I hold my hand up to shoehorning one of my favourite podcasts, often about physics and philosophy, into this week’s fashion theme. Stay with me because the recommended episode is relevant. But first, why does Sean Carroll’s Mindscape often appear on lists of “desert island” pods? I don’t listen to it as often as some other favourite shows but it’s dependably enthralling when I do and I can imagine mining the 250-plus episodes, each averaging about 80 minutes, as I forage for food, water and somewhere to plug in my phone.
As a respected theoretical physicist, Carroll is on home turf talking quantum mechanics or superstring theory, breaking down these impenetrable topics for us muggles as well as, if not better than, any full-time science communicator. But rather than staying in his research lane, Carroll is also impassioned about broadening his knowledge across other disciplines. He created his still chart-topping podcast in 2018, largely as a licence to chat one on one with world-class thinkers, which works particularly well if you also happen to be a world-class thinker.
The achingly well-informed conversations take in the complexities of art, fine wine and corruption as well as engineering, neuroscience and game theory and, although the episode on dressing well seems like an outlier, you can trust Carroll to choose his guests with care.
Derek Guy is a Vietnamese-Canadian menswear writer, known for his erudite and thoughtful blog, Die, Workwear!, which he started in 2011, and for his amusing fashion critiques of tech billionaires and politicians, which has earned him a huge following on X, formerly Twitter. His conversation with Carroll includes a couple of recommendations for dressing well inexpensively, but I enjoyed the takeaways about fashion being a cultural language that informs notions of good taste, and the cultural capital required for this. Also fascinating was Guy’s explanation of the aesthetics of asymmetry and the spotlight effect, a psychological study that involved a participant being forced to wear an embarrassingly large Barry Manilow T-shirt.
