Subscribe now

I had a hard time getting into the theme of this week’s puzzle for years. Despite it being a fixtures of men’s fashion, the elitism associated with this specific foray into haberdashery was a bridge too far. Capital F Fashion is not exactly heralded for its accessibility, but one of the things I love about little f fashion (getting dressed) is its approachability. Despite the vintage industrial complex, finding a personal style and achieving it affordably—especially with the proliferation of helpful vintage shopping information on social media—is arguably easier than it ever has been.

$8,000 wrist wear never seemed to fall into the same bucket. So for years, I wore completely inoffensive pieces from 8-across, the kind that say, “I googled what to buy for under $50.” In the past year or so, however, I stumbled upon an inroads into this hobby that required a far less substantial financial investment than suggested by some of its most elitist aficionados (albeit a similar time contribution) and still grants access to the aesthetic and communal facets that appealed to me.

Whereas 30-acrosses cost minimum four figures and often climb into five, I have become infatuated with 11-across. If you become a real horologist and want to get into complicated movements and exceptionally crafted dials, 11-across splintered off into an associated luxury brand called Grand 11-across in the ‘60s. But today, the Japanese brand still makes affordable pieces that even the snobbiest snobs would not turn a wrist up at.

The vintage Japanese timepiece rabbit hole has given me access to a practice more similar to vintage clothes shopping. I trawl eBay and, weirdly, reddit, for well-priced entries from as far back as the ‘60s. My current everyday wrist adornment is from some time between 1983 and 1993 (it was difficult to date precisely), making it one of the oldest things I own and use on a regular basis. It’s an automatic watch (meaning it does not require a battery, but is instead powered by its own movement), has a beautiful dial, and keeps time competently. For $250, I can easily find well-running pieces from as far back as the mid-'60s. This re-articulation of the hobby—a meticulous practice of honing your style and then desperately hoping needle-in-a-haystack digging overlaps with a fine-tuned identification of idiosyncratic taste—has fixed the hobby for me as a mirror to the very best aspects of vintage shopping, rather than just luxury status symbol pursuit. And while somebody who owns a 30-across simply for the price tag would likely look down on my $125 11-across, anybody who actually cares about this world as more than just a way to dangle a price tag off of the wrist is always eager to see and chat about my find.

Good luck!

Subscribe now

Traditional suiting is a practice of addition, meticulous construction that simultaneously amplifies desirable features (broad shoulders, long legs, etc.) while obscuring the less appealing. But a certain subset of men, almost exclusively unified by their hatred of women, have put their heads together to concoct a different approach. Buttons clinging for dear life, pant legs bulging like over-filled sausages, cropped hems revealing an indecent glimmer of ankle. They have, inexplicably (although I have a theory) eschewed traditional modes of masculine dressing in favor of extracting their wardrobe from a time capsule of menswear’s most heinous era—the 2010s. In an ironic twist, these fellas have landed on an approach to tailoring that most closely resembles feminine garments: corsets, bondage dresses, leggings.

My dad has often mused to me about Hasidic Jews’ identification of the wool coat’s introduction as the historical moment when the progression of fashion’s evolution must cease. There’s certainly an actual anthropological answer for the query, but he prefers to to leave it to the realm of the unknowable. For the misogynists that have infested social media, a similar dynamic has unfolded—trapping them in the amber of a specific time and the flash-in-the-pan tailoring format it brought to light. Rather than to convey a religious distinction, I have another theory as to the source of their costumery.

A recent viewing of a clip from Crazy Stupid Love, which I am slowly but surely watching in its entirety in the form of 60-second vertical videos, provided a timely insight. Ryan Gosling is, in that movie, the proverbial Rosetta Stone of handsome pseudo-misogynist who wears suits casually. I believe what may have occurred is that his character was effectively distilled into a word cloud: “handsome,” “muscular,” “semi-tight suits.” And then, in a twisted game of telephone, the word cloud devolved into a more simple portmanteau: “musculartightsuits.” Now, a decade and a half later, somebody like Justin Waller dresses like this while he simultaneously says the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard in your life.

Suiting is a practice of nuance, identifying key elements of fit that demonstrate fluency in a language. It’s boring nerd shit for nerds (complimentary), but these worms have turned suiting into a gamified practice of identity-construction. Jordan Peterson’s suiting is a good example.

While his tailoring is actually, at times, surprisingly inoffensive (perhaps because he is not exactly a body builder eager to push every single seam of a shoddily-made synthetic suit to its full limit), he is one of the leaders of what I call the “more is better” ethos of suiting. My distaste is akin to the Oscar critique sometimes levied against over-the-top performances: “the award is for best acting, not most acting.” These guys are not competing for best dressed, but instead most dressed. And in doing so, they more closely mirror a ham in a community theater’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross than, say, Wagner Moura in the criminally-snubbed The Secret Agent. Not only is this a misguided approach to getting dressed, they also look like shit.

Subscribe now

In 2026 thus far, we have oscillated between days plummeting below freezing and those creeping above the coveted 60-degree threshold. Without sounding ungrateful for the latter days, I do fear the erratic nature of weather patterns increasingly disrupted by climate change seems to be leading to the deterioration of more traditionally linear seasonal warming. And with it, we are, at least anecdotally, witnessing the disappearance of days in the gorgeous sweet spot of the high 50s to mid 60s. Not to be callous, but one of the most important things climate change has seized from us thus far may be the light jacket.

I’m a bit of a light jacket sicko. Let’s just say there ain’t one in this puzzle that I haven’t owned at one point, though I am particularly fond of a simple 12-across jacket. One of the pieces of media that first got me into fashion was the documentary Bill Cunningham New York, chronicling how the street photographer (and legendary nice guy) viewed the world, and how this translated into an ultra-influential style of candid street photography. Heralded by a lot of the big names in capital F fashion, Cunningham’s work resisted the notion of fashion as a bubble, instead viewing it as inextricably linked to the practice of living, as evidenced by his photographic style: capturing people as they simply were. He described fashion as “the armor to survive the reality of everyday life,” and eventually settled upon one of the more recognizable uniforms in the fashion landscape. Every day, he wore black sneakers and a blue moleskin workman’s jacket at an always evolving level of patina.

I was further endeared to Cunningham when my former boss, founder of V Magazine, told me that he would always find a $20 bill inconspicuously slipped into one of his jacket pockets after bumping into the photographer, a mentor of his, at fashion shows when he was broke starting Visionaire. Weirdly, this semi-paternal generous spirit did not seem to rub off on him, but I digress.

