Capsule #26: The Men's Edit 2 ft. Robin Loo

Hello hello,

Happy December!

Another special week is upon us: our second Men’s Edit is here, written by the wonderful Tom Gordon-Martin (TGM), a creative producer at The News Movement. We talk about men’s fashion and pop culture moments in Capsule pretty frequently, but I think it’s nice to bring in men’s voices, especially given how much there is to say about masculinity at the moment.

In this issue, Tom touches on: stag dos, cold swims, 5-a-side, brands doing it right, v-necks in Saltburn, climate change campaigns, and the rise of the tongue (in trainers, that is). He also shares some great recs to add to your queue this weekend 🎧.

He’s also brought along Robin Loo (Prestige Pak, NTS Radio) to share his Hot & Not with us all. 🍜

Hope you enjoy! I know I did.

Holly

Talking about man things…

I was playing football after work recently. It was a Tuesday, cold, rainy. £9 each. After a hefty tackle, a guy shouted at me: “You a pussy?” I was stumped. I don’t know, am I? Maybe? Either way, I think I’m more interested in the question.

A few days later, I went on my first stag do. 25 guys. Ireland. 2 nights. I was worried, no, I was practically certain the trip would confirm that my gender is a bit fucked.

But I was wrong. It was a soul-enriching 48-hours. We swam in the Atlantic, I made new friends and saw old ones. We spoke about things like marriage, our jobs, our partners and what we want to do with our lives. As everyone got a bus into town one day, I decided to walk along the seafront and was joined by someone I met on the stag. The whole way we talked about how running helps our mental health, the temptation to leave the city, and how scared we are at the prospect of having kids.

These two experiences kind of catch the fringes of where I think a lot of guys are at at the moment. As bell hooks wrote in The Will to Change:

The "mask" that hooks refers to is never easier to spot than in group dynamics. On the football pitch, the mask often feels as important as wearing the right colours or communicating well with your teammates. It’s as if we're so familiar with the codes of masculinity, that we preempt the dynamics of male-dominant situations. Yet the stag do experience completely flipped this on its head, and proved my judgements wrong. I was then reminded of a song lyric that highlights the changeable nature of masculinity - Joe Talbot of IDLES sings in ‘Samaritans’, “The mask / Of masculinity / Is a mask / A mask that's wearing me”. When you take a step back and look at the mask symbol in this way, of course you can see how masculinity isn’t one flat, permanent state. It’s shifting, it’s different across different groups, and we can change it if we want to. I’m trying to say that my gender “isn’t a bit fucked”, to quote myself. And maybe the guy at football just needs a nudge, some permission, to take his silly mask off and realise it’s going to be okay.

Round of applause because…

…we all just got through another Black Friday. Yes, I did take my phone out last week for some joyless scrolls and I was slapped repeatedly across the face with opportunities to buy beautiful, cheap(-ish?) clothes from brands I normally just can’t afford, Adsum and Nigel Cabourn being a couple of them.

Ultimately, the fervent marketing of the whole thing makes me feel shitty, but it reminded me of the way Nottingham-based Universal Works approaches Black Friday: to coolly and calmly reject it. Checking their socials for sales info this year, each page was silent. I did find this piece from 2020 where they affirm that their Black Friday deal “is the same as usual, offering the same fair prices and great design that we offer all year round.⁠” They then went on to signpost people to local and independent stockists 😍.

As Holly said last week about Black Friday anxiety: “let this panic be a signal for shifting how you approach shopping in future.”

With this in mind, UW, you have my heart.

V is for V necks…

I went to see Saltburn this week. I thought it was good, not great. The story didn’t feel finished. In an interview with Letterboxd, director Emerald Fennell said one of her four favourite films is Cruel Intentions, which I also watched this week. And you can totally see her filmmaking and story inspiration for Saltburn via that movie…

One of the clearest through lines between these films is the outfits, and I particularly enjoyed how effortlessly the male characters wore v-neck jumpers in both films. Some were better than others, but I was all in for a v-neck under a blazer or a thick and chunky one with no tee underneath. 

And I’m not alone: after a quick search to see how original this is, I found that the fashion editors at SheerLuxe are also saying that you want your v-neck to be “high cut, chunky and close to the neck.”

And finally…

It’s getting oily in here. Two recent adverts have absolutely sent me and you should watch them both. First, this Change Climate film made by Channel 4’s in-house creative department, 4creative. The other is this jokes video with Olivia Colman, aka Sophie Chapman aka Oblivia Coalmine, made for Richard Curtis’s Make My Money Matter campaign.

Both these ads are funny. Both satirise our leaders’ continued failure. And both videos explicitly centre one of the key substances destroying our earth: oil. Which left me wondering, are we on the edge of seeing more messaging that focuses specifically on oil? Or on specific things more generally? I know one of the big struggles around climate change messaging is the scale of it all - that feeling that the problem is too big and vague to solve. As a journalist, but also a human being, I am desperate to find ways that effectively communicate the severity of our climate situation to enough people so we can turn it around. Maybe focusing on oil, a disgusting, sticky, smelly thing that should very much stay in the ground, will do better at getting people’s attention. 

This week, Robin Loo popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Robin is a music-biz linker upper from south east London and founding member of DJ/Party collective Prestige Pak (@prestigepakuk). He spends his days looking after brand partnerships at NTS Radio.

📺 Watching: The Robbie Williams docuseries on Netflix. This doc adds to what I think is one of the best eras in documentary storytelling. It feels like the camera never stops pointing at Robbie, whether via archive footage or as he narrates his own story from his bed in his pants. What other way would you tell the story of Robbie Williams?

📖 Reading: Bellies by Nicola Dinan - This is a beautiful coming of age romance story about two people who fall in love and what happens when one of them begins to transition. One of of those when the characters are still with you weeks after you finish the book. 🧡

🎧 Listening to: Black Classical Music by Yussef Dayes - getting this album for my dad for Christmas, snm. Particularly recommend ‘Presidential’ from this record, but also go back and listen to Dayes’s album with Tom Misch. Stunning.

Arnie and Tom got chatting about man stuff and here’s what they came up with…

Since this is a men’s edit, we’ve got to talk about football. Classic football’s grip on streetwear is only going to intensify and in particular we think this is just the beginning of ‘the tongue’. Fenty x Puma and Wales Bonner know what we’re on about. And so do England’s Jude Bellingham and Trent A-A who both stepped out in remakes of old classic Adidas boots with a tongue this week. If you haven’t already, it’s time to get your tongue out.

If you’d like to adopt Arnie or one of his friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, please forward on 🥺

See you next week 💋