Nick Cave: The Hustle Club
Packing for my first trip to NYC since the pandemic, and since turning 40, brought a new set of priorities. Footwear with arch support trumps cuteness & style. Indeed, this is not my first rodeo. I suppress old thinking, finding a new logic over past logic. I resolve that comfort takes priority over a sense of style. After all what is style really and why was it ever important? In the past, cute shoes provided armor. A desire to belong in a perceived cutthroat community where designer labels rule the streets. I decide I’m old enough not to care about such things. Afterall, my club membership to the “40+ Club” includes the useful perks of invisibility and having zero fucks in my small wristlet to hand out. Confirmed in my decisive comfort, I, along with my travel companion, traipse through Bergdorf Goodman clad in factory model Adidas sneakers. We peruse the shoe section taking notice of blingy footwear displaying large gaudy designer logos. It occurs to me these tacky fashion pieces operate as a type of calling card for those who, unlike middle aged me, strive to fit in and assert they belong in the room with a class above their own. The irony however lies in knowing that those who truly embody this perceived “upper-class” enjoy the perks of the “1% Club” (or in my case the “40+ Club”) including a lack of need to appear they belong to it. Truly wealthy (and middle aged) people find the logo’d footwear to be what it truly is, overdone & tacky. Such is the goal of Nick Cave’s “Hustle Coat”, on display a few blocks north of us at the Guggenheim, which illustrates this point beautifully. A coat in which the lining is made from large chunky gold chains & diamond encrusted watch bezels allows the wearer to engage others who wish to identify with a perceived higher class. Call it “class dysphoria” (a type of gender dysphoria) where we covet a perceived sense of power and control that a group of people possess. However, a truly powerful man does not need to wear a fine silk necktie to the business meeting (think early 2000’s Mark Zuckerberg hoodie & fitness slides). The truly powerful woman does not need the charms of her beauty to dazzle others (think aging IG models). The truly wealthy person does not need the logo of the designer to signal their wealth. The necktie, the décolletage, the Louis Vuitton logo, the Hustle Coat, all types of ornamentation in which the wearers, members of the “Hustle Club,” wish to possess a perceived power in others and with obsession hustle after facsimiles of true club members signaling instead they are indeed “other”.
Nick Cave: Hustle Coat, 2021