Remember that Nylon Mag feature with the kids from Hair that we found so bizarre? Well it seems that Esquire has to decided to one-up the Bumble & Bumble advertorial with something that’s even more strange: a “fashion fiction” feature with our old pal John Wray, author of Lowboy.
Wray’s writerly task? To “imagine the stories behind a few of this season’s most lived-in, luxurious items.” An example, pegged to the image above:
“Polly Jean Johansson had long suspected that Charlie Grass did not, in fact, read the hardcover books that lay artfully strewn about his dingy one-room apartment above the Duane Reade, but it was his red-white-and-blue cardigan that clinched it.”
Is it just us, or is this an earnest attempt at J.Cruel-style prose gone wrong? Or maybe we were just turned off by the concept altogether. We do find it interesting that the most affordable item in this story is a pair of $80 jeans — which would buy approximately 32 subway rides for a paranoid schizo on the lam like Will Heller.
What do you think? Is this piece bordering on highbrow shilling? [via Jacket Copy]