the Sartori In Tangiers edition

NF, One L 
​Issue #7

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1. I love how a “fashion revolution” in 2025 involves the blatant theft of what already was a ridiculous fashion trend in 1977, mainly hybridizing John Cale (shades), Johnny Rotten (hair, attitude), Captain Sensible (pasty gauntness), and Adam Ant (chevrons) into one contemporary nine-button tool who would be laughed out of the dorms at Sarah Lawerence just for being so slap-worthily derivative.

2. I suppose if your plan were to rob a bank and on the way out tear off your Wu Tang hoodie, button into the latest Stewart Trevor ensemble, grab a tuba, and blend in with a marching band conveniently doing a halftime show across the street, it might be just the thing.

3. Barring that, being entirely petroleum and therefore nonporous, that jacket would not even be fit to mop spilled Dinty Moore Beef Stew with. I mean, when Urban Outfitters began selling “pre-stressed” Fugazi shirts in the mid-90s for $79 a pop (I walked by their flagship store at Powell Station at 2am every morning after my shift, with a mental glass-deconstructing brick in my hand) any idea of protecting culture from commodity was lost. And probably nothing to aspire to in any case.

4. Except maybe as a lone strike against cynicism in the darkness of American cash-artifact-ualization, in a world where holograms of sadly expired Ronnie James Dio were touring Vegas and CGI Fred Astaire danced with a vacuum in a Hoover commercial. I think in the end, AI will come to stand for “Always Insincere”, since the already blurred line between image and undetectably corrupt image manipulation will make culture even more regressive.

5. An unapologetically ALOI (artificial lack of intelligence) will then become widely celebrated, as all art and therefore fashion and film and music will eat itself by loudly pretending not to eat itself while having already eaten itself.

6. If a majority among us is not already having physical sex with AI, it will be soon, and as worldwide population dips precipitously as a result, AI churches will spring up from the rubble of Scientology Centers and we’ll be worshipping The Lord Programmatic as well, and since worshipping anything that is not directly empirically known is just another form of masturbation, my feeling is this Stewart Trevor jacket will soon be the new Technicolor Dreamcoat.

7. Unfortunately, it will be a blandly anodyne dream, an entirely grey one celebrating the lead singer of the Neuter Revolution, who sings in binary warble about a lost world in which "London Calling" was once a sentiment worth fighting over, instead of an $1800 belly tattoo.

8. Or hell, maybe it’s just a jacket and I should lay off the Bolivian Espresso.

9. There is no nine.