You can buy a jacket like Bill’s for upwards of a billion dollars at any local “curated” vintage shop, or you can trawl eBay (use the keyword “French 12-across coat”) and likely find an affordable and beautifully worn vintage one for under $100. Like a lot of workwear, these were actually worn by people who, well, worked, and thus any sort of scarcity implied by their price point at vintage stores is manufactured.

I hope you enjoy this week’s puzzle. Sorry it was a day late.

Subscribe now

The Academy seems to play a fun game with the Oscars wherein its members take a big ol’ pendulum and, with herculean strength, forcefully swing it back and forth recklessly every few years. Sometimes it seems to prioritize, above all, a true practice of cinematic artistic merit. Moonlight’s 2017 win is a good example of when the pendulum was being firmly held in that direction, and this distinction was further amplified by the La La Land fiasco. Highlighting the divide in a spectacularly offensive way, the moment revealed that the big blockbuster “cultural moment” movie (Chazelle’s musical made over $500 million; Moonlight only $66m) would not win, and instead the decade-defining piece of cinematic excellence would.

Other times, they send the pendulum careening back towards the “cultural moment wins out” bucket. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most glaring example in the last decade. It is a fun romp of a movie, but it came out the same year as Tár, which I view as a perfect (and timely) movie, one of the greatest film achievements of the 21st century, and The Banshees of Inisherin, one of my personal favorites. It isn’t to say that movies like EEAAO don’t deserve praise, just that films of this nature—even miraculous ones—often receive their adulation in ways not represented by the Academy.

Sometimes, I imagine to the academy’s relief, the “cultural moment” film of the year is also a high-level piece of auteur filmmaking. Love them or hate them, The Shape of Water and Oppenheimer (boring!) fall into this category.

Last year, perhaps in fear of Wickedmania, they attempted to forcefully swing the pendulum back as far as they could, opting for the fun-but-not-particularly-earth-shattering Anora. This was the same year the earth-shattering-but-not-particularly-fun The Brutalist released. Its loss was perhaps in part due to a well-meant but overblown AI-related cancellation, but it had a tangible culture-defining impact on film, as it was partially responsible for re-catalyzing interest in VistaVision (One Battle After Another and 8-across both used it). Rather than winning 31-across, its awards’ presence would become best remembered by Adrian Brody—who boasts the world’s largest gap between acting prowess (good) and overall vibes (bad)—and his record-breaking long, and obscene, acceptance speech.

This year is a toss up. From a box office perspective, you could argue two of this year’s contenders qualify as “cultural moments”: One Battle After Another and 34-across. The latter certainly sparked more conversation and got a much wider audience into the theater. If I was a betting man (I’m not), my pick would be the former. This is not a value judgement of which movie is “better,” but Paul Thomas Anderson’s film toes the line masterfully between auteur cinema and something you could, hypothetically, see with your family—perhaps with an anticipation of some awkwardness during it’s first act. PTA has also, remarkably, never had a movie win 31-across, partially due to some bad timing of his magnum opus (There Will Be Blood) being forced to compete with 6-down’s opus, No Country for Old Men.

In some of the mind-numbing discourse that has emerged in the wake of 34-across, a crumb of information often gets omitted. The movie’s front half is an incredibly written, executed, rendered and performed historical drama (the kind of thing that wins Oscars), while its second half is, at its core, a goofy (and fun) vampire movie! A horror movie has not won 31-across since Silence of the Lambs (1991). And while 34-across is certainly too substantial to be relegated to the meager classification of “horror flick,” Get Out similarly used the genre as a vessel for broader experimentation, and received far less Oscar anticipation than Coogler’s work. Movies can be good, great, amazing, impactful, visionary and not be crowned with the largest award in the film landscape simply due to genre, scope or tone.

I also really like 8-across, but it ain’t gonna win 31-across. We’ll see what happens on Sunday, but go ahead and do the puzzle, it’s good one.

9-across is at a critical moment. Essentially hemorrhaging money for the past few years, the Kering brand’s hiring of 22-across was one of the riskier (and highest profile) moves in fashion’s ongoing game of musical chairs. Since Tom Ford’s tenure (and later, Alessandro Michele’s), 9-across has been identifiably maximalist and, often, sexy. Plugging Balenciaga alum 22-across into the role seemed like a natural next step because of his penchant for pageantry, but he’s also arguably one of the most polarizing designers in Europe. His specific brand of we-live-in-a-society social critique can, at worst, verge on child pornography and, at best (at least for 9-across so far) send tepid looks down one of highest-profile runways on the planet.

The response to his debut last week has been fairly lukewarm. In a show that revolved more around models and the way they trudged down the runway than the clothes themselves, 22-across didn’t quite assert a new era as much as he squeaked out a suggestion. After opting to unleash a series of AI ads the week prior (and roll his eyes when asked about it), the Georgian designer is again eager to dive into criticism-inducing territory, noting to GQ that he can finally “create from an emotional standpoint rather than intellectual standpoint.”

It has always felt to me that 22-across cares more about what he’s “saying” than the way he’s saying it. The NYTimes editor Jacob Gallagher described the clothes as “the supporting cast” of the show. I think part of my personal distaste is owed to a (perhaps incorrect) belief that he is responsible for a lot of the spectaclization of contemporary fashion. His stunts have trickled down into a lot of independent fashion (NYFW fare), seemingly guided by a principle: how can we get people to take TikTok videos of this show? I understand the reflex, but I think it can come at the expense of the clothing. I wrote recently about Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut, the antithesis to this dynamic. Viewing his couture feels like standing before a painting; it can elicit a feeling unmoored from a specific chronically-online context. 22-across’ debut at 9-across instead, for me, elicited an eye-roll and, “ok, he’s doing a ‘show about masculinity.’’’

My read of this' show’s commentary is that he is asserting that looksmaxxing and these subcultures revolve around glorification of the body. But then the show itself is glorifying this macho body. If fashion is to act as cultural criticism, I don’t think it can solely go as far as, “This thing is happening.” By sending these symbols of looksmaxxing down the runway, it is—to me—a validation of their devotees’ notion that bone-smashing will land them in the limelight. I want to refrain from a “showing bad thing is bad” critique, but by virtue of placing it on this stage, 22-across is heralding this Chad as sexy, as it. Gallagher’s review concluded, “This collection may make people run to the store. But it could just as well make them run to the gym instead,” which I think sums up my point. In a letter posted on Instagram introducing the show, he said that “9-across must become an adjective.” Aside from it already famously being an adjective (I believe the only brand that can make this claim), this similarly suggests that he intends to fix these things (the Chad, Nettspend in a particularly heinous outfit, Fakemink checking his phone halfway through his runway strut) as the signifiers of what the brand’s name means.

