A friend of mine who works in a large auction house says that people who collect art tend to buy pieces from the era in which they made their money.
Meaning, if you recently made a giant pile of cash, you’re more likely to collect recent art. If you made it – or, to be more precise, if some long-forgotten ancestor made it – you’ll be drawn to collect art from the period in which your ancestor did his earning. Or, probably, his stealing. Back then there was a very fine line between the two. (Not much different now, come to think of it.)
As it happens, I’m an avid art collector. My area of concentration is American paintings from the years 2015-2030. At least I hope it is. I’m still waiting for my giant pile of cash.
What I have instead is a giant pile of clothes. I’ve spent the past week or so editing a new television project, which sounds a lot harder than it is. It’s the editor who does the actual editing – he fiddles with the computer that assembles and reassembles the pictures. Even in the most assured of hands, editing is a time-consuming process. I come into his editing room once a day – twice at most – and look over his work and make suggestions, at which point he glowers furiously at me and I go home to wait for him to call me to come back in and review his work again.
So when I’m not hanging around the editor, driving him crazy, I’m hanging around the house, driving myself crazy. And when I’m restless and anxious, I start little projects around the house. During the editing process of my last series, I alphabetised my books. The one before that, I built a pizza oven in my back garden.
This time, I took all of my clothes out of my wardrobes and armoires and squirrelled-away bins around the house and piled them up in my bedroom. In between sessions of editor-torture, I’ll sort through all of my clothes, get rid of things I no longer wear, make sure that the years of uninhibited bread-eating haven’t rendered too many things tight and uncomfortable, and in general take stock of what I’ve bought – either wisely or on impulse – over the past 10 years or so.
It turns out, we’re not talking 10 years. We’re talking 20, at least. While not a “hoarder” in the contemporary sense, I do have a hard time throwing things out. I’m not one of those poor souls you see on reality television shows, with piles of newspapers and collections of old bottles cluttering up the passageways, but that’s just because I have a large house with plenty of nooks to pack away the Loro Piana sweaters from 1995. Or earlier.
I have found receipts in jacket pockets from the Clinton era. There are jackets with lapels as narrow as a pencil, and some with lapels as wide as a bed sheet. The shirts should be examined by an anthropologist, who will be able to pinpoint the precise year each was purchased by researching the popular collar styles of the 1993-2012 era of men’s high-end fashion.
And I do mean “high-end”. What I have realised is that I have spent, over the years, an irrational and insane amount of money on clothes.
Properly catalogued and dated – again, by some kind of anthropologist – the entire collection will be able to provide an accurate snapshot of my financial situation since I first started working as an adult, in 1990. Each studio deal during the early 1990s is marked by a sudden influx of ventless suits. As the studio deals tapered off, suits gave way to jackets and sweaters. Around 2002 or so, as the recession of that era took hold, a lot of casual shirts suddenly appeared.
The current style in men’s fashion – tighter, more form-fitting, shorter around the shoulders – is unrepresented in my wardrobe because for the past few years I’ve been launching a couple of television series the hard way – without a studio deal behind me – and I’ve been pinching my pennies. An archaeologist from the future, sorting through my clothes, would probably assume I had died.
Of course, I haven’t. In a way, I’ve just come to my senses. Seeing a mound of expensive – and slightly outdated – clothing has a clarifying effect on the mind. Maybe I’ll head over to the editing room, unannounced, and give the editor a little prodding. This latest project I’m working on seems very promising. It could be the big hit I’ve been waiting for.
Which can only mean one thing: I’m getting some of those new trimmer-looking suits. Not for me, of course: for posterity.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
