Luxury lives in small things. Your life of luxury begins when you buy one small thing that’s made with quality in mind. In my case, a t-shirt. What could be less pretentious? And let’s get practical, this is how I dress. This is what I wear every day. Why not have a nice one?
The texture of the t-shirt is light and perfect. It drapes my agile, predatory frame with heroic aplomb. The t-shirt is confident but nonchalant about it. Seductively detached. Poised but never self-conscious. It’s a fucking t-shirt, sure. But it hints at untold mysteries of grace and hunger, flight and battle, and ultimately, surrender. Casual, breathable surrender.
No, I’m not telling you where I got my t-shirt. Then they’ll run out! The point is, one small, nice thing can transform your mundane experiences into poetry. But you have to show up for that shit. You have to soak in the glory of that small thing for it to become true luxury.
When you’ve truly soaked in one nice thing, though, it changes your whole perspective. You purchase one heavenly item and suddenly everything else in your life looks haphazard and clumsy. You cast your discerning eyes, which have recently tasted divinity, across your misshapen hovel. The furniture slouches defeatedly. The colors are apologetic. The profiles are slumpy, bumpy, chumpy, lumpy, dumpy, frumpy, grumpy -- the seven dwarves of Middle Brow (near Middle Earth, but less valiant). The smells are unfresh. The artwork is juvenile, cloying.
But it’s the textures that really bury you. All of those textures you once thought were luxury-adjacent now offend with their desperate mimicry of something better. All you feel around you is fake softness, synthetic fluff, imitation opulence, ambivalent sheen, a symphony of factory-made fraudulence. “My textures are so vulgar and scratchy!” you wail, but no one can save you from the dowdy parade of counterfeit bourgeois pap that is your habitat. It’s like all of the polyester blends in Joann’s Fabrics joined together and formed a monster like on “Stranger Things 3” and that monster is your chumpy-ass middle-class life.
“I want luxury,” you say, sounding like a fucking 60-something bottle blonde from a Lexus commercial.
So you drive up the coast in your beat-up minivan until you find an interior space that awakens your good taste. Here is a space that flatters your bank account, even as it drains it like a hungry vampire. Here is a space with blonde wood flooring and wabi-sabi textures, where there are impractical fabrics like LINEN that shrink and wrinkle easily in the hands of those without extra cash floating around -- or without extra-careful washing hands paid by extra cash. You wander through this light, uncluttered, transcendently breezy space and you think, “I belong here.”
And the lighting agrees. Your face in the mirror, devoid of any signs of age (thanks to some mysterious luxury mirror technologies) agrees. Your features, which looked pugnacious and peasant-like back in your own dank, offensively scratchy habitat, look positively aquiline and even French here, in this glorious sunshiney space.
It’s just a fucking sandwich shop. But still.
That’s when you realize your whole life could be as special as that one perfect t-shirt. Your whole world could be as luxurious as this fucking sandwich shop. You could just replace every single fucking thing in your life – this pair of stupid shoes, this very loud refrigerator, this badly proportioned pet, this man with the cracked teeth and the slightly asymmetrical face – with something more whisper-quiet and soft and seductive.
All you have to do is throw all of this shit away and get better shit. It’s so fucking easy. Luxury can be yours. It’s so simple! So do it. Do it, motherfucker! Get rid of everything. Upgrade all of it. You deserve it.
Can you afford to upgrade your badly proportioned pets? Write to askmolly at protonmail.com and find out.
Yay! I’ma buy a cool t-shirt! https://www.vollebak.com/product/carbon-fibre-t-shirt/