Welcome to the first issue of One Thing! Maybe you’re here from my (Kyle’s) newsletter, where you can read more about the project. OT is about curation, taste, lifestyle, and building a raft for the fragmented internet. Please participate in our quest! Right now we’re a community of 350+ readers. If there’s a blurb you want to write or a thing we should cover, just reply to this email. We want to have a conversation here. About what, exactly, we’ll figure out.
One Good Thing:
Kyle Chayka: These animated Rimowa ads have been popping up on TikTok that are a mix of Tintin and Studio Ghibli — and somehow they’re not cynically terrible? The luxury luggage brand, after its acquisition by LVMH in 2016, has been slowly expanding outward from dent-prone metal suitcases into backpacks and handbags. Because every business has to be scalable, and Rimowa’s halo of cosmopolitanism must be cast onto other objects in order to generate more profit.
The nice thing about these ads is their hand-drawn, artisanal, mid-century quality. It’s extremely Monocle x Ilya Milstein. Which is also the vibe: travel, eclecticism, tasteful adulthood. They feel young but also grown-up, as if millennials could become adults after all. The problem is the products don’t necessarily live up to the image. A cross-body bag in corrugated aluminium reads more like a parody of functionalism. Nicely surreal design, though. (OT trend watch: return of Surrealism.)
One Bad Thing:
Nate Gallant: Have we firmly entered the new maximalism? At the very least, culture right now seems to be driven by a nostalgic yearning for maximalist late-90s and early aughts pop culture. If Rimowa is the revival of vintage futurism, then Tiffany’s new collaboration with The Pokémon Company is a bland gilding of nostalgia. The brand released Poke balls in Tiffany’s signature blue that spew forth silver or gold Pikachus, Squirtles, and Cubones on necklaces.
The Pikachus in particular are pockmarked with diamonds on their puffy cheeks, accompanied by kintsugi-esque in-set diamonds, which look hastily shoved into a sort of appendectomy incision on poor Pikachu's side. The designs are by the artist Daniel Arsham, aka Snarkitecture, who is apparently the first artist to be allowed access to the Pokémon archive. Here he rehearses his usual aesthetic strategy of making things monochrome and crumbly.
It’s a sad launch because the luxury-ification doesn’t add anything to Pokémon’s cultural existence. The game arrived in the ‘90s offering accessible collectibility and a less exoticized version of Japanese culture. By contrast, there’s no childlike fun in the jewelry; it’s a kind of lazy glitz costing thousands of dollars. Put another way, Arsham x Tiffany doesn’t add anything to Pokémon’s cache. (Pokémon are the opposite of monochrome, literally and conceptually.) It must also be observed that Alexandre Arnault, the scion of the family who owns LVMH, was behind the Rimowa reboot and is now trying to turn around Tiffany, which LVMH bought in 2021. But different brands require different strategies.