BACK TO WORKWEAR

A recent Double RL 'popup shop' in Bushwick Inlet Park, Brooklyn NY

A recent move to NYC brought the welcome impression that America has gone back to Work!  Especially in the former epicenters of industrial labor like Brooklyn and Portland, places where men and women would gather to make Things, in riverside industrial hubs renowned the world over for their products, gritty realism, and pollution - all signs that production is really Happening.  So it appears on the streets of Williamsburg, where bearded, denim-clad young men pound the pavement looking like extras from 'The Gangs of New York'.  I haven't seen this much dress code uniformity since the 1970s in San Francisco, with packs of 'Castro clones' roaming the streets in...jeans and flannel! (But highly tailored). Now we are 'worker clones', in which irony compounds on irony - Labor is dead, or at least, we're not doing any, we all just look like factory workers, lumberjacks, and tradesmen, while we click away on keyboards. 

A recent photo-op at Lumberjack Fetishists Anonymous

Real industry moved to China and the Third World, which are busy despoiling the landscape, a sure sign that actual Workers are hard at Work.  Since Chinese Communism has switched to state-controlled Libertarian Capitalism (is that even POSSIBLE?), Chinese workers have shed their 'Mao' uniforms of drab green... but have they discovered Workwear?  Is DoubleRL supplying the multitudes with authentic garb appropriate to an actual life of Labor?  I don't know, but they should.  Mao jackets were chic in US in the 70s, perhaps we can sell Chinese laborers distressed denim and flannel, which is actually made in China!  That would be a coup.

Tattooed pigs pulled from the Huangpu River, downstream from the Tattoo Academy of Jiaxing.  Pigs are used for practice by students, their skin being similar to humans'.  At the end of each school year, thousands are simply dumped into the river, upsetting Shanghai residents downstream.  'Hipster Pig Soup' is how Shanghaians refer to the river at these times.

While we're talking China, did you know that all 15,000 of those pigs floating in Haungpu River were TATTOOED!?!  It seems the Chinese are intent on winning the 'culture wars' as well as the dominating the global economy, and a massive tattoo training academy in Jiaxing is churning out new artists by the thousands!  Not only that, the factories which actually produce the 'authentic workwear' found in hipster shops worldwide is made right next door to the Tattoo Academy!  It boggles the mind. 

DSquared, figuring it out...

I predict the whole Workwear thing will soon float down the East, Thames, and Columbia rivers like so many tattooed pigs.  What's next?  We better start googling 'Conart' on ebay, because 80s/90s Hip Hop gear will shortly see middle-class hipsters spinning on their backs atop cardboard squares... mark my words!

[While this article hews close to truth, it's really about April Foolery!! ]