In short, the show was fine. But, at such a pivotal moment, 9-across needs something more than “fine.”

Separately, Maximillian Davis’ 10-across was amazing.

This is bad journalism, but the extent of my laborious research for this week’s puzzle has been to identify an important blip within the contemporary landscape (Wuthering Heights), not see it, make room for it in this puzzle, and then crowd-source reviews and thoughts from others. After last week’s puzzle-shape fiasco, it’s safe to say I’m in hot water.

My favorite criticism of the film thus far is by Sam Bodrojan, whose reflection on Saltburn mirrors my own: “I harbor a delusional fondness for Saltburn. A film so unapologetically reprehensible, so hacky and smug, necessarily prompts obsession. It is a movie where no shot edits cleanly into the next, where every line sucks the air out of the room. I crave the clarity of loathing something so intensely.”

And in this bout of investigative (generous) journalism, I was craving the loathing elicited by Fennell’s last foray into her specific brand of movies that are bad but exist within a visual style that screams good. What I instead got was mostly tepid reactions, disappointing for me in writing this and certainly for those with interest in seeing the movie. If it’s not fun to hate or to love, then what’s the point.

As an aside, it feels like a lot of purported “it” movies have fallen flat lately; The Moment also never quite took off.

My friend Kev, in what I would characterize as the most positive review I heard, described Heights as “heartbreaking yet sensual, intense yet endearing, obsessive yet distant. The sets were insane, it was like watching a painting some to life. Costumes were clearly trying to be historically accurate but also had a bit of kink weaved in.” But her ultimate conclusion: “Wasn’t blown away but it was cute.”

Sophie gave me more what I was hoping for: “The hottest thing straight people can do is cheat on each other” and a simple two word review that with the right media diet is a properly comprehensive two-word takedown: “beautiful gowns.”

“The only thing that it got right was the amount of wind in the moors,” said Jackie—which also prompted me to google the word “wuthering” and find that it actually means something. “A feast for the eyes, but left the brain starving for moor” and, “It’s overall bad but the costumes and makeup are fun,” was delivered in all-caps which I opted to eschew. And finally a prediction, “The album will get a grammy nom while the movie gets a razzie nom.”

Arun, my go-to film critic friend because of his unwavering ability to see what feels like every single movie (from Avatar: Fire and Ash to innumerable films whose existence escaped me but I simply “must see”—and he’s often right), provided what I would ultimately characterize as the most negative review of them all. A truly bad movie, something whose deficiencies verge on spectacle, would at least elicit a more fun barb from the ever-witty playwright. Alas, disappointingly, Fennell’s latest was so milquetoast to only produce: “mostly I was a little bored and surprised that someone would want to adapt that novel and excise the ghost” and a Letterboxd review that begins, “Not much to say…” I love Arun because of his propensity to speak about any movie at length, so this read to me as an specially incriminating indictment.

Enjoy the puzzle!

Also, I swear I did not intend for this puzzle to look like a certain symbol, but by the time I noticed I did not have time to re-construct it. I’m sorry!

The word gets overused, but 13-down is singular. Not from an aesthetic or design perspective, but it’s unique because of the way it was informed by and then informed contemporary fashion in its hatching from the shell of the “streetwear” moniker. In its 2015 heyday, it was the spiritual successor to the Pyrex Vision (later Off-White) streetwear of the early 2010s. Boxy shirts atop slightly less boxy shirts, black—sometimes cropped—pants, meticulous layering.

In the five years the label sat atop New York City fashion (winning the 2013 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and the 2014 CFDA menswear prize), 13-down became not just a fixture of hypebeast-adjacent menswear, but arguably the Rosetta Stone for a lot of the fashion it preceded. Founders Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne were early to the disillusion of the streetwear-Fashion binary, relying on silhouette and form rather than labels to cultivate an identifiable aesthetic. What they sent down the runway was soon sent down the streets of the city and delivered like an IV directly into reddit and 4chan fashion forum intrinsic to that era of style discourse. If some of the more experimental brands present fashion two years in advance, 13-down is more near-sighted, but with a crystalline control over what will appear next. Chow and Osborne see fashion, not as it will be in two years, but as it will be next month.

This is how I felt throughout the entirety of the brand’s return to NYFW, seven years since the founders quietly opted to take a hiatus back in 2018. 13-down is arguably more prepared for the current moment than it was for its previous era. Rather than a relative outlier in menswear at the time, this ethos—nodding to silhouettes of streetwear with the craft and spectacle of high fashion—is the guiding principle of modern fashion. The experience of attending a fashion show often feels more like attending a gallery. It’s art to escape, to evoke feeling. 13-down, conversely, presents clothes I want to rip directly off the model and sport as I head to my next fashion week commitment. Straight-leg heavy denim, alternatively-tailored blazers, boots toeing the line between work and tech, it’s a collection that screams to be worn.

In a move that signals the direction of the contemporary creative, for better or for worse, Chow and Osborne have launched their own Substack (clicking this will spoil 13-down) to chronicle their journey re-establishing their NYC mainstay label.

Perhaps it’s the rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia—a return to a less staunchly anti-capitalist era—but Super Bowl ads did used to get me kind of excited. As a kid, they were the last remnants of the ultra-romanticized Don Draper style of advertising, countless hours of creativity funneled into its most honorable pursuit: Doritos commercials. A joke, but I do think that there was historically some element of creative value in the advertisements reserved for our nation’s most important venue for that type of stuff.

If the past decade or so has been a steady decline, this week felt like a nosedive off the cliff. From both a content and brand perspective, every commercial fucking sucked. Any vibes-based celebration of the beauty of life was catastrophically vanquished by the appearance of a Claude or Chat GPT (both examples of 17-down) or who-gives-a-fuck.ai logo to conclude the ad. Arguably the most creatively interesting ad of the night surely elicited groans upon its ending. Coinbase simply showed us the karaoke screen for a Backstreet Boys song until popping their logo up. While watching? Fun. Upon learning of the advertiser? Livid. What I viewed as an interestingly disruptive ad quickly turned to anger regarding how low-effort the project actually was.

