On a Meaningful Life and Scale

Yesterday I went to the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of a documentary about the fashion collective threeASFOUR, and then an after party at the Boom Boom Room. It was the most fun I’d had out dancing in a while. Why? On an empty street corner in the Meatpacking District before I walked home, I started trying to articulate it and the word I came up with was scale.

The documentary centered on the designers’ struggle to achieve financial stability.

It doesn’t have to be either/or but often it is: Commercial success can mean scaling out of something that feels human.

Making art with your friends, going to parties and dancing, having the freedom to move between spaces where you feel the right degree of known (not anonymous but not harassed), this makes a meaningful life.

Personally, I don’t so much enjoy socializing in the “entourage” dynamic. But once friends blow up to a certain level of success, that’s increasingly what’s available. I prefer moving through a party where it’s a mix of people I know and don’t know. And ideally both factions I want to know.

The internet has something to do with it. Certain people have always become famous beyond being scene fixtures. But parasocial nightmares are more and more common as exposure comes without a guarantee of real wealth, unhinged fandom without the ability to afford security. So last night, partying in a room where the core group was over 50, you felt a social fabric predating the corrosive ramping up of hyper-visibility.

The documentary threeASFOUR: Full Circle begins the same year I moved to New York. While the collective’s beginnings trace back to 1998, and this backstory is patched together with archival footage, the actual action of the film made by Sean Ono Lennon and Brian Gonzalez begins “Winter 2012.” I couldn’t help but think about what my introduction to the city was then. And how it made me put roots down for the life I’ve since built.

When I arrived as a 22-year-old, threeASFOUR’s Gabi, Adi, and Ange were unavoidable. I saw them everywhere. They appeared as a blueprint for a life I wanted, leading with style, integrity, and presence in a social world woven between galleries, lofts, and restaurants. They exuded their label’s otherworldly ethos but with an effortless, dressed-down cool. Always biking. All three of them uncommonly beautiful. My reference for that off-duty intentionality was paparazzi pics of celebrities. They looked as good if not better and were free of being hounded in that way.

There is no real resolution. In the film. In their lives. In mine. We keep on keeping on, trying to make stability without sacrificing meaning. But I think dancing last night, I appreciated the ways we are rich. And the risk we take losing this abundance when notoriety tips beyond the kinship ties of a niche underground and becomes alienated and unmoored, with map but not territory.