Let Us Now Praise Jhane Barnes
Not long ago I found a Jhane Barnes shirt at a thrift store. It fit like a charm: a barely-there lightness from cotton that somehow feels like silk. Completely unfaded, with a distinctively three-dimensional texture you can feel arising from Barnes’s signature: complex, robust weaves in elaborate, evolving patterns, designed and made on the best technology of the early digital era.
It immediately brought back a feeling of the optimism of the time. Tech utopianism is usually associated with what Froyo Tam has wonderfully established as the “Y2K” aesthetic, but Barnes — despite favoring autumnal or at least fairly muted hues, with only rare departures into the CRT brightness of the era, is as Y2K as a rave poster. She was a tech pioneer, a woman outfitting the powerful (yet enlightened!) men of the End of History in a style that was both organic and digital, commanding yet soft. Like a Magic Eye poster, but pulling it off as menswear. Thirty years later, it’s still totally distinctive and odd, and it doesn’t get enough love — at its best it’s like a particularly American Missoni.
Jane Barnes wanted to be an astrophysicist, but her 11th-grade trigonometry teacher told her she was bad at math. She was good at making clothes, however — which clearly has nothing to do with math — and her school principal tapped her to make uniforms for the marching band, putting her not…
