no lie i genuinely believe brands are so behind the pleather movement bc they can just buy cheap plastic sell it as expensive ‘vegan leather’ and be ready for you to return in a couple years to buy another 'vegan peeta approved™ leather jacket’ bc they last like 5 minutes compared to the way leather lasts decades all the while you can pat yourself and coorporate’s back for being sutainable all the while pvc (what some fake leather products are made of) has been labeled the single most environmentally damaging type of plastic and while there are non pvc fake leathers such as pu leather… its not like thats much better producing plastic pollutes and the second your pleather clothes start to breakdown (which happens much faster than you think) theyll wound up on landfills for at least a 100 years…
also they love love LOVE to try and sell you “plant-based leather” that you then look at the details and it’s “45% cactus” or whatever and there’s no mention of what the rest of it is
it’s plastic.
it’s always plastic.
ALT
Let me tell you a story.
50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it’s body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.
But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.
The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn’t melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.
Anyway, I pulled grandad’s jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.
The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there’s no market for leather these days. Its skin won’t be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a “vintage” cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they’ll sell another one.
[Image ID: screenshot of a Tweet from Gillian Branstetter that reads:
“If enforcing gender norms requires a constant state of surveillance and censorship then they probably aren’t as biological or innate as you think they are” End ID]
We must not despair as long as we are here, we can teach the children about the ancient texts
Okay hold on but we can’t talk about Dragostea Din Tei without talking about Gary Brolsma. Yes, there’s a link above but that doesn’t really explain just how formative a video this was in the relatively early days of the internet.
“The Numa Numa Dance” was posted in December 2004 to Newgrounds.com and was one of the first viral videos.
Estimates on how many times this video has been viewed run somewhere around ¾ of a billion views.
News articles at the time talked about how this video by itself “justified the existence of webcams.” (Though I think the reason for the first webcam was reason enough.)
Let’s go back to the view count, though. If one person wanted to watch the Numa Numa Dance video approximately as many times as it has been watched in the past 19 years, and finish up the watching this year, they would have had to start roughly during the Battle of Piraeus in 403 BCE.
Yeah.
Humanity has, collectively, spent about 2426 years watching Gary Brolsma joyfully dance to Dragostea Din Tei.
The song charted on its own, don’t get me wrong. It’s still something like the 4th best-selling single of all time in France and the most successful Romanian-language pop song of all time. But its memetic longevity? There you can’t skip over “the Numa Numa Dance.” That is the Deep Memetic Magic of long ago.
OH. thank you for linking this: I had no idea what the name Dragostea Din Tei referred to, but I sure was thirteen on the Internet the year the Numa Numa Dance came out. I sure did immediately start dancing in excitement when the song started playing, too!
okay so that’s at least one person who would have no problem if they got sent back to medieval times, the guild hall absolutely going off to this mashup
ALT
