On Objects
The most fashionable object in my life right now is a tube of toothpaste.
It is Marvis. Mint flavour. It costs roughly the same as any other tube of toothpaste if you do not think about it too hard and significantly more if you do. The packaging has not changed since the 1950s. It does not come in a limited edition colourway. It has no brand ambassador. There is no content strategy behind it.
And yet it sits on my bathroom shelf in a way that tells you everything about how I think about objects. That they should be considered. That they should earn their place in daily life. That the moment between waking up and leaving the house deserves the same attention as the clothes you put on before you walk out the door.
This is not about spending money. It is about spending attention.
The most interesting thing happening in fashion right now is not on the runway. It is the quiet collapse of the boundary between fashion objects and life objects. The Loftie alarm clock on the bedside table. The Aesop hand wash by the kitchen sink. The Iittala glass that has been in the same spot for three years. The notebook with the specific weight of paper that makes you want to fill it. These are fashion decisions. They just do not get called that.
What separates a considered everyday object from a forgettable one is rarely the price. It is the decision someone made to care. To think about the weight of the lid. The curve of the handle. The colour of the thread. The way a product feels in the hand before it does anything useful. These decisions compound. A home filled with objects chosen this way does not look designed. It looks lived in correctly.
Virgil Abloh understood this better than almost anyone working in the industry during his lifetime. His most important contribution was not clothing. It was the furniture, the sculptures, the price tags, the brackets around words. The argument that the designed object is a cultural statement whether it costs nine dollars or nine thousand. That argument has aged better than almost anything else from that era of fashion.
The question worth asking about any object is not what it costs. It is whether someone thought carefully about it before it reached you. A 40 NOK candle made by a person who cares about wax temperature and wick diameter is a more fashionable object than a 4000 NOK one produced at scale by a team optimising for margin. Price is a signal. It is not the signal.
This is what lifestyle objects and fashion have always had in common, even when the industry pretends otherwise. The best version of both asks the same thing of the person who encounters it. To pay attention. To notice what is there. To understand that the thought behind the object is part of the object itself.
That is the only definition of good taste worth using.
~ 9.95
