№.3 Merch For Your Modus Operandi
Or, the story of one swank duffle bag.
When I first met my friend Duncan, at a party early last year in Austin, Texas, he was wearing this marvelous teal jumpsuit with a graphic of an ornate gold mirror haphazardly stamped all over it. Men can’t pull off jumpsuits! Without looking like a factory worker, at least, or a Ghostbuster. This is an iron law of sartorial existence!
But he made it sing; I don’t know how, but he did! Scratch another triumph for the Epicene style, I suppose. A month or so later, we reconnected in New York, and some small neuron in the back of my mind, the one devoted to male fashion upsets, remained ever-vigilant with regard to the jumpsuit’s imminent reappearance; but a week later and still no dice, I couldn’t help myself any longer, and flat-out asked him.
‘Oh! I don’t have it anymore, sadly. I lost the entire duffle it was in…’
So last fall, when, after describing all the ideas I had for my brave new brand to Duncan during a long hike through the Rockies, he offered to commission a half-dozen pieces, I knew exactly what I was going to make him.
That is, if I was open to commissions. At the time, AFFALÉ was only a name, a shade of green, and few groovy samples I made for myself to wear to Burning Man. I was a month into a sabbatical from Resonance, the full-stack fashion platform where I’d done various tech and design things, almost since I’d first moved to New York five years ago. I was taking time away to pursue my off-again, on-again career in music. Did I really want to stick a toe back in those waters, so soon?
And would my pristine vision for AFFALÉ, legacy luxury house-come-lately, become irrevocably tarnished by dilly-dallying with bestie bespoke? Launch, or don’t launch; there is no merch. But, on the other hand, the mixtapes-for-friends mode of fashion brand existence is quite popular these days!
New York is uniquely dominated by female designers who have found success dressing their friends rather than the entire world… It’s almost like the garments and products these designers make are the merch for their modus operandi. (That makes these things the best-designed merch in the world!)
— Rachel Tashjian, The Girl Gang Fashion Fandoms of New York City
And I knew Resonance just so happened to have a lovely jumpsuit template available… and, perhaps, they even have a duffle, too? Oh, wow, they do! How cool would it be to design a branded AFFALÉ duffle?
i) Prints Charming
Initially, my garment-affective sense steered me towards flat, humble, woodblock-style prints, thinking they’d jive well with the texture of the heavy canvas material I had chosen for the duffle.
I was aiming more for “texture” than “pattern,” and I wasn’t scaling the repeat more than three or four inches, not much larger than what you see above (on a desktop, at least).
But “Bolder, louder!” beckoned. After all, this duffle bag was for an individual who, in our first conversation, had won me over by beatboxing a near-perfect rendition of Brittney Spear’s Oops!… I Did It Again, to the tune of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in F minor, BWV 881.
I started selecting for more depth, more discernible “objectness,” and scaled the repeats larger, closer to eight-to-ten inches.
My Midjourney prompting strategies vary wildly. Some days, I’ll simply copy-paste a few one-sentence prompts to start, and traverse through scores of variants before arriving at what I’m looking for. Others, I’ll make use of an entire twenty-parameter prompt machine I built inside an Airtable base that takes advantage of the full range of Midjourney’s available parameters, and allows one to specify everything from exact hex codes and print mediums, to Major Arcana and Christopher Alexander’s Fifteen Properties.
Knowing a bit about the history of textile design goes a long way; a field trip to The Design Library is priceless. In the near future I’ll publish a deep-dive of my entire process, but for now the prompts for all of the above prints were along the lines of the following:
In the end, I chose the second from the left on the bottom row, the one that looks a little like a sky full of hot air balloons. There’s just this indescribable warmth to it; it perfectly embodies the Old-World-World’s-Fair sensibility I’m going for with AFFALÉ, but with just enough surrealist abstraction to keep it from being too kitsch. And based on Resonance’s material-color atlases, I knew the heavy canvas material would soak up the navy blue ink magnificently.
All that was left was to place the print onto the garment body, so I fired up Illustrator and got to work. I plucked a few solid colors from my chosen print to apply to the straps, front and back panels, and side pocket. I stuck the AFFALÉ A logotype on the bag’s front panel, and on the rear arranged in a haphazard jumble the words from André Breton’s definition of surrealism, found in his Manifeste du surréalisme.
And the wavy, spacey yellow pattern on the right?
After I finished applying my print to all the pattern pieces, I noticed a second page in the Illustrator file, with what seemed like duplicate pattern pieces. Spares, maybe? I asked a coworker with more experience with the placement process than I.
“Oh, it’s an optional lining for the bag’s interior,” she told me, “But no one ever uses it.”
Well, of course, with prints to spare, I was using it! Scrolling through the list of materials the lining could be made in, Crepe de Chine immediately caught my eye. Surely an error, I thought—a canvas duffle bag, with a silk interior? There’s no way they let this through. It’d be too much sunglasses-emoji for this world. It has to be an error. I picked the already-silkiest looking print from my leftovers, slapped it across the pattern pieces, crossed my fingers, and submitted my print request.
ii) Trim, Etc.
After adding the silk lining, I figured, Why let the interior have all the fun? Gold chain handles it was, doubled-up for extra heft!
I’d have to “handle” this particular bit of embellishment myself, as I knew Resonance wasn’t likely to entertain my not-yet-official brand’s custom, one-off trim modification. But luckily I know a gal in the city, just down the street from me, who’s up for anything when it comes to alterations, so I was set.
Our bag was looking pretty swank at this point. To tie it all together, I wanted to design a signature silk bandana for AFFALÉ, more as a kind of house-establishing gesture than anything. Like Karl Lagerfeld, designing his iconic interlocking monogram repeats for the Fendi sisters, and later Chanel. True, I might be cutting my teeth on random bits and bobs like silk-lined duffle bags, but even at this nascent stage, I wanted to establish an AFFALÉ design for the long-haul.
