From Phi Beta Kappa's The American Scholar, July 14:
One of the first things I noticed inside Billiam Jeans—a small Greenville, South Carolina, atelier that I visited a few years ago—was the row of antique sewing machines carefully arranged on a window ledge. The half-dozen people working inside happened to be seated at contemporary sewing machines, but the array of prewar counterparts was no mere window dressing.
Bill Mitchell founded the company, which sells its high-end denim at boutiques both here and abroad. A svelte, bearded twentysomething, he pointed to a first-generation Union Special 43200G hemming machine, or “edge locker.” Stout and brimming with thread, it looked like something you’d find in the dusty corner of a provincial industrial history museum. Mitchell told me that he’d purchased it from a seller in Thailand, at a cost more appropriate for an automobile.
What the 43200G does that most modern machines cannot is produce a distinctive chain stitch, a series of tight interlocking loops of thread on the underside of the hem. Over time and with washing, Mitchell said, the hem will begin to develop a prized “roping” effect, a kind of subtle spiral that has become de rigueur among makers of premium denim. Mitchell said his Union Special machine radiates an almost fetishistic power, with customers in thrall to the “idea that we care enough to go back into history and preserve the old-school way of doing it.” The scarcity of the machines, meanwhile, makes clients “feel they’re getting something they can’t get in other places.” Similarly, the use of selvedge denim, which is made on specific types of short-width looms—a once-common technique that has largely vanished—has come to be synonymous with quality.
This kind of intense focus on questions of authenticity and provenance, with use of a language foreign to the uninitiated, has long been the purview of the art or wine connoisseur, who confers the approval sought by anxious consumers and is valued for an unerring eye or palate. Now, however, the mantle of connoisseurship extends to any number of everyday things, like blue jeans, toothpicks, pickles, and pencils. Call it the connoisseurship of everything—a state where it becomes difficult to disentangle one’s love for objects from the pleasure that comes with the mastery of knowledge about those objects.
On one hand, it makes sense: Why should we drink anodyne brew, eat insipid foods, wear poorly designed clothes made in distant factories using questionable means, when closer examination, an almost obsessive attention to detail, can lead to better, more satisfying purchases? On the other hand, there is something exhausting, almost soul-draining about this constant, questing game of having the best possible exemplar of a thing, of having to learn (or pretending to learn) another set of tasting notes, consumption rules, gradations of quality. Must coffee always be single origin, come embellished with a story, be crafted by the latest, truest method? Why can’t coffee ever just be coffee?....
....MUCH MORE
One pull-quote to disagree with:
"There is something exhausting, almost soul-draining about this constant, questing game of having the best possible exemplar of a thing, of having to learn (or pretending to learn) another set of tasting notes, consumption rules, gradations of quality."
If you don't know the "tasting notes, consumption rules, gradations of quality" how can you ever decide which hot pepper sauce to try next?
Yes, ma'am, the Satan's Saliva small barrel Special Reserve sauce is made from Scotch Bonnet peppers grown exclusively on a tiny island off the coast of Antigua, a larger island.And: "The World’s First Milk Sommelier"
The peppers are picked at the peak of their short lives to ensure the characteristic citrus and battery acid top notes contrast with the charred peat and road tar bottom to create a complex tease, flamboyant enough to be called the scamp of thevineyardpepper pot but finishing as cigar box and C4.
In case of overdose the usual cold milk treatment is insufficient and one should go deeper into the butterfat realm, whipping cream at minimum, preferably a hunk of cream cheese to gnaw on as you search for the nearest burn unit.
Perfect when paired with artisanal small batch lard or any of the kicky tallows now making the scene.
Or does this type of mockery make me the snob?
Entering that wilderness of mirrors is the slow road to snooty madness so I'll just answer 'no'.
