On the Search for a Good Beach Towel

Snake America is an email newsletter that covers vintage clothing and sometimes furniture, usually for sale on eBay, sometimes on other digital auction platforms. There are over 100 issues, the majority of which devolve into topics not entirely germane to the auctions at hand.

Orvis dog pants

I think Orvis might be my favorite brand of clothing that's not era-specific. Orvis isn't old and isn't new. There isn't much distance from the clothes they made to the clothes they make now. What they made is mostly good. The new stuff isn't very, but it's not bad and has charm. The Midtown store is a hop from The New York Public Library and its second floor is all outdoors and fishing gear. You can get lures and trout maps and waterproof pants and hats with hooks on them there. The store was on Park Avenue a decade ago and was the only place in Manhattan that sold waterproof socks. (Can't confirm.) When I went back a year later they shed themselves of that distinction. The new store sells new Barbour jackets, in the two standard cuts, at street level, and an assortment of dog toys.

I notice in earlier newsletters I keep saying there's a fine line that gets walked wearing certain clothing. I've written that a few times. I can't just keep saying that and painting myself into corners. Each time I wrote that I meant there are many ways to wear something, but only one way looks good. The something in this case is clothing that's not immediately tasteful. Unless all the complements are correct, that item's bad taste spreads. If it isn't contained the risky outfit becomes a bad one. The fine line is finding the right, complementary pieces of clothing to rein in the bad taste. The whole point is being the first person to cook eggs the wrong way.

The thought to draw the fine line with these pants came into my head like a reflex. It's true that they're not very tasteful. Labradors are very boring dogs. They shouldn’t cover a pair of pants. And it's true that the pants could work well in a specific context. And it's very true they can also really look bad. But upon reflection I don't think the line is that fine. It's pretty cut and dry. These are khakis with dogs on them. There are a handful of ways to wear them, none of which are much different from each other. It used to be that all-over print clothing like this screamed money. It definitely doesn't do that anymore. I guess you can go full Polo Mansion, and lean into the wealth. Or the pants can be worn in an MoMa PS1 way, dressed against something bland, or destroyed. In both cases the eye goes towards the pants with dogs on them.

There's an online company whose name exactly rhymes with Pennington and Bailes that sells similar pants, but with college sports teams instead of golden Labradors. Their web shop's collegiate section features all 14 SEC teams, eight ACC teams of 14, including Clemson ... and Notre Dame … and other teams from other boring conferences and three Big 12 teams that aren't the Texas Longhorns. Tennessee pants come in khaki with orange accents, and in orange. Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma aren't featured. Notre Dame doesn’t play football in the ACC, so I guess this is a basketball site. (Maybe.) A&M is featured, and this other company Cutter & Buck makes pants for them too. What’s going on here? I need all-over print Longhorns pants worse than I need all-over print Golden Lab pants. I've never lived in Texas or owned a dog. I love Longhorns football enough to print bootleg T-shirts with the school’s logo and name on them, as well as my phone number. No one from Texas has called. There aren't any Longhorns monogrammed pants anywhere else online. I emailed P&B about why they don't have Longhorns and Kansas pants and I haven't received an answer, but it's only been two years since I asked. I followed up this week and learned that they don't currently license with UT. Monogrammed pants are great to look at in photographs but don't look as good outside the digital confine. It's the same thing with those pants with the stripe on the side. Which was something that didn't last very long. Wearing too much adornment is like when a man with a beard wears a hat and glasses. What is he hiding? It’s a line that doesn’t seem as fine to me as it does to people who do all three at once.

Ayrton Senna towel

Last summer my life was out of my control and I needed a good beach towel so bad that I lost sleep over it. I spent a long time looking and couldn't find one. It's almost Easter and I'm no closer. This newsletter exists to find market opportunities ... the world is lousy with them. For every item that once anchored a department store department when our parents were growing up there’s a direct-to-consumer company now selling just that thing. Mattresses … toothbrushes … razors. But there isn’t one for beach towels. There are companies like Parachute that make linens but no companies that are more specific. Makes sense. Who has room? Who has time? Why subscribe to a post-retail towel service where you’d get a different soft-colored beach towel every month? It only makes sense if you own a gym. Signing up for an app and getting hooked into a linen service is like that Eric Andre episode where people pay him to work out moving. It’s better to do what everyone else does: buy a new towel every summer at the towel-and-trunks-and-offensive-shirt store by the beach when you get there. It’s faster. Life is easier without linen service. In The Mood For Love was a movie about rice cookers. It takes place in British Hong Kong in the early 1960s. Its director, Wong Kar Wai, said because women didn't have to spend all day making rice they had the time to hang out. I guess Gidget or Baywatch are the linen-service equivalent, movies about being free and being able to hang out and swim and not having to worry about when your beach towel shipment will get there and how to pay for it.

We have to stay away from beach towels until we need them. There's a tacit agreement between consumers and storefronts to not waste time or space with beach towels. Us consumers agree to only buy them when we need them, and stores agree to fill their valuable shelf space with more interesting things, like delicious gum. Of course, some of us want more. Just because everybody barely needs a beach towel doesn’t mean you should skimp on one. If you do it well enough you can leave an impression. You buy the right beach towel and people won’t forget. Who knew the brittle rag you lay on sand with could be a thoughtful item? I guess the point is you can be thoughtful about anything. I think this towel would be that if it weren't so poorly executed. What could be better than a giant towel, of good weft, with an incredibly fast, expensive car on it? Not much. But this thing looks cheap and the photo is fishy.

Luxury houses make towels too. Most are really big, bath sheet-size usually, not technically towels. Buying one is an exercise in presence and disrespect: spending all that money to just sit on sand. It's harder to get one for cheap than you'd think. Not many people sell old towels, but just enough buy them. Most sellers who have luxury towels think they have a piece of the Holy Cross. You can’t go too old with a middle-class towel or it gets scratchy. If you want old, it has to be rich. Or you have to buy new. Harley Flanagan from the Cro-Mags was selling beach towels with the "Age of Quarrel" album cover on them. This was online, a few years ago. I thought about it. It was such a distasteful cash grab that it broke new ground. Any band can make a T-shirt … He published the post in June, mid-summer, and was taking pre-orders for another month. He said the towels were shipping later after that. By then summer would be over. They were $45. My guess is they would be there a bit before Christmas. I didn’t buy it after all and am still looking. A friend in the neighborhood got theirs in November, in time for summer in Australia, where everyone has a few beach towels to begin with.