Last week, the fancy LA grocery Erewhon (which I wrote about almost a YEAR ago omg) launched a collaboration with the fashion brand Balenciaga. They have come together to sell totes ($425), aprons ($550), big t-shirts ($725), hoodies ($1,150), and a juice.
I actually can’t seem to find the juice on Erewhon’s website, which means that maybe it has sold out? If you’re in LA, let me know. Either way, I have thought about this juice so many times over the last few days that I remember what’s in it: ginger, lemon, apple, maple, and activated charcoal.
In my brain, Erewhon is my beat. I am fascinated by this store and what it does and what it means. And also? It’s a grocery store. So I will only make 6 musings (for that is likely all the topic deserves) and then perhaps I will be able to forget about this juice forever.
The juice is charcoal-based.
Stick with me here. Activated charcoal is used to detoxify the body after overindulgence. Typically administered in little pellets (I took many when I had food poisoning in Vienna once — a story for another time), activated charcoal is said to work by binding toxins together so that we can more effectively release them.
Before this most recent fashion show/collab, the conversation around Balenciaga was predominantly that it was toxic. They released an ad campaign over the summer that featured children x harnesses, which got them in trouble and reeked of poor taste. (Also there’s a big thing here with Kanye/the Kardashians, but I honestly can’t go into it. Read this, by MJ Corey.)
If charcoal’s purpose is to expel toxicity and purify the body, perhaps this collaboration is an attempt to do the same, but to the body of the brand itself.
Historically, Erewhon has done collabs with celebrities that consisted of very colorful smoothies. We delighted in the brightness, how these drinks made life more vivid. Now, we have a juice that is black. Both lighter and darker. The levity from smoothie (thick) to juice (viscous) X the color shift from bright to black feels meaningful. I would say it’s a game changer, but I’m not sure of what the game is.
Okay also, Bourdieu said that ‘taste’ was what enabled a distinction culturally between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. In accessorizing through full ingestion (aka branding themselves on juice), does Balenciaga imply that they are literally palatable again?
The entire Balenciaga collection, not that i’m paying TOO much attention to it (or am a fashion person at all, really), seems to capitalize on the concept of grocery store culture. Uggs, sweatpants, tote, hoodie — very LA, to be sure. It makes me think about how after people get famous, they’re often quoted saying “I wish I could just go to the grocery store without being bothered.” It’s funny because so many people order their groceries online anyway. So maybe the mundanity of a grocery run is actually becoming… retro? Special? Sacred? Hmm.
Sorry because I know that I am a broken record on this one but I DO just always think about this: we look at smoothies as an iconic encapsulation of what health is. But smoothies are actually not universally healthy! In TCM and Ayurveda, not all constitutions are prepared to consume large amounts of raw, cold, and sweet things. This is why, if you drink a lot of smoothies or eat a lot of salads in a cold climate, you might not be able to digest them that well.
This definitely isn’t true universally (maybe you drink cold smoothies all the time and you’re fine, in which case God bless) but I always find it helpful to remember that what is marketed as healthy is not actually always the thing that’s best for us.
Does this branded juice collab actually matter?? Lol! This is kind of a rhetorical question.
I’m not dismissing how much mundanity and culture matter, because sitting with and observing both are paramount to living in the material world. However, it doesn’t escape me that in moments when many, many people are getting killed, I am thinking about them and humanity and injustice and also intermittently? Yes about a juice that may not even be for sale anymore.
This isn’t meant to be overly moralistic, because our attention is infinite — and so is the internet.
I supposed it’s just a little bit of something dark to gulp down that I hope ends up binding us, maybe one day making us better.