What's In a Name?
It’s often said that all thing are political. All things are also philosophical. For the people who have been riding with me since the beginning, the development of The Masses, Co. Brand makes perfect sense. For newcomers to the movement, the connection between a leather-goods business as personal politics might seem like a stretch, or even as an inappropriate merging of disparate interests.
Too many brands in the fashion and accessories industry fall on two sides of an ever-widening void: On the one side, the churning out of cheaply made, mass-produced goods that pursue of profit by at the expense of people and the environment. On the other, the so-called high-end brands that are created to be exclusive signifiers of wealth, elitism and station over the common-folk.
The Masses, Co. is less concerned with positioning the brand in the middle of this market void as much as we are with disrupting this system entirely.
Maybe that’s an ambitious goal for a one-person shop, staffed by a full-time professional teacher and a full-time creative director and craftsman for The Masses Brand. It’s possible I made the wrong choices to support my aesthetic interests as a bon vivant. That’s why I’ve embraced a polymath’s DIY-everything philosophy.
My father has a few well-used mantras: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well” he’d often tell me as I’d assist him in whatever home maintenance and repair job that happened to require his attention on any given weekend. Other times, he’d remind me that “if something is worth having, it’s worth sacrifice to gain.” I have these mantras in my studio, too, as it became clear to me at an early age that things I wanted were always best when I created them myself. Store-bought things always led to some disappointment. Some marketing executives somewhere would always find ways to sell satisfaction, by cutting corners, skimping on cost and sacrificing quality and packaging Myth. These things would all inevitably break prematurely and I was never happy with how department store clothes hung on my body. Incredulously, I’d ask my father why, if all this stuff was manufactured by people somewhere, didn’t they take the time to just do it right the first time. While I’m not entirely sure if it was in the content of his refrain or in my own analysis (holding the flashlight for my father always left me plenty of time for my mind to wander about such things), but somewhere in these observations, I must have been radicalized.
In the early twentieth century, capital was on the rise, and artisan-owned modes of production were on the decline. A pro-labor publication burst on the scene, concerned with (among other things) capital rapidly being concentrated in the coffers of people who really didn’t do much, who knew no tangible skills, but who owned things, and a middle-class that would own fewer and fewer of the means to their ends of self-determination. These groups would also attempt to sound the alarms of the rise of the robber barons and the impending bursting of the mass-production bubble. This magazine was called The Masses, and while it’s not directly eponymous with the Masses Brand, the ideological references of each entity are no doubt intertwined.
I can’t, in good faith, put forth that any entrepreneurial endeavor may be as well an anti-capital endeavor. While I am sure that there is room in the theory for such a claim, my scholarship has not illuminated that nuance. My personal experience, as limited though that may be, has. Although my personal enterprise is at (1.) privately owned (by me and only me) and is (2.) organized in such a way to deliver profits in the form of liquid capital, I nevertheless attest that to The Masses Brand is built on several ideological pillars in order to disrupt the mindless consumer binary as described previously:
Create humble goods that can be distributed with pride.
Let no-one be bound by exploitation.
Utilitarianism, durability and aesthetics must coexist now, as in the future.
The relationship is the product.