Jaguar Literary Drop

About a month ago I was in San Francisco with my daughter, and I took her to a high-end consignment store in Pacific Heights. Pac Heights is the home of SF elites, the location of the Getty Mansion, towers with thirty million dollar penthouses, all the accoutrements of the rich. This particular consignment store regularly receives very high-end luxury brands, so if you accident upon it on the right day you can get a Gucci shirt for $20, and I wanted to pick through it with my teenager, who is into Tokyo street fashion, and see if we might score some finds for either one of us at pennies on the dollar. After about ten minutes I found a shirt that was so cool-looking, and so intricately tailored that I pulled it aside. My daughter gave it the thumbs up. It fit perfectly. I bought it for $27, took it home, wore it on a date with my wife, and received compliments. I had never heard of the brand, so I looked it up. The shirt is made by an Indie menswear brand in New York City called Descendant of Thieves.

I can’t afford any of their shit. That said, I found the website intriguing because of this:

Descendant of Thieves is…

A NYC brand specializing in small-batch production. Each style is handcrafted by 12 master tailors and labeled with its production number. Once sold out, it’s never reissued —Made for those who refuse to conform.

New styles drop every Friday at noon (est)

Now, I like artisanal things. Ceramics with an imprint of the maker. Holiday cards that are hand-made. I like small batch cookies. I like most things that are unique, not mass-produced. I had never seen a brand do this before. I went back and looked at the label of the shirt, and sure enough there was a tiny stitched-in label that said 107 units made.

This got me thinking. Eventually, I signed up for their email list. I think it is unlikely I am going to buy anything from them, but I want to be there, virtually at least, on friday at noon. I’m curious what their tailors are working on this week. The shirt I have, which has a Hawaiian print as you can see, looks nothing like anything they are currently selling, so there is some element of temporality built into the thing. Like a limited edition print, I am holding a piece of artisanal production, the output of an artist collective at a certain moment in time, and there are not going to be any more of these made. I think that is cool.

I’m pretty confident I could wear this shirt out anywhere in the world, and the likelihood of me encountering someone else wearing the same is statistically around zero.

I find myself wondering who Dres Ladro really is (it’s the cofounder’s nom de guerre, ladro is Italian for thief, what his father called him when as a kid he stole his dad’s clothes to redesign them), and what the tailors ate for lunch the week they made my shirt. I have an image of them in a warehouse in Brooklyn, sitting around sipping noodles together at lunch, their sewing machines idled. I see rolls of fabric, and heavy shears. It is late spring and a window is open; snatches of salsa music come up off the street. A songbird is nesting in the eaves above the factory window, and the music is intermittently punctuated by its singing. The green outline of an indeterminate shadetree is muddily visible through frosted glass. The Hawaiian shirt was an expression not of sunlight, beaches, and warmth, but the yearning for summer…

I like this notion of doing a drop.

Prepare yourself, Jaguar Imprints (our literary imprint) is considering what this would look. What about a small-batch drop of books? What if you had a head’s up that they were coming? What if the only place you could find the books was on our website, and the only way you knew they were coming was if you subscribed to this newsletter? What if you knew that you had about 30 minutes to get one if you wanted it? What about that?

What if it was like the secret menu at In-N-Out, and you had to know someone who knew someone to be in the know? Would that add a delightful zest of anticipation to your Friday on the drop day? Would your heart pitter-patter just a tiny little bit?

Would you wonder what we were eating for lunch that week too? Would you picture us out in the forest, with our bookbinding equipment, a family of squirrels helping to glue the bindings? A wheelbarrow filled with the week’s production? The sound of the creek running? Wind through the branches of the Douglas Firs?

Any Jaguar drop would likely have the word ‘Drop’ in the title. And I’m guessing that the first notice of the drop would go out to our paid subscribers, as a way of saying Thank you.