Your Fall Aesthetic: The Fuck-You Vest, Explained
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If you’ve seen it worn on the streets you can be sure it’s on a second-hand online marketplace for the low. Or not. Take outdoor goods and activewear brand Patagonia’s Better Sweater vest, for example. A $99 polyester fleece garment worn both by suburbanites on brisk fall days on post-work trips for foodstuffs at the grocery store and college students on brisk fall days on post-class jaunts to collect a 30-rack of beer at the grocery store. That is to say, it’s versatile — unquestionably practical to some, softly sensible to others.
At a price point approaching your average millennial’s weekly food budget, the Better Sweater is an investment of sorts, a sartorial affirmation of the wearer’s dollars. A statement piece which suggests that the wearer appreciates layers, is mild on the general concept of sleeves, and favors a Fair-Trade Certified sewn garment that, conveniently, also “warms your neck.”
Once seen, the consumer journey begins. Aside from buying the vest directly from the brand, a breadth of resale and second-hand portals exist on the internet ranging from Craigslist to Depop to Instagram with Grailed and eBay as the most popular platforms for pre-owned (and new with tags or never worn) menswear. Patagonia, for its part, has a used clothes haberdasher of its own: Worn Wear, the brand’s proprietary site for “recycled” clothes.
A cursory search, as of this writing, reveals only a handful of Better Sweater vests (in women’s sizes no less) averaging $50 apiece on Worn Wear. So, if you don’t happen to notice your preferred size and colorway in the mix, a trek out into the wider world of pre-owned Patagonia awaits. While the dedicated brand page is now “under maintenance,” eBay is still the most replete and expansive digital bazaar for the Better Sweater vest and its ilk. In fact, it is on eBay where a particularly noteworthy subset of Patagonia grails — limited-run or hard-to-find items that are sought after by brand stans — are on offer.
“The iconic Patagonia vest that traders, portfolio managers, bankers, [and] venture capitalists all wear when the temperatures start getting chilly is now available in gray and navy!” goes the full-throated product description for the “Authentic Goldman Sachs Men’s Patagonia Better Sweater Fleece Vest.” A reminder that, online, you can be whoever you want to be — especially if that someone sees themselves when they see a Midtown Uniform meme.
The seller of this particular number, bankerbags, isn’t wrong in his (forgive the assumption) declaration — the product is noteworthy. And not just only for the facepalm irony of a pointedly woke label’s ongoing co-opting by corporate identities, that are, at the very least, baldly capitalistic. The high resale price of the investment bank co-branded vests, as compared to the half-off Worn Wear listings, marks them as bearing social value and cache for a particular consumer archetype: one who is willing to put their money where their vestments are, after a fashion. Which is to say, someone whose fall aesthetic revolves around their fuck-you vest.
Call it blunt or vulgar even, but to describe something as having a “fuck-you” quality about it is a very 2018-going-on-2020 locution, one millennials are apt to ascribe to things or actions — see: fuck-you money — particularly those which intimate a blatant flaunting of wealth or privilege. You do not necessarily have to break the bank if you work for one. The expression, however, is not novel to the young men with disposable income and the phalanx of brands they equip themselves with like so much lifestyle ballast. Johnny Carson was known to use the descriptor, for instance. And, in the case of the Goldman Sachs x Patagonia merch, “fuck you” is, at its core, an act of contemporizing a line used by Tom Wolfe in his 1976 Esquire essay “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine.”
Attending a gathering of Boston Brahmins on Martha’s Vineyard, the journalist detailed the men’s outfits as having a “go-to-hell air: checks and plaids of the loudest possible sort, madras plaids, yellow-on-orange windowpane checks, crazy-quilt plaids, giant houndstooth checks, or else they were a solid airmail red or taxi yellow or some other implausible go-to-hell color.” For the famously white-on-white-on-white clad writer, such a sight was confounding, perhaps, blinding.
Wolfe once described his ethos as “counter-bohemian” and his aesthetic as a “harmless form of aggression,” which is exactly the kind of patrician criticism “go-to-hell” is. It’s too polite, calling something “go-to-hell” today when we all know the person behind the banker-branded vest is a walking micro-aggressor in a fleece; his clothes signaling a general “haha, fuck you” to everyone without a winning portfolio of stocks. Our clothing ourselves, right?