Sprinkled within the schlock of AI and chatbot ads were some nuggets of distinction: Dunkin’ Donuts’ skin-crawling de-aged ad and its countless celebrity-infused counterparts. The advertising budgets that previously went towards ideation and creative strategy are now funneled entirely into the bank account of Ben Affleck, Adrien Brody, and—for some reason—the Backstreet Boys (who appeared twice!). A standout example was the Chris Hemsworth Amazon ad, in which he listed numerous ways that the always-on listening device could ultimately kill him. Then, without denying any of these possibilities, Alexa offered him a massage. And the commercial ended. In short, a list of reasons why the product is bad (evil, could kill you!), followed by one reason why it could make an indulgence slightly more convenient (eliminating a phone call to the spa). Run it, they said.

This dynamic was heightened by a largely exceptionally boring game—unless you’re someone obsessed with NFL defenses and offensive lines that appear to have stepped onto a field for the first time that day. The tedium of the game gave more weight to the appearance of commercial breaks, which became increasingly more upsetting as the evening unraveled.

I’m not naive enough to have expected something particularly interesting to populate the breaks between Drake Maye having the worst three hours of his life, but it’s just the latest iteration of the everything-is-getting-worse-all-the-time industrial complex. Advertising may be not be the noblest of exploits, but it at least used to have a modicum of artistic or creative value. Now, most ads could boil down to a bulleted list of what celebrities they managed to get—which in some cases seemed like they crossed arbitrary options off a list until they arrived at someone available (Andy Cohen for Nerds, is there a connection I’m missing?)—or vignettes of life’s beautiful things infected by AI’s ability to make them “easier.” I did kind of like the Budweiser ad though, sorry!

This puzzle makes reference to almost none of the above, but instead the thing that made the entire affair in any way watchable.

Subscribe now

My entry-point to fashion was, maybe unsurprisingly, not through haute couture. It was a bit vindicating to hear, in an episode of The BoF Podcast, that Jonathan Anderson perceived fashion’s most luxurious appendage with a similar flippancy. He described his disregard for couture with a simple rejection of its necessity: “Why?” Anderson’s work has always been about pushing the limits of experimentation within the bounds of wearability. This usually results in things that are, put simply, playful. The Loewe puzzle bag is a great example. A bit more idiosyncratic than traditional fashion house fare, but still approachable enough for the market that spends that much on a handbag.

This is why a lot of haters were ready to write off the Irish designer’s first foray into couture at 1-across. A lot of the criticism could be boiled down to: this looks like a ready-to-wear collection and/or this is too similar to 11-down Simons debut 13 years prior at the same house (they both revolve around the same motif: 15-across). After listening to Anderson’s thoughts about the process and collecting my own, both of these criticisms miss the point of haute couture—especially in the modern era.

Anderson has spoken a lot about how the best way to really grasp these pieces is to engage with them in person, which is why he opted to transform the couture runway venue into an exhibition open to the public after the show. While we identify couture with a lot of its most spectacular iterations (‘90s Mugler or even the current Schiaparelli revival under Daniel Roseberry), haute couture is arguably more about craftsmanship than aesthetic. The spectacle does not need to be derived solely from how it appears in an image, but from countless hours and meticulous craftwork—which may only be perceivable in person.

Dior and I, the 2015 documentary chronicling Simons debut at 1-across, was the piece of media that got me into capital F fashion. Previously steeped in Reddit fashion forums and street style photography (focused on the dresser as subject rather than the designer), it was one of the first times I tapped into the madness of fashion as art. In revisiting that show for this newsletter, I was struck by how relatively tame it was. He subverted the fantastic elements that had long directed the house for a more minimal, even post-modern infusion of color into some relatively disciplined shapes. One could also argue that it looked more like a ready-to-wear collection. But the result was a refurbishing of what couture looks like at 1-across. Thus, Anderson’s debut was—within the current codes of the brand—a perfect representation of couture. Not quite 11-down’s deviation from history, but instead a reflection on the previous decade and change with injections of his trademark formal and structural playfulness.

Anderson views couture as the “backbone” of the brand. It needs to present a vibe that can be distilled into everything from one-off capsules to the menswear shows. If this—simultaneously elevated, silly, playful and elegant—is what we can expect to trickle into the rest of the house’s year, that’s good news.

Also, as for Simons and Anderson using the same motif (lambasted by Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada) for their Spring shows: who gives a shit! If you view the presence of a repetitive motif as a signifier of a repetitive show, you’re not looking closely enough.

Subscribe now

4-across is just so cool. In the ‘80s, he developed an ultra-functional garment style that was resistant to wrinkling while simultaneously comfortable and flowy. By first creating a polyester garment at an exaggerated size, he (and the head of his brand’s textile department Makiko Manigawa) would then use a hot press to permanently embed a series of miniature pleats into an already cut-and-sewn piece. The result was Pleats Please. While the eccentric cuts and explosive colors can be eye-catching, it’s the technological innovation that makes the line so coveted. I, personally, have left my vest balled up in my closet for months during its dormant season, only to later dig up a miraculously wrinkle-free garment.

Despite Pleats position as so central to a lot of American consumers perception of 4-across, its foundation really just solidifies what made him such a special designer: his commitment to making clothes that can experiment with the human form without sacrificing wearability. In last week’s show for men’s week in Paris, the brand’s current designer Satoshi Kondo continued the legacy wonderfully.

The show, entitled Formless Form, included the “Clay” series, incorporating a structural textile that warps with heat. The clothing looks distinctly different on a body than it would laying flat. In the “Gradation Wool” series, a unique dyeing technique resulted in some distinctively beautiful suiting. My personal favorite was “Raft,” a hyper-voluminous padded jacket whose exaggerated size allegedly traps air to provide increased warmth.

Dynamic tie-play has been coming up a lot in menswear lately, perhaps most-notably in Jonathan Anderson’s refusal to tie a tie normally since taking up menswear at Dior. In 4-across’ show, structural ties were positioned to look blown-back throughout the show, while others descended almost to the floor. You can view some more looks here.

In some ways, 12-across is an aesthetic 180 from 4-across. Still arguably best-known for its uniquely high-quality leather, the French house is far more subtle and understated. The latest show represents the end of a 38-year tenure as head of menswear for Véronique Nichanian. In her final outing, she showcased what made the brand what it is: clothing meant to be worn forever. In the show notes, Nichanian remarked that “everything fits together, but everything is mobile, alive, enduring, seamlessly, continuously, through a season made for a lifetime.” Rather than succumbing to the ebbs and flows of the menswear trend cycle, 12-across has always intended to produce garments at a quality and aesthetic that can remain in a wardrobe for decades.

Grace Wales Bonner will succeed Nichanian at the house, showing her first collection in 2027.

