Nomads

From our occasionally far-flung correspondent Alison, I present without comment this:

To envision the future, we must first preserve a vision of the past. We must also draw inspiration from the living cultures of the present.

– UNESCO

Bal Harbor, Florida for the weekend. I’ve come to see a friend – he’s a musician on a never-ending tour -- every day a new town, shifting Main Streets, a new crop of locals on aged bar stools. My friend shows me his cushy tour bus home, if he has a desire for domesticity, it’s on the back burner. His life on the road is a privilege; part artist, part Shaman, he is following literally, his path. Most days I find myself in Manhattan, saddled with the urge to be somewhere else; I am possessed with the nomad’s cry, her unmistakable song.

In nomadic African cultures, women are “the primary producers, the owners and users of the domicile.” Their life is a composition of survival and conviction, a grueling quest for new sources of water, livestock, and food. In most cases, it is a conscious disconnection from the modern world; described in detail in the Washington Post, they are Nomads by Choice:

Every Saturday, Inaka trudges some five miles to the village of Ber, 40 miles east of Timbuktu, to buy and trade goods at the market. One recent day, he brought with him slices of goat cheese his wife had made earlier in the week. He hoped that selling the cheese would help him buy sugar, tea, tobacco and a gerba, a water container made from a goat carcass.

When speaking of cultural landscapes and material objects, The World Heritage Centre in Zimbabwe stresses the importance culture and nature as completely interwoven; the spiritual and the sacred as heritage. Hayden-Harnett founders Toni and Ben, frequent travelers themselves, have designed their own infrastructure of a lifestyle, seeking inspiration from "the living cultures of the present," pilling heritage, politics, landscape, and fantasy like bits of fabric to create bags for the marketplace. True artisans, their work is integrated into their beliefs, and the results are thoughtful, detailed, crafted bags. The irony is not lost; the primary purpose of a bag is to transport personal items of value; the bag itself an expression of organization, and depth.

Here in a Floridian hotel, a faux Tiffany blowfish lamp casts a dense amber infusion of light. This is so non-sensible, it’s comforting. I’m bathed in notions that seem to have sprung from some remote desert landscape of the soul. Nomadic life is not romantic, it’s pure survivalist mode, moments of intense joy woven into an existence the very essence of which is disenfranchised, and ephemeral. The blowfish stares with a ruby eye; artifice of the Twentieth Century, diadem of urban living. Sometimes life too closely resembles a scavenger hunt, each of us filling our bags, collecting memorabilia, some of us in hotel rooms in search of the sacred. What we find valuable, nostalgic, are celebrations of the known, of where we’ve been. We carry this with us as talisman against the unknown, where we are heading, and what we will find along the way.

"Like the pyramids?"

Every morning, we wake up to NPR. Usually, since we've been up most of the night working, it takes an hour or more to climb out of sleep and out of bed. The news stories enter our consciousness first as fragments of our dreams. Recently I dreamed I and our President were in a rather Victorian parlor face to face with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; I was trying to coax Bush to answer the letter Ahmadinejad had written; Bush was dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a long-billed red cap. Needless to say, it was difficult to get him to concentrate.

So, when Toni had finished a group of concept sketches for a group of beautiful travel bags with cargo pockets and said "Let's call this the Gaza collection," I was not surprised. But I thought because of the news she might have gotten confused. "Don't you mean Giza?" I asked. "Like the pyramids?" No, she meant Gaza: "like the Gaza Strip." I worried for a while, wondering what the fashion community would make of something like this; would anybody be upset? It seemed needlessly controversial. Toni insisted. She said she had been thinking a lot about what we'd been hearing on the news, and about the region as she designed the bags. She reminded me why we started the company - in part because we wanted the freedom to do what we thought was best. I capitulated, and the collection is called Gaza.

Then I waited. Waited for somebody to comment; or even notice. One way or the other. Days passed by; the bags were on the linesheets; weeks passed by. Then months. The bags arrived. People bought them. Nobody seemed to notice. Before, I had been worried somebody would notice - now I was a little irritated nobody had. But finally, someone did notice, and asked us about it. Her response was worth it. Read Hala's blog post about it here. Thanks Hala for being curious and daring to ask!

JKG RIP

Last Saturday, in Cambridge, Mass. the economist John Kenneth Galbraith died at the age of 97. Sadly, his death seems to have been met with little notice. Partly it was his age - by 97 obituaries have so long been on file one might forget it hasn't already been printed. The era that Galbraith towered over, of FDR, Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy, and Johnson. If you missed the obituary in the Times you'd have hardly seen a ripple from his passing. But there ought to have been. Though it would exasperate him to hear it, Galbraith's observations about human nature far outweigh in value the economics he practiced. Mainly it is because economics as a discipline has shrunk in scope and aspiration that economists disregard Galbraith's achievements.

In many ways he is like the economist Thorstein Veblen of the generation before him - in many ways he is not. Veblen's main contribution was the notion of "conspicuous consumption" a phrase that ought to be familiar to anybody who makes money in the fashion business. Galbraith's great observation, in criticizing those in his own field, political, and business leaders was his notion of the "conventional wisdom." More than anything else this idea explains without apologizing the actions that have lead to so many problems, whether economic, as in stock-market crashes or savings and loan failures, or political and diplomatic, as in the missteps and miscalcuations and misunderstandings that lead to pointless wars being started and being continued long after their error has been made manifest.

"Coventional wisdom" no longer needs quotation marks, the phrase long having been accepted as a common English phrase since its appearence in Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958). The idea is simple -- that people are married to their notions; we do and must continue to believe in what we believed to begin with, even if it does not bear up to reality. The conventional wisdom is held by convention, strengthened by group dynamics and entrenched by the structural nature of common endeavor, whether in academia, politics, or business. A huge part of our success at Hayden-Harnett has been to ignore the conventional wisdom: that a small designer needs to join a showroom to succeed, that bags need to be expensive to be beautiful, that consumption has to be conspicuous, that the customer prefers form over function-- well here at Hayden-Harnett we salute the true iconoclasts - not the glamorous pairing of the rich and famous on the Sundance channel; but you and us. RIP John Kenneth Galbraith, and thanks.