I sketched my way through a half-dozen ideas, before arriving at a design consisting of a series of concentric circles, framed by a solid-color border, with the AFFALÉ A logotype in the bottom-left corner. I finished with two templates, a default, and an alternate I discovered worked better for darker, denser prints.
I selected a few patterns from my original generations for the duffle. The orange print came from the same seed as the duffle’s, so it filled the accessory role perfectly. The green bandana was to be a pocket square for a chore coat that was also part of Duncan’s order. You’ll notice that the A has tumped over in its corner; originally, this was unique to this bandana, as that corner was to be buried at the bottom of a pocket, but I like the whimsy of it, it reminds me of ragdoll physics. Thus, it stays.
iii) It’s Here!
A few weeks pass, and then a large package arrives, to an immediate unboxing. Perhaps not surprisingly, the result was the duffle bag to end all duffle bags. I immediately stuffed it with blankets and staged an impromptu photo shoot:
There’s really not much else to say. I still can’t believe I made a canvas duffle bag with a silk interior. Talk about high-low! One minor defect is that a few of the Manifesto’s letters run off the rear’s edge in places. But maybe they look more in-motion, that way. As if they’re literally jumbling around inside the bag as you walk. Surreal!
iv) Packaging
I decided to use Duncan's order as a prototype for what AFFALÉ's eventual shipping kit might look like. I'm a designer, after all, so my available options were: Top Apple, or Go home. Unit economics be dammed, I opted for the former. So I found myself wandering among the post-Christmas detritus of a literal big-box store one late-December afternoon, until I found the perfect rectangular box, a lovely, dull metallic-silver model that came in a few sizes.
The boxes' blinding white interiors were a bit of an eyesore, so some kind of paper was a must. No matter how swanky the brand, tissue paper has always felt cheap to me, so I hunted around Blick and Paper Source for sheets of decorative paper that I felt like conversed with a piece in Duncan's collection in some way.
The A garment tags are offshoots of something I was experimenting with at the time, little “calling cards” to carry around in my wallet. People stop me on the street without fail whenever I’m wearing any of my brand’s samples, and spelling out ‘A-F-F-A-L-E-But-With-That-Reverse-French-Accent-Thing-Dot-F-R’ for Anglos was getting old, fast.
Using the A from my logotype as my de facto brand symbol, I created an Illustrator template and ran a script to clip-mask it against my entire print archive, and print some branding, the color’s UUID—in the form of early surrealists’ birthdays—and a QR code that linked to the AFFALÉ landing page.
I had printed a business-card sized batch for my calling cards, but for hangtags I scaled up the assets and printed a half-dozen test sizes, up to a foot in length, before settling on a right-feeling eight-point-something inches. After cutting the letters out, I hole-punched above the A’s apex and tied each to its garment with some twine.
Once wrapped, boxed, and ribboned with some gorgeous AFFALÉ Green© velvet ribbon I also found at Paper Source, the result was… somewhere near stunning! But it fell just short, in an uncanny-valley sort of way. It looked like the kind of job your local suburban big-box jeweler would probably do. Like little miniatures of the cars in those smarmy Lexus commercials where the doting husband attaches an implausibly large bow to the roof of a car he bought for his wife. You know, those cold, impersonal, branded holiday vibes: “A Very Proper Noun Christmas.”
But! I happened to have these darling little brass-and-copper tassels, some trim I was auditioning for another garment. I tied one around the bow on each box, and the warmth-balance was absolutley perfect.
Shipping, shipping was next. The boxes were bubble-wrapped and placed inside a larger box. I wrote Duncan a quick note, tossed it on top, and taped it all up tight.
Ever the Midjourney enthusiast, I sifted through a few generations’ worth of kitschy, Francophilic designs that looked vaguely shipping-labelesque, until I found a few I liked. Bon voyage!
v) Opening Ceremony
A snowstorm’s worth of shipping delays later, Duncan had his garments. He gathered a few friends with “big reactions,” set up a camera, and threw a lil’ unboxing party!
I clipped the entire twenty-minute video down to just the duffle unboxing, as well as a few moments of utter delight over the packaging. (Did you catch that? ‘This is better than Apple!’ I didn’t bribe him to say that!) And of course, a few kind words regarding moi 🥰.
“But, what happened to our totally-over-the-top gold handles?,” you might be wondering. They were stolen right out of my mailbox! Alas, the universe has better taste than I, as the handles would’ve totally top-heavied the bag into submission. A quartet of handles, with incidental duffle.
vi) What’s Next
As the first duffle bag I’ve made, ever, I’m satisfied. As merch, as bona fide AFFALÉ product, who’s counting? I’ve already ordered a few color variants of the bag, holding constant the branding, and of course, the silk interior.
It’s impossible to say whether the magical synergy of the first bag’s silhouette, print, and branding was an aesthetic anomaly, or if its level garment-affective power will be present in other, well-chosen color variants, but we’ll find out soon enough.
Meanwhile, the bandana templates were clearly winners, and I’m working on a script that will automatically scan new prints created in Midjourney to determine the appropriate template (likely, based on measures of monochromatic-ness and luminosity), and generate and order a new style. I'll also experiment with dual-sided bandanas—essentially, two sewn together.
What I really want is to make another of Duncan's duffle for myself, but I'm fully committed to fostering the sort of sparkly feeling that comes with possessing a one-off garment. I have some ideas, though I don't quite know everything it will take to scale the magic, yet.
But as soon as I do, you'll be the first hear about it.