Subscribe now

My original intent with this puzzle was to populate it with some easily answerable clues and some that would require outside research to solve. For the past few editions, I’ve been wanting to prioritize solvability, but I still like the idea of including a clue or two a week that may require a quick Google search for a lot of solvers; this is a nice way to keep the puzzle fun and also semi-educational.

This week’s (mini) puzzle revolves around an exciting Japanese designer, Soshi 12-across. He won the LVMH prize last year, and showed at Pitti Uomo (arguably menswear’s most important trade show—held biannually in Florence) for the first time last week. In a conversation with Vogue earlier last year, he spoke about the influence 8-across had on his design language.

8-across is arguably the most influential menswear designer of all time. In the ‘80s, he was responsible for the rigid silhouette of the decade: broad structured shoulders, slightly cinched waist, straight pants. After the crash of ‘87, this specific aesthetic started to have a potentially negative association with the rampant acceleration of capitalism helmed by people wearing that exact costume throughout the decade. Thus, in the ‘90s, the silhouette evolved into a sort of casual elegance. The jackets got simultaneously larger, longer and less structured. The pants ballooned and were often tailored to hang lower over shoes. For a lot of modern menswear-heads, this is the aesthetic we associate with classic 8-across tailoring. The broad shoulders and relatively narrower waist remained, but everything draped and flowed more than in the ‘80s.

Take a look at the Wolf of Wall Street suiting (provided by 8-across) on the left in comparison to a look from the spring 1990 show.

Soshi 12-across (whose brand is just his two names smushed together) is a great representation of 8-across’ relevance in contemporary menswear. For his latest show, he took the exaggerated tailoring to its extreme, with double-breasted jackets draping far past the hips and pants bunching atop leather shoes. He told Vogue that his aim isn’t to replicate 8-across, but: “‘Quoting’ feels like a more accurate way to describe it.”

Amidst these flowing testaments to the legacy of 8-across, 12-across had a few deviations. Incorporating cropped pants and sashiko stitching—and foregoing the double-breasted jacket—the Japanese designer showcased how to reference aspects of this now ubiquitous silhouette in a way that felt fresh and exciting.

Overall, Pitti Uomo had a lot of fun stuff this year. 8-across’ show, the first since its founder’s passing in September, featured a lot of similar tailoring with some really cool textural experimentation. Prada’s show was, as always, interesting and will certainly trickle down into a lot of what people are actually wearing in the next few months. The tailoring was much slimmer than the two aforementioned shows, with some very playful pops of vibrant pink, yellow and turquoise throughout. My friend Dylan did a great video explaining the use of seemingly-stained cuffs throughout the show.

Fun week for men’s fashion and good day to do a crossword puzzle!

Subscribe now

My mom texted me from a flight Saturday night to verify that 19-across, who she has spent the last 40 years seeing in concert anywhere between 5 and 25 times a year, had passed away. To my reluctant confirmation of the Grateful Dead founding member and co-frontman’s passing, she responded: “I keep looking out the window at the sky to see if I can see him.”

I was inquisitive as a kid. Reports state that, at the airport, I would stand in the middle of the terminal, waving and peeping out a “hi” to every passer-by, insistent upon receiving a response. Social curiosity would eventually turn more theoretical. When I was either 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 (when people confidently assign an early memory to a year, they are lying), I asked my mom, “When does space end?” She responded, matter-of-factly: “Whenever Jerry wants it to.”

She was talking about Jerry Garcia, the man whose visage I knew best outside of my own nuclear family for the first ten years of my life. A signature part of the Grateful Dead concert experience is a sojourn they take during the second set called “drums” followed by “space.” “Drums” is self-explanatory. “Space,” certainly influenced by acid’s ubiquity in a congregation of Deadheads (and its alleged timing to the peak of a second set trip), is an ambient set capitalizing on the band’s unique practice of boasting two drummers who love to make big sounds. For some Jerry die-hards like my mom, this most kaleidoscopic portion of every Grateful Dead show was an opportunity to take a bathroom break.

But this vignette, in which the word “space” first conjures this niche acid-infused experiment rather than, you know, space, is the most succinct way I can characterize my relationship to the Grateful Dead. I never “got into” the Dead. Much like children who emerge from the womb with a craving for what their mothers had been eating, I was born aware of the refrain to 7-across.

Strangely, up until last year, I never listened to a lot of their music privately. It is, to this day, the music I’ve heard most in my life. Between every car ride I ever took with my mom and the nearly 20 times I’ve seen them live, I can’t name an artist that comes close in sheer hours listened. But when I would stand among the enraptured fans, all gasping in recognition of each song from its first chord (I’d turn to my mom and ask, “Which one is this?” before realizing ten seconds later), I always had this impostor complex. Like Billy Elliot’s aversion to the coal mines, I thought I was missing the feeling I was supposed to have to connect me to my family.

I’m a chronic planner and anxious over-thinker. This ethos isn’t conducive to the journey-oriented structure of Grateful Dead music. No two Dead shows are alike; the performances are never destination-based, but instead solely about the experience of improvisation. My pursuit of some specific feeling released by the music was missing the point.

Last year, I saw the Grateful Dead at the Las Vegas Sphere. When I heard the bass intro to “Cold Rain and Snow”, it was like Anton Ego taking his first nibble of ratatouille. I was 7 again, witnessing The Dead perform the song at Red Rocks, excitedly telling my mom, “I know this one!”

When I was 22, the band cheekily began to play the same song as rain fell down, before a torrential downpour would suspend the show. Golf-ball hail started rattling off of the thousands of tin risers of Boulder’s Folsom Field, adding to the cacophony of a blaring emergency alarm and a robotic voice repeating: “Dangerous weather, get to safety.” My dad, siblings and I ran for cover, eventually returning home to slip into dry clothes before the second set; my mom remained throughout the entirety of the ordeal, remarking that it was one of her favorite shows and a great opportunity to get up close to the band. My sibling Theo and I were secretly on just enough mushrooms throughout the experience to escalate its highs and also plummet its lows.

When I was 10, I definitively smelled weed for the first time reverberating from the mustachioed 50-year old seated next to me.

When I was 28, I’d grin to my friend Zeke as I passed him a Spicy Sweet Chili Dorito during the crescendo of “Terrapin Station” surrounded by thousands of similarly-grinning inhabitants of Las Vegas’ spherical venue. Our decision to get concessions during one of the band’s most popular songs resulted in a different kind of magic—witnessing the concourse of the Sphere in complete desolation. We had returned at precisely the right moment, 20,000 people scream-belting “Terrapin” in response to 19-across’ final refrain.

