Morning Comrades! A special email for this last week of the year for you today, with the last newsletter coming your way tomorrow. For now I would like to draw your attention to this elaborate project I have been working on with my friends at Early Majority for the last few months.
As many of you know, I generally do not work with other brands but invite friends in to come and collaborate with Black Lodges. This is a happy and wonderful exception, one, because I genuinely enjoy what the team at Early Majority are doing and are going to be doing as well as the fact that their co-founder, Joy Howard has been a dear and close friend and comrade for well over a decade.
Early Majority, similar to Black Lodges is a worldview gone physical and digital. Equally part brand ( a non-gendered high tech damn serious outdoor brand ), a community and a substack newsletter. Again, I vibe hard with these people and I think you would be interested in their work also. This collab is a podcast, a t-shirt, a contest and more. Essentially, it is all based around Feminism and I ended up using a quote from Charlotte Perkins Gilman laid out in the style of Katharine Hamnett whose work laid much of the groundwork for what was to become political streetwear on t-shirts back in the 80s. The quote “End The Man Made World” is from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and originates from the early days of the suffragettes movement.
I know, a fucking podcast! We all know how much I dislike this format but when one of your closest friends asks to sit down with you and talk, well, you do, of course and happily so and we just ended up having this conversation recorded, professionally. It starts off with the history of Black Lodges, which I would wager most of you know already. It gets interesting, deep and political, to the point where I state certain realities that would most definitely get me kicked off most social media platforms about 20 minutes into this conversation. My utmost appreciation and respect to Joy and her team for not editing those parts out. You can click on the above to listen to this podcast.
Or as the EM team said:
We love how Gilman’s body of work exhibits much of what we also love about Steven’s: fierce criticism coupled with ardent dreaming. Anyone can tell you what’s wrong with the world, but to truly devote yourself and your work to manifesting a better one, well, that takes a combination of strength, courage, and crazy that we call wonderful. And that’s Steven Vogel.
Over Thanksgiving, we sat down to talk about his work and lean out journey. Topics explored: how boring it is to talk about streetwear, the communist drinking club, feminism, and the utopia that’s right here for the taking. Unfortunately, we neglected to discuss Katherine Hamnett, who clearly inspired the execution of the collaboration — so please take the time to learn about her remarkable work too!
This is the T-Shirt. It gets to the point and I didn’t want to mince any words here. Again, thanks to the entire EM team for letting me run with this one. You can only get that over at their end and all profits are donated to a project called AUTONOMY.
AUTONOMY runs a Feminist Futures Program that develops visions of the future to orient our political and economic actions today. They conduct data analysis and consult businesses on how to help companies maintain success without working their employees to death. The most obvious way, and one of Autonomy’s missions? The four-day workweek.
This is the fun part of this collaboration, specific to IG but I figured we might as well get some good work out there. I will be posting about this on IG later today as well but long story short, use this template and add your favourite feminist quote in there, tag me and Early Majority and let’s get the good word out there. Oh and that automatically enters you into a raffle to win our shirt also.
That’s it. I hope you all enjoy this, maybe get to know Early Majority a bit better and enjoy our work together.
Until tomorrow, I remain yours, without compromise,
V.