Taken one way, what we wear is, ultimately, an everyday exercise in decision making. At the same time, we’re also all living in a “post-trend universe.” This according to New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn. Taking her observation at face value then means that we can, sartorially speaking, be whoever we want to be. A generous execution of that theory, however, would be investment banker cosplay. Though, of course, dressing so as to appear as a moneyed and powerful master of the universe is not so much a novel idea as it is a trend without ebb; one which continually manifests in the cuts and hues of the times it reflects. Never forget the mantra Mad Men massaged into the minds of millions of Americans: “People buy things to realize their aspirations.”
It’s true that available to us is an abundance of options — Horyn’s “supermarket of choices” — even if those options are only variations on a uniform theme: gray or navy? Relaxed or slim fit? Bankerbags, for instance, carries an array of business-casual wares: Fleece quarter-zips and zip-up hoodies from Patagonia, and near-identical products including a “soft shell vest” from ‘gonia competitor The North Face. There are also, true to the moniker, duffle and tote bags emblazoned with the Goldman Sachs logo along the straps and handles mimicking prep star products that traffic proudly among haughty New Englanders and Hamptonites.
Assuming he knows how to broker a good deal, I wrote to bankerbags in order to clarify the provenance and authenticity of the Goldman Sachs-branded merch. (For any label worth its hype, brandishing bootleg Patagonia is likely among the most disreputable moves possible.) Referring to his capsule-collection’s worth of garments as “supplies,” he reported back that the items are only available to current bank employees. Stating further that all of the big players in the banking industry have “a partnership with Patagonia.”
He should know having also written that he previously worked at “200 West,” the Goldman Sachs tower with the very post-Great Recession nickname of the “Shadow Building.” In telling me how the banks get their Patagonia, bankerbags may have unintentionally revealed his sources: He can be so in his bag with his accumulated i-banker swag because he has “colleagues who are still working there.”
No qualms, however, if you’re not a Goldman guy. Should you have missed out on the Vineyard Vines pop-up shop they hosted at their New York City headquarters, the portfolio of investment bank vetements extends to J.P. Morgan as well, which has nearly identical co-branded items available for those in the know.
Branding, conspicuous or not, is the filter by which practically all consumers function. “It helps establish corporate identities — boundaries, really,” Horyn wrote. Which is partly why it’s so striking, this ubiquity of financial analysts and associates (along with their bizarro Silicon Valley counterparts) in their matching fleece vests. By no means does Patagonia outright endorse the association. In fact, their charming catalog advertising its customization offerings exclusively depicts the adventuring, socially-and-environmentally-conscious types who are their bread and (almond) butter. So, it made a sort of backward sense when bankerbags opaquely wrote back that the “vests are actually made by an outside company that provides the clothes and banker bags for all the big Wall Street banks.”
To be sure, the Better Sweater vest is far from fashion’s avant-garde. Comme Des Garçons matriarch Rei Kawakubo remarked in an interview that she derives no joy from “camping clothing.” That is, the purview of the seasonal collections designed by labels like Patagonia. “I have looked to see if there is anything interesting here and I have not found it,” she admitted.
Style-wise, it’s a conservative dude’s game, being a banker or a bro. And the corporations for whom they serve are, similarly, dyed-in-the-wool by nature. Which is why the banker logo parallel to the Patagonia insignia is so lucrative to some and duly evocative of a type of self-evaluation: It’s a normalizing display of an upmarket label that has been codified for a select tribe of consumers who prize fiscal wealth above all. Their soft power is a snug feeling, a smug look.
A vest is almost never worn on its own, naked against the skin, outside of the “Magic Mike” franchise. One has to choose to layer themselves with this modern milquetoast breastplate. It is not only calculated and prideful to adorn oneself with corporate logos, but free advertisement for the brands as well. It stands to reason that it is not inherently insidious to don these vests so as to signal an affinity for the place that provides you with your livelihood and reason to wake up and get out of the door every morning. Given this esprit de corps, it’s only fair that they could just as well say “It Sachs to suck.”