When I was 7, 10, 19, 22, 25, and years between, I’d feel the words to songs I didn’t know the names of flow out of my mouth.

On July 9th, 1995, exactly a month before Jerry Garcia passed away, he uttered his final words to 19-across. As they wrapped up their encore of “Box of Rain,” Garcia, smiling, reflected on the set: “Always a hoot. Always a hoot.”

Lately, I listen to the Grateful Dead every day.

Subscribe now

I’m frankly going to cheat on this newsletter. I spent the past few weeks working on a thoroughly researched piece about a footwear trend for the WSJ. Conveniently, this trend also make a great subject for a fashion-themed crossword puzzle. So in the interest of feeding two birds with one scone, the best way to learn about the theme of this puzzle (pertaining to 19-, 29-, 44- and 56-across) is to read this WSJ article.

I’ll provide a quick overview of the article’s thesis for those who may not have a subscription. In the past few years, two leather shoe silhouettes have emerged as go-to styles for fashion-heads and even stylish real estate attorneys—like my friend Jo’s father Kerry. Both silhouettes can be described as having a “moc-toe,” which refers to the U-shaped seam on the toe-box. Right now, the most topical iterations of moc-toes are a lower-profile 29-across (arguably a sleeker 44-across) like this, and a more structured, slightly raised derby like this. The theme answers in this puzzle relate to the types of shoes that can boast a moc-toe, the brands that make them, and the shoes they reference.

I’d implore you to read the whole piece for thoughts from the people who design these shoes and a roundup of cool folks who like to wear them.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

I have to come clean. Producing a full-length puzzle each week is really hard. Couple that arduous task with a holiday schedule and you have a recipe for a mini crossword puzzle. In the spirit of this puzzle’s brevity, I will keep this newsletter brief as well.

This week I was in LA visiting my girlfriend Justine’s family. She and I are both famously (and explicitly) anti-LA and always eager to have experiences that validate our hater stance: smog, traffic, brunch, etc. It pains me to report that we had a really lovely LA day.

I have been on a quest for a pair of black Diesel jeans that are both 6- and 10-across, properly. We popped into a vintage store in West LA that had a pair of Diesels lingering on the edge of a single men’s clothing rack, mocking me. They were sadly too small in every way, and surely not 6-across.

We then meandered into Klactus Vintage down the street, where I held my breath as I wrestled a pair of dark vintage Diesels from a rack of Levis 527s, 501s and Wrangler cowboy cuts. They marked the end of my quest for jeans that fulfill the theme answers of this puzzle.

Matt—the owner of Klactus—and I discussed his goal of maintaining a vintage store with more approachable prices as a pushback against the rising tides of the vintage industrial complex. The store is littered with a truly remarkable selection of single stitch tees for around $30—a steal in the current vintage hellscape. I don’t think I saw an item in the store over $100, a rarity in a market that will slap a $250 price tag on anything you can deem “sun-faded.” I’d implore my LA friends to check it out if you’re ever on the west side, especially if you’re in the midst of the same denim quest I once embarked on.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

This project was largely influenced by a conversation I had with two friends sitting around a big wooden table overlooking the Catskills. We were upstate for an adidas-Humanrace wellness retreat, and as we watched a grassy hill ripple with wind, I was interrupting the tranquility by chattering about the misnomer of a “dream job” and how I once saw a job listing for a “Games Editor” at the Times and had wondered who could possibly be qualified for a job like that and posited how many gainfully employed crossword editors could there be in the US (seven?) with a resume to grant them the requested experience to apply for that role and how could I possibly get one of the lesser games editor jobs and tirelessly work my way through the ranks of puzzle-dom—surely spending countless lamp-lit late nights clue-writing at the well-worn desk of my local paper—to finally summit the proverbial games-editor mountain and become a cruciverbalist for the brand most closely associated with crossword puzzles? Who among us hasn’t wondered the same thing?

My friend Ella responded to that inane line of questioning with, “Why don’t you just start your own puzzle?” In retrospect, that was obvious and I’m a clown. Mitch quickly suggested it be called “Crosswords by Charlie,” and my trust of his taste—he’s Creative Director of Office Magazine—overruled the simplicity of the name and now roughly four months later I have released ten crossword puzzles.

Initially I wanted the puzzle to function as a pseudo-newsletter: a more inventive way to share information about what was going on right now in fashion, magazines and culture. Something prioritizing substance over form. But I realized that this would require me to forsake the craft of crosswords that I love and respect so much. It wouldn’t be a puzzle, just restructured trivia. So rather than releasing something like the below, I spent two months reading about and practicing the actual process of crossword construction. What you find out very quickly is that you don’t get to have that much freedom over the words included in the puzzle. A few theme answers can be included, but too many necessary answers make it impossible to finish construction; you need the flexibility of changing answers within your fill.

As I’ve continued to get deeper into the world of construction, I have become acutely aware of how bad some of my early puzzles have been from a technical standpoint. The minis I started with were not conducive to themes. So rather than having actual themes, I was just cramming tangentially related words into the puzzle. A lot of these early puzzles also had far too many 3-letter words, which can interrupt the flow of solving. If you don’t know the across of a 3-letter, you have to try to solve another 3-letter, which means you have less clues from other potentially solved answers. CXC5 was a turning point for the puzzle. It had relatively fewer 3-letters and an actual theme, with two theme clues (13- and 32- across) plus a revealer clue (27-across). That said, it still had 24 3-letter words out of 46 total answers. For context, a NYT submission should ideally have 20 or fewer 3-letter words in a full sized puzzle—usually around 70 total words.

All this is to say that today’s puzzle is the strongest I’ve made yet. It has only 22 3-letter words out of 74 total and a couple of great long answers. My hope is that the puzzle has been getting better every week, and I appreciate everyone’s commitment to solving. I’m excited to see how it looks by puzzle 20.

Subscribe now

Despite my assignment of CXC as a “fashion crossword puzzle,” this is actually the first edition that specifically revolves around clothes themselves. So rather than mourning the state of pop culture journalism or nostalgically tracing the trajectory of my homeschooling footwear, this week I provide simply a fashion newsletter.

Seasonal changes are always an opportunity to spend too much time thinking about your wardrobe. Couple an atmospheric change with a personal one—I moved in November—and you have a recipe for countless hours of meticulously analyzing every single item you own. For most of my life, I’ve been held hostage by the inhabitants of my closet. If I retrieve a piece laying dormant for years from the far back corners of my dresser during an alleged clean-out (an easy contender for "Donate”), I’ll find myself instead remarking, “Wait this is actually sick,” and promptly depositing it in the “Keep” pile. Nonetheless, in preparation for moving, I (bravely) sold or donated over half of my wardrobe, leaving me diabolically critical of what I have left.

