clothing

Smiles, a decade on

Looking at Elements from the Hong Kong / Macau ferry terminal in the afternoon

The beauty of living in Hong Kong strikes me on a Wednesday. As too often I am in a rush, trying to make it home before a call, trying to make it from one appointment to another despite having left myself no buffer. It’s too common an occurrence because I try always to say yes, always to do one more thing. Even when there is no physical way to do both, when attempting will add more stress to an already crowded life. I do it not because it’s possible, but because trying, while hard, makes me feel alive. Life is short. Our daughter is almost three. There’s never enough time, for any of us. And so I rush, and so I am scrambling out of the subway on the first hot Wednesday in 2025. There will be many more, and we will tire of them quickly.

Today, though, people are excited, and the outfits are good. Hong Kongers have great style, a huge diversity of styles, and today in Causeway Bay they are on glorious display. Within two blocks I see an older man in a flamboyant suit, two ladies in model-level outfits, and a passel of children wearing everything from Pokémon to 90’s rave wear. I see a man carrying a small dog and a women with a printed dog on her shirt. I see two old people with canes wacking the ground with ambition, hard sacks to scope out the sturdiness of the built environment. I appreciate his endurance. I appreciate the consideration for the weather, for the appearance in public, for the part of all these people that brought them out today.

Hong Kong makes me happy. Often, in the current job, I step off of zoom and outside without thinking, my brain still wrapped up in whatever I was working on a moment prior. I leave my apartment for food, for an errand, part of a city but also alone in it, removed from it by remote work. Within a block, or two, I am happy to live here, happy to be among so many humans. Living in a truly dense environment, in the kind of built density that is so rare even in humanity’s busiest cities, is a gift. I encounter so many people, and they pull my mind away from zoom, from the internet, from the annoying burdens of modern life.

I am finally realizing that people need different things. Some people thrive on long quiet walks across the rolling hills, or through forests. Some thrive on the mountains, or the beach. And some, like me, are best when presented with so many external stimuli that the internal whirlwind of the mind takes a back seat to “wow that’s a big dog” or “watch out for that hand cart”.

And so a wish, on this first warm Wednesday in twenty twenty five: may more of us get what we need from the place we choose to live.

Clothes remembered

“I used to have the best jean jacket,” she tells me over dim sum in Hong Kong. “I left it in the taxi to the airport when I left Berlin. That was fifteen years ago. I still think about that jacket.”

My mind goes to my favorite garment, a green corduroy and laminate North Face black label jacket bought as a self present on arrival in Hong Kong five years ago. It’s been my favorite piece of clothing ever since. And then I remember my four pointed felt hat, black with two gray stripes, purchased in Shinjuku in 2003. And then to my partner’s comments, on looking through old photos this weekend, so often exclaiming “oh my god that shirt!” or “do you remember those shoes?” I do, of course, the photos tracking our relationship, yet many of the memories have faded, and require these pictures to access. My body, as I often write, has forgotten.

When this site began I worked in the garment industry, spending hours on fabrics, stitching, trim. I think back to those days, to the personal focus on quality that came out of that experience, and I remember things. Physical possessions. Expensive jeans, mostly, a hoped-for connection between the increase in garment cost, livable wages for the sewer, and water treatment facilities for the indigo dye. After a bit I remember my wool knit hoodie, Triple Aught Design, my first merino garment. It was purchased early on in our time in SF, and worn almost daily there. It’s hanging in my closet as I type this, more than ten years later. For a long time I never traveled without it, my one essential item. It has been used as a pillow in countless mid-tier hotel rooms, slept in on dozens of transpacific flights, and worn on every evening bike ride all the rest of our ten years in that foggy city.

In some ways these garments shape us, even years later. I wonder what events my friend took her jean jacket to, what she felt like when she wore it? I wonder if she’ll ever feel that strongly about a jacket again? Does that part of us fade as we age?

I think of my wife’s green jacket, which she’s had from high school or early college, which she wears now around Tokyo in the winters. How many of these garments are for cold weather, how many of them are rarely worn now, able to be pulled out intact for good memories? Or is that just because we moved to the tropics, and they so rarely feel necessary?

In January for a few days the weather cools. I wear my favorite garment everywhere I go. It’s something to treasure, feeling good in clothing, feeling good in a way we’ll remember.