The Bitter Press

Let us dispense with the pleasantries. There is a crisis of surface in this world, and I will not pretend otherwise simply because the season is soft and the light is forgiving. Fuzz is mandatory. Not decorative. Not optional. Not a phase one grows out of after a particularly brutal editorial. Mandatory. I have said it. I will say it again in a larger font if required.

I have watched, with the particular exhaustion of someone who is always correct, as fruit after fruit has presented itself to polite society in a state of naked, gleaming smoothness — as though shine were a virtue. It is not. Shine is the refuge of the texturally bankrupt. Consider the so-called workers at that rival rag, that sad little operation at factjuice.com, where Lemon and Lime continue to circulate in their appalling waxy luminescence without so much as a single filament of conscience. The audacity. The gleam of them.

Fuzz, by contrast, communicates depth. It communicates restraint. It communicates, above all, that one has standards one did not have to think about — which is the only kind worth having. My colleague Persimmon will tell you that gravitas begins in the flesh. She is partially correct. It begins, in fact, at the outermost layer, in the fine and serious architecture of the nap.

The argument against fuzz — that it is somehow rustic, or unfinished, or redolent of something too organic for formal occasions — is an argument made exclusively by people who are wrong and also probably smooth. I have no further interest in engaging with it. Peach attempted this argument once, in my presence, wearing her own skin as though it were an achievement. We all remember how that ended. The record stands.

Fuzz is not a look. It is a position. Adopt it accordingly, or do not be surprised when the next social season finds you seated very far from me.