that seems to have convinced themselves that they’re punishing their wallets for the benefit of the planet. Mr. Weiner said he and others were “skeeved out by the notion of wearing petroleum.” (Most economical fleeces on the market are produced from polyester.) Shoppers like him, Mr. Weiner said, are soothed by the idea of buying something that connects them “as close as possible to some sheep on a hillside.”

If polyester isn’t your thing, might you consider something called a zip sweater? And if your main concern is the environment, what about just not buying new clothes? Because that is also an option. Not shopping, or buying used. Used natural materials or otherwise. (I still regret not buying a used neon pink fleece in a Parkdale vintage shop and may yet see if it’s still there.)

The NYT article gives the impression that someone has gone and invented a new thing, fleece made out of real wool, when what has almost certainly happened here (I am guessing; I have never touched this garment) is, someone thought to put zippers on a sweater and market it as a fleece. I know I owned a sweater-material hoodie, material composition unknown, high-school-ish era, so this concept cannot be entirely novel.

But maybe this sweater I mean fleece is better than the rest? It is certainly being marketed as such:

If this is a rosy image of people who spend $910 on clothes, it’s one that will please Andreas Steiner, the Italian-born founder and designer of Rier. …

His wool fleeces, he said, won’t leach microplastics into the water as polyester versions have been found to in studies. He went as far as to claim that the fleece could decompose entirely within about six weeks if it was buried. (The New York Times did not test this out.)

Mr. Steiner is aware that there’s any number of ways he could get the cost down. He could add thrifty polyester to the material, produce them in Bulgaria where wages are lower than Austria or switch the zippers. But that would compromise his vision. The price, he said, is “honest.”

This is bad news for owners of the now-peasant-sounding $400 sweaters or (ahem) $40 CAD Uniqlo fluffy fleeces that absolutely double as stuffed animals.

Is polyester bad because of the environment or because it’s “thrifty”? Discuss amongst yourselves. The answer lies in the readily available all-wool thrift store sweater. Sure a moth may have gotten to it but moths gotta eat as well, right? (Do not do as I have done. Dry-clean or dryer-clean those vintage sweaters before putting them away!)

To me it seems obvious: the appeal of the $910 fleece is that wearing one makes you look like the sort of person for whom $910 is effectively a nickel. But it has become unchic to telegraph a desire to look wealthy, so it now must be couched in stuff about values. Your values simply align with those of the posh.

But the plebs catch on, and now you can get sweater-material (acrylic) lounge pants at the mall, in all the quiet luxury shades of beige. And so the cycle continues.