Mono no aware

Travellers looking to explore the Rhône Glacier around the turn of the last century would have found no better place to stay than the Hotel Belvédère. The hotel boasted panoramic views over the glacier from its terrace and even had a tunnel through the ice right from its doorstep. Sean Connery was reportedly such a fan that he insisted the hotel be featured in Goldfinger.

Unfortunately, throughout the 20th century, global warming led the main feature of the Hotel Belvédère—the 11,000-year-old glacier—to retreat so far back that it could no longer plausibly have been described as the hotel’s star attraction, and occupancy dwindled.

Or perhaps it was a matter of changing tastes. Perhaps at some point, as air travel became more affordable, European tourists decided that spending time on a beach was far more interesting than watching ice melt.

Whatever the reason, the hotel permanently shuttered in 2016. But, as the many images on Tumblr will attest, it lives on as the backdrop of choice for automotive photographers everywhere, the hairpin turns of the Furka Pass being the perfect place to demonstrate a vehicle’s steering prowess.

What does all of this have to do with fashion, you ask? Well, we’ve written a lot about cosmopolitanism being one of the key tenets of our brand, and now we’d like to introduce another: mono no aware (物の哀れ), which is difficult to translate, but means something along the lines of “the pathos of things.”

It’s a sudden and unexpected recognition of an object’s transience, a bittersweet longing, a wistful yearning for the halcyon days of summer at the first sight of autumn leaves. This is the feeling we get when we look at pictures of the Hotel Belvédère, and this is the feeling we strive to encapsulate in everything that we do, from the rough-hewn texture of our fabric choices to the cold color cast of our imagery.

At the heart of it is a recognition that everything in nature reaches a natural end. In the words of Wallace Stevens: “Death is the mother of beauty…” Far from indicating any deficiency in quality, in a world of forever plastic, the fact that our garments, spun from natural fibres, will one day dissolve into the earth is precisely what makes them so exquisite. Appreciate them while they last.