WELCOME TO PARAPHERNALIA.
What interests you about fashion, design, music, movies, television, automobiles, electronics, tabloids, drugs, magazines, literature, or whatever it is you consume? Do you find that you collect things? Like a serial killer collects things? People fascinate me, and their ephemera can say everything about them. The paraphernalia that makes up our lives is personal. It’s psychological and it’s pathological. Sometimes it can give you a voyeuristic rush. Sometimes I feel like a grave robber, the way I can pour over the contents of a dead person’s effects. I get a rush at estate sales and auctions. I love spying on people’s internet histories and cruising message boards, closely reading lawsuits that reveal a person’s private messages. I eavesdrop on the schizophrenics outside my window on the boulevard because they fascinate me and I care about them. I can certainly obsess over my own paraphernalia, but I can just as easily admire someone else’s without ever wanting it for myself. The more one can explain what they love about something, the more accessible and decipherable it is to someone else. This is the lens through which I metabolize the concept of style, and that is why I want to write this newsletter. This is not a shopping guide or a fashion diary. We’re doing aesthetic analysis over here. For the good of mankind.
Written by me, Patrik Sandberg, a screenwriter and producer, formerly an editor of fashion magazines and also a non-committal creative director in the realms of advertising, luxury apparel, consumer goods, hospitality, pop music, and fine art.
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