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Does this sound like a brag? It is not a brag, but I get a lot of emails from brands and I am loath to respond to them. So I am surprised to share with you that this afternoon, I received an email that caused an involuntary and instinctive oooh, ahhh, look at this! It’s this sweatshirt ($145) from Lacoste’s French Open collection with a simple drawing of a tennis player carrying a racket that the artist didn’t even bother to string.
The thing is, I can’t tell you why I like this sweatshirt. My response was more reactive — LOOK, COOL DRAWING — than analytical. I’m not particularly drawn to what my colleague Cory Baldwin described as art that is either Art Deco, Cubist, or both. I definitely don’t play or watch tennis. I didn’t even take time to think about some very important questions, like what is he leaning on and where did his legs go? This is apparently a “winning pose,” though, according to the product’s copy.
I could make something up: This sweatshirt so casually evokes the preppiest of sports without making you look like you’re headed straight to Daddy’s Cape Cod yacht for the weekend. But my mind didn’t make those leaps in the half-second it took for me to see the sweatshirt and then force my deskmates to feast their eyes upon it, or even in the several minutes it took for me to text my girlfriend about it and then tweet it!
Truly, I think I just exposed myself badly by endorsing the sweatshirt without thinking about the implications. The abstract art-meets-tennis concept is best described by Racked senior editor Alanna Okun: “If Infinite Jest Were a Sweatshirt.” Dammit.