weekly Go Flip Yourself

If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?

The world still turns to Japan for things; it also turns to Japan to rid itself of them. There’s only one problem: Japan isn’t anywhere near as tidy as outside observers give it credit for.

Subtractive is contemplative; additive is stimulating. But, above all, the Japanese are master ‘editors’, he says, picking and choosing between polar opposites to suit the occasion. This is why Japanese people continue to remove their shoes indoors, even as they choose to live in Western-style houses. It’s why they continue to distinguish between Japanese-style and Western-style foods, hotels, even toilets. To Matsuoka, the subtractive and additive approaches aren’t inherently in opposition; the distinction is simply a matter of context.

‘Today, the idea that you’ll hold on to a lot of things for your whole life is fading,’ said Tsuzuki. ‘Take clothing. It used to be the case that good clothes cost a lot. You’d buy them and take care of them and wear for years. So you’d naturally build up a collection. But now we’re surrounded by low-cost retailers that are just good enough. You wear it for a season and that’s it.’

Supreme traced a social and cultural topography of its brand’s global community, but that community formed exactly because you could only buy Supreme at its Lafayette Street shop in New York. Through its merch, Supreme held this community together across time and geography. It connected people, conversations, and symbols into one Supreme social network.

One of the things I’ve discovered with buildings, particularly your so-called “high-road buildings” is they can become more amazing as time goes on. As that process proceeds, they are buildings that come to be loved. And once they’re loved, they’re safe, by and large. So the quality of mastery can be in the quality of the materials and crafting of a thing that invites that kind of caring, that will keep the thing going.

You are what you wear. It felt that way, back then. What you wore was intimately tied to your sense of self. What are clothes if not outward reflections of internal projections?

Focus moves from fashion to function.

So for 21 weeks this year I homeschooled my boy. Every day I felt scared and overwhelmed and excited and liberated. And the results have been beyond anything I believed possible.