Our Boro Ouroboros

They say to lead with a feature image of a person, but they also say to make it a good image of an appealing person, so I was torn. Here you go, it's me sorting through a massive pile of remaindered denim.

What is boro? Read on.

Last year Ben (sukajan guy and frequent creative collaborator) drove me around LA and we popped into his favorite Little Tokyo bookstores, edge-case fashion houses, and gamified sushi-belt joints. An oft-thumbed treasure from that trip is a book he gifted me about boro, a Japanese textile genre in which worn-out denim and other indigo-dyed clothing are quilted together. Like an old telephone pole barnacled with rusted staples, screws, nails, and the rain-melted shoulders of playbills long fallen, these assemblies offer rich evidence of life — and pleasantly flummox the mind by looking like treasure though made of trash.

Hayden and I went to the Goodwill Bins a few weeks later, and picked a cart full of old denim clothing out of the grubby trolleys. (If you aren't familiar, the Bins are to human material culture what the fertilizer factory was to Jurgis Rudkus.)

The denim sat in a big blue IKEA bag in the garage at the fixer-upper all winter, which means it got soaked by the rain that flowed in slow sheets across the floor, and started fermenting. I might compare its ultimate fragrance to chicken manure.

Last week, a team of twenty mules pulled it through a long, hot laundry day, however, and so it was Saved.

Last night I spent a few hours trimming the landfill-bound Dickies and dungarees into usable panels, preserving with special care the bits bearing holey evidence of life. Next I will see if my 1979 Singer "Zig-Zag" can power its way through multiple layers of the dense material, reanimating it as a quilt, or perhaps an ugly large thing I keep in a cabinet. When this comes to something, you'll see it here.