About a year ago I posted about a little clothing brand called ‘429 Life’ whose name comes from the use of a phone’s keypad to spell out the word ‘gay’. You can read it at: 4-2-9 spells G-A-Y. I was pretty keen on them at the time, I think the idea’s pretty cool. It’s one of those ‘in the know’ kind of ideas. You either get it or you don’t. Perhaps the ‘in joke’ was just a little to ‘in’ for some people, including the company itself. In my post last year I wrote:
The t-shirts tastefully, in tiny writing, have slogans like ‘Are You 429′, ‘429 You Wish’, ‘429 Boy’, and ‘Absolutely 429′. If you’re unsure whether you’re 429 or not, you can buy the ‘premium soft cotton’ t-shirts without any label.
They don’t talk about the gay thing anymore. Now, under the ‘We Are 429′ section of their website they state, in ‘understated’ lowercase:
we like to challenge the idea of ‘labels’. so, when asked what 429 means, we can only give one answer: 429 is being confident in your own skin…
work in them, play in them, date in them … do whatever you want in them (we don’t judge).
I hate this lack of any attitude. It makes me want to despise their clothes, which isn’t as tough as it was before because they now look pretty ordinary. There’s nothing special about them. Of course they’re nice ‘premium’ shirts and such, but while last year their clothes were something remarkable, now they’re nothing more than what you could pick up at Zara with half of the price and none of the gay-shame. But they haven’t developed enough shame to stop putting homoerotic photos of muscly boys, as below, in their catalogue. Cute boys are apparently still allowed: it’s honesty and frankness that aren’t permitted. Theirs new style is like Abercrombie and Fitch but while A&F doesn’t really pretend to be anything but pretty and butch, 429 actively tries to deny its gay roots. Gross.
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