Every week a different FADER staff member will pick a clothing item or accessory that he or she has lately been spending a lot of time with—or would like to—and write a little love letter to it. We would’ve done a column on who we’re dating but that seemed a little bit much. This week Julianne writes about the Fallon Veruca Collage Long Necklace.
There were some serious nerds in my high school (not discounting myself), but none were nerdier than the kids who belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism. A worldwide organization dedicated to reenacting medieval history, these were dudes who wore furry boots that presaged Uggs by a decade and spent their afternoons in the local park drinking various sweet waters and jousting with wooden swords. LARPing has become de rigueur in recent years thanks to its increased visibility in popular culture, but the SCA was the OG fantasy fighting, conceptualized long before video games or genre fiction or MAGIC cards... conceptualized in the 17th Century, as it were.
While I was a different breed of nerd than these mysterious, dedicated knights and knaves, one thing I always admired about them was their propensity for chainmail, the armor made from hooking little metal rings together into a hardy second skin to avoid peoples' knifepoints from penetrating your arteries. Chainmail is highly underrated as both a craft and an art form—it looks something like glimmering snakeskin, and its status as an artisanal (kinda) textile is right in line with the current hunger for handcrafted items... and my hunger for sturdy industrial wear. Givenchy played around with the idea of a chainmail niqab in their Fall 2009 couture line (probably my favorite collection ever), but as summer winds up, it's not practical to don 32 pounds of iron in the New York humidity. With Fallon's Veruca Collage Long Necklace, though, I can front a little. Welded together in heavy ox brass, it's got the vibe of chainmail without all of the weight (or the connotations), and I can look sophisticated while secretly knowing if someone tries to stab me in the neck, I'll be protected. Glad it's 2010—not really into things like mead, serfdom or the bubonic plague—but it's comforting to know that a textile popular in the 1600s has longevity more than 400 years later. Bet those dudes from the park are stoked, too.