My current objects of scrutiny are my now significantly depleted cache of pants and my juvenile collection of winter headwear.

For over a year, I’ve only been wearing cartoonishly wide pants. I recognized the flash-in-the-pan potential of such a trend, but also—after uncomfortably sliding into the skinniest jeans Levi’s could offer for most of my teen years—was just so grateful for the wearability offered by this silhouette. Now as I put my wardrobe under a judgement microscope, I am feeling crushed by the weight of the big pants pendulum violently swinging back and a closet filled with 10-inch-plus leg openings.

It’s dawned on me that a lot of the men whose style I most admire are wearing pants that could be deemed slim for the current era. My friend Alex Roth—when not more extravagantly draped in something off the runway—always seems to be clad in various perfect pairs of vintage bootcut jeans. Clement Condat (who did the logo for CXC!) has a penchant for wearing slim jeans with a little flare. And I’m left donning baggy selvedge jeans like a 19-year-old TikTok fashion influencer. Thus, I have been feverishly scouring eBay, FB Marketplace and thrift stores for the exact right pair of slim-but-not-too-slim jeans to fit my angular and looming frame. The D, I, E, S, E (again) and L keys along with the L, E, V, I, S and 5, 1, 7 keys on my keyboard are ragged with overuse.

In short, the wide pants full moon is waning.

As far as headwear is concerned, it seems there is almost no good option that checks both the “warm” and “fire” boxes. In my early ‘20s, I could throw on some sort of exuberantly colorful beanie as the cherry on top of a playfully youthful outfit. But now, as 30 approaches, I am left clamoring for something more mature that does not fully sacrifice my self-perceived whimsical sense of style. On a recent upstate trip, I found the below mohair beanie at a lovely Hudson shop called Meridian. The argyle pattern was just the nod I needed paired with a more muted color palette.

That said, variety is the spice of life (and I may or may not have already semi-lost this hat by leaving it at my sibling’s apartment) and I am still on the hunt for more both age- and style-appropriate headwear. Send suggestions.

If you’re here looking for a clue to this week’s theme, let’s just say that “pants” and “beanies” are but two of the many beautiful articles of clothing contained within a wardrobe—perhaps even one specifically tied to our current season.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

When Warhol started Interview magazine in the late ‘60s, he was filling a void. This was during the boom of New Journalism, when writers like Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion began to imbue their nonfiction explorations with the literary apparatuses historically relegated to fiction. It was an era of redefinition, blurring the lines between the creative and the investigative. And Warhol had his own approach. “I felt there was a need for an easygoing, conversational magazine […] Every other paper is full of bad news, but we publish only good,” Warhol told The Lexington Herald in 1974. This ethos was neither antithetical nor supplemental to New Journalism; it was merely parallel, and half a century later has arguably snowballed into the prevailing discipline guiding most pop culture editorial work.

If you flip through almost any contemporary fashion or culture magazine, you will find at least one “conversation”-story in lieu of an editor-penned profile. When I was a college student envisioning my career as a writer, I grimaced to see some of these pieces. I recall reading a conversation between 27-across and Timothée Chalamet in 2018 and posing a Kanye-esque, “I like some of the Gaga songs, what the fuck do she know about cameras?” Like almost every 20-year-old in the world at the time, I was steeped in an obsession with 27-across, but what gave him the expertise to interview a budding movie star? Ironically, that story was in VMAN, the magazine that I would become the editor of seven years later.

When I worked for GaryVee’s publication ONE37pm, we were charged with the task of “making positivity louder.” This is a noble concept that in practice often felt more like marketing than journalism. I deemed this ethos unique to the GaryVee-ification of my publication and an outlier in contemporary criticism. What I’ve found since as both a reader and writer is that this is now the dominant guiding principle of most pop culture editorial work.

See, when Warhol instituted this practice at Interview, it was practically shtick. That isn’t meant pejoratively; it was intended as a stark deviation from what readers were accustomed to. This isn’t what magazines are supposed to be! This free-wheeling approach to journalism helped to fortify a new kind of celebrity editorial, one that aimed to portray its subject as acquaintance, somebody you can chit chat with.

There’s a few reasons I believe these stories have gained so much prominence in recent years. 1) is obviously the virality built into a story not only carried by one big name, but two. 2) is that they are easy. I have written long-form journalism, and I have moderated talent-on-talent conversations. The gap between the labor required for each is not small. 3) is the deterioration of the editor as a cultural figurehead. 4) is rapidly decreasing editorial budgets. The cost of getting two celebrities on a zoom call together can be measured in the amount of emails an editor needs to send coordinating logistics with PR reps—a truly insurmountable mountain of circling backs and touching bases. It pales in comparison to the actual financial burden of covering an editor’s expenses as they traipse around the nation to slowly chip away the marble to reveal a Profile. In his book When the Going was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, Graydon Carter acknowledges that he was making six figures for singular pieces of writing during his time at Vanity Fair.

This is not to say that these kinds of conversations are not valuable! From a cost-analysis perspective, they produce en exceptional read for a fraction of the cost. I especially love this Cultured story with Josh O’Connor and Andrew Scott, plus this VMAN piece with Archie Madekwe and Zack Fox (ok, I wrote this one). After sitting in on some of these conversations, I left with a sense of impostor syndrome. “Wow, they did a way better job interviewing that person than I would have.” And of course they did! They know each other! They often lead similar lives. In less than an hour, an actor’s peer can garner so much more personality and charisma from their companion than a writer (stranger) could in the allotted time. These talks are like the best first dates—which may not even produce a second; one departs, thinking, “They are just so lovely.”

But the true great profiles do more than sketch an outline. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, by Gay Talese, is one example. It’s how a writer would reflect a friend (not acquaintance) imploring, “Don’t hold back. I can take it.” Talese does not didactically explain Frank Sinatra; instead, he meticulously metes out vignettes of a life. You’re not being told if Ol’ Blue Eyes is good or bad, if he’s washed up or still got it, if he’s kind or cold. You’re being handed a picture and asked, “What do you think?”

This GQ feature on Dennis Rodman from from 2021 is amazing. This ESPN dive into the injury-plagued career of Joel Embiid is a great read. But what’s so heartbreaking about these pieces is that my experience as a reader is now a mirror to opening Interview in 1972. Part of the euphoria contained in their reading is owed to their deviance. There is still a lot of really great writing out there, but in The Dude’s words, “This is a bummer, man.”

