Print product

Long live catalogs! We all need OG style inspo.

It’s late 1988. Allan Border is the Aussie cricket captain, tackling Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, and Viv Richards in one-day classics. Pat Cash and John Fitzgerald are leading the local charge at the Australian Open tennis. Paul Hogan’s in Crocodile Dundee II, but some dude called Yahoo Serious shocks everyone with a film called Young Einstein.

That’s not exactly a century ago, but it feels like it. I was finishing eleventh grade, harboring fading dreams of making it as a tennis player but trying to figure out how to transition from a life of t-shirts and track pants to something a little more … fashionable. Yet, at the time, the outside world barely intruded on Australia’s reality: every now and then, someone would return from an adventure to a far flung universe (i.e, America) bearing clothes we’d never seen and music we’d never heard. It was like a glimpse into the future, minus a flux-capacitor-powered DeLorean.

The other way you’d get a glimpse was in print. I’ve noted my long love of magazines—especially the US editions of GQ and Esquire back then, which arrived three months late before some unscrupulous importer realized you could ship them in quicker, slap “via air mail” on them, and triple the price. Flicking through those pages was a dream, envisioning striding the streets of New York City in a suit and tie, hot babe in tow. Given that seemed a tad out of reach for a 15-year-old in the burbs, a much more accessible dream was to mimic the Country Road catalog.

It’s hard to overstate its influence on a kid trying to figure out what looked good and, more importantly, what looked good on me. Desert boots with shorts? I’ll give it a shot. That combo of shirt and jeans? Sure. When you’re at school and high fashion is anything with a collar, where else do you learn but from what you’re exposed to?

I trawled online a couple of years ago for old Country Road catalogs, and even went to eBay hoping some hoarder had decided to flog a secret stash. No such luck. But the brand is celebrating its 50th birthday this year and has provided glimpses of its archives, along with inviting customers to share their own memories. It’s a hoot, and for fun here’s my contribution: the “C-R” on the all-too-baggy sweater is the giveaway, and how about the pleated pants?¹

I was reminded a few times in recent weeks of the power of beautifully presented print content to engage, enlighten, and inspire. First, literally the day after writing about my love of ink I learned J. Crew was resurrecting its iconic catalog after a seven-year absence. When I landed here in 2001 and through the brand’s juggernaut years of the late aughts, J. Crew was a touchstone for everything. Can’t figure out what to wear on a first date? Check out the catalog. Need a suit for a wedding? Check out the catalog. Wonder what Michelle Obama is wearing? One guess. (Of course, if soft-core porn with a side of fashion was more your speed, there was always Abercrombie & Fitch’s A&F Quarterly).

“I studied those catalogs more than any of my textbooks,” Elisabeth Hunter, a 47-year-old stay-at-home mother, told the Wall Street Journal of the old J. Crew catalogs, adding she and her college roommates used to cut out pages to decorate their dorm. It’s a widely shared sentiment: a few years ago, the Instagram account @lostjcrew began gathering vintage and iconic images; it now has 83,000 subscribers.

The second reminder came from Ralph Lauren. Lauren happens to live nearby (he has a palatial home in Bedford, New York) and a store in New Canaan, which is my favorite town around here. With that rattling around my brain, I then saw his US Olympic team uniforms and read about the lush fashion show he held in the Hamptons, which reminded me to flick through a book I have chronicling his empire.

What struck me as I looked at page after page of meticulously curated lifestyles—from preppy to corporate to dude ranch to ski village and everything in between—was the absence of celebrities. Today, you can’t move for Jeremy Allen White in Calvin Kleins or some other star flogging this, that, or the other. Back in the 1980s, you rarely saw a movie star or singer fronting a fashion campaign. It was the models who became stars—not the other way around. And there’s something about that approach that just works when it comes to being able to envision yourself in, say, a tweed jacket or crazy lush cashmere coat.

The final reminder was purely personal. I was juggling three books on my phone and Kindle, trying to snatch time reading a page here and there in between distractions. But it was in Chicago—spending time with Elevator Girl and surrounded by her piles of books—that I realized the joy of print isn’t just that it’s beautiful and permanent and portable. It forces you to slow down and bring words to life, as does viewing images on paper, canvas, or any other physical medium. The brief boom and even quicker crash of NFTs was no surprise as there’s a reason people queue for hours for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. It’s not merely paint on canvas, but a vessel for hundreds of years of history and mystery, imbued with the genius of its creator. Spoiler alert: it’s also way smaller than you think.

So, bring on the catalogs. Bring on images of people laughing and smiling under the Australian sun, taking me back thirty years to Daryl Braithwaite songs, baggy sweaters, and holidays with my family, many now gone. A couple of years ago, I grabbed a Country Road sweatshirt to scratch my nostalgia itch. I reckon a duffel bag has to be next, maybe in August when we head Down Under and my kids get their first taste of the country they’ve only dreamed about. And Country Road: get those old catalogs online! I’ve got a couple of impressionable minds to shape!

Note: The image accompanying this is from Country Road, photographed by Simon Lekias and shot on Wilyakali and Barkindji Country.

1. This photo also is shockingly reminiscent of my dad, who adopted this look for the last couple of decades of his life. Style obviously runs in the family. Obviously.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.