Also, I liked the Chanel show.

Subscribe now

CXC7 centers around a movie I would deem emblematic of the theater-kid-ification of Hollywood. While I don’t think that the average actor has actually shifted more towards the “played the lead in their high school’s production of The Music Man” archetype, our social media age has given a previously inaccessible glimpse into celebrities’ personalities—revealing that many of them are understandably dorks who did high school musical theater.

This preamble is to soften the blow of outing myself as a dork who did high school musical theater. Similarly to my experience with Merrell’s ascendance from guilty-pleasure homeschooler shoe to Dimes-square mainstay, I’ve witnessed a lot of what I was embarrassed about throughout my short (over a decade) stint as a theater kid cement itself within popular culture.

I was deeply behind on seeing the film this puzzle references. And it was odd to feel my dismissiveness of the movie read as a broader antipathy towards theater, reflective of a contemporary cool-guy fashion editor persona. Ironically, a meager fifteen years ago, I would have likely been attending its premiere with the cast of a junior production of Into the Woods. I was actually late to see the movie because I’ve heard every song so many times that I was in no rush to hear them once again.

For most of my childhood, my younger sibling and I would jostle around in the backseat of our mom’s Suburban en route to a rehearsal or audition, repeatedly listening to 20-across or 39-down on repeat. When I finally watched the movie with family over Thanksgiving, there was one track I didn’t quite faithfully recognize as well as the others. My sibling quickly informed me that they famously skipped over that one during their ceaseless soundtrack listening sessions, hence my memory’s blind spot.

I have a final anecdote revealing that perhaps people are not exactly as eager to anthropologically discuss this dynamic as I am. David Corenswet, the new Superman, was on the cover of the last issue of VMAN. The son of a theater actor, he is abundantly sweet and sincere, and a bit of a dork (complimentary). The perfect representative of the theater kid to heart throb pipeline. Naturally, when I sat on a Zoom with Bradley Cooper and Corenswet for their actor-on-actor conversation, my short list of questions for the former to ask the latter included, “How do you feel about the term ‘theater kid’ being thrown around to describe you?”

Surprisingly (!), Bradley Cooper did not opt to pose that question in the interview.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

During the intervening weeks between college graduation and beginning my life as a young professional (editorial assistant), I spent my time huddled around the stove of my childhood home with my mom. She was an admirable cook, and it had dawned on me that I was about to depart without any confident record of the recipes she made throughout my childhood. In those weeks, I concocted a sprawling google doc (aptly named “recipes”), which I still refer to today when I want to make a brisket, chicken soup, Shabbat egg noodles (pictured below), a North Jersey specialty called Chicken Savoy—my favorite, or a baked ziti.

Despite us being completely and exclusively Jewish, my mom’s North Jersey upbringing meant we ate an inordinate amount of Italian-American dishes. I also inherited from her some North Jersey pronunciations of things like “mozzarella” that earned me some mockery—the origins of which I didn’t fully understand until watching The Sopranos in college. When I envision my now defunct childhood home, I see the way the light filtered through our big kitchen windows onto a glistening tray of freshly crisped mozzarella.

The most lasting advice she gave me during our impromptu cooking classes is concise and ubiquitously applicable: “For any recipe, double the garlic, double the onion, double the butter.” This is especially apt this week.

I was going to write a treatise about the complicated ethical dilemma surrounding celebrating Thanksgiving, but I don’t have something to add that hasn’t been said. The holiday is rooted in tragedy but is today a celebration of two of the things I care about the most: my loved ones and food. I hope everyone gets to indulge in a bit of those things this week, and that CXC6 can be a respite if and when you need it.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

I grew up partially homeschooled in Boulder, Colorado. This era and lifestyle accompanied a uniform. Tie dye shirt, unkempt hair, utilitarian pants (although what utility a 9-year-old required is beyond me) and 13-acrosses. I wore these shoes—beloved for their comfort, color options and true purpose as a hiking shoe—right up until I started to get into fashion. A shoe I associated with only pragmatism and dank basement homeschooler meetups was quickly discarded in favor of Clarks Desert Boots and Nike Killshots.

In 2017, The Cut coined the term “gorpcore”: a portmanteau of “normcore” and “gorp.” “Gorp” is often incorrectly—by me, in CXC1—referenced as an acronym for “good ol’ raisins and peanuts.” It is actually a backronym retroactively ascribed to a verb used since 1913 for eating greedily. Regardless of the etymology, it’s now used synonymously with trail mix, and invoked semi-pejoratively by late 2010s fashion magazine editors to describe the integration of outdoor gear into streetwear.

It’s worth noting that—while gorpcore didn’t become integrated into contemporary streetwear until the late 2010s—real IYKYK fashion heads were tapped in by the 2000s. Robin Williams loved to punctuate a look with a pair of 32-across shoes. While Williams has since gotten his flowers as a truly singular style icon, he was the subject of scrutiny in the 2000s for some of these looks, often cited in “worst dressed” lists by tabloids.

In hindsight, a shanda.

Once I started to fancy myself someone “interested in fashion,” I began to perceive the clothing I wore as a homeschooler as existing in an anti-style vacuum, a category of objects entirely separate from those I was beginning to glamorize. A Venn diagram of two fully separate circles. These were garments that existed in opposition to fashion; they sacrificed aesthetic for mobility, flair for comfort. As the lines between capital F Fashion and What People Wear have become increasingly blurry (much to the chagrin of the former’s old guard), those more interested in the latter camp have successfully imported 13-across, 26-across and a laundry list of other brands historically relegated to the outdoors into the fashion zeitgeist.

As I began to witness this impending transition in the mid-2010s, I was a madman—tacking possible canaries in the coalmine of the impending gorp explosion onto a conspiracy board in my mind. Once I started seeing terms like “techwear” and “goth ninja” percolate, I knew 13-across’ day in the sun was near. I eagerly slipped into a pair, methodically increasing their cadence in my rotation annually. By the closing bell of the decade, they had re-earned a spot in the starting roster.

PUZZLE SPOILER BELOW

I’m deeply nostalgic and sentimental, so reintegrating what I loved as a kid into my wardrobe as an adult has been a relief and a vindication. It reveals a data point and the synthesis that follows. One: fashion is cyclical. Duh. Two: because of this, wear what you want. You might lose ten of your best Merrell-wearing years if you don’t.

Subscribe now