Bring back gatekeeping

I'm not gonna tell you where I got this from and I don't care that you're upset.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to discover something and why it can feel like you earned it.

A brand, a restaurant, store, a pair of pants. Something you found before everyone else did. Something you didn’t feel the need to post, just quietly hold onto. Maybe you told a couple friends. The ones who would get it.

I’ve always been a little early on things. Not in a “look at me” way, more just early enough to get made fun of for it.

In sixth grade, I wanted a pair of Kr3w jeans so bad. My mom laughed when she saw the price—$60 felt crazy for an 11-year-old in 2006. I still begged. Eventually, she gave in after I promised to get all A’s and B’s or something.

I wore them to school the next day and got cooked. Any joke about my nuts not breathing and my legs looking like toothpicks and this and that because at the time I was like 80 pounds holding 10 pound dumbbells.

But I remember thinking… they just don’t get it yet, so the jokes never hurt.

And that’s kind of how being early works. You look wrong until, suddenly, you don’t. A year later, everyone else was wearing the same thing. By then, I had already moved on.

That pattern never really stopped—it just grew up with me.

Now it’s less about getting laughed at and more about something harder to explain. There are brands and places I genuinely want to see succeed, but not at the cost of losing access to them. I want them to grow, just not to the point where they don’t feel like mine anymore.

You know?

And I know how that sounds.

But I think it’s because taste doesn’t feel random to me. I built mine brick by brick. Hours of digging, searching, paying attention, research. You don’t just land on it. You develop it. You dig through thrift stores and sit on eBay and stop at the Goodwill bins.

I think about the book The Tipping Point sometimes—how things don’t blow up because of big marketing, but because a small group of people decide something is worth paying attention to. Word of mouth. People who care, passing it along.

Growing up, that felt real. I started hanging out on Fairfax when I was 12. Instead of I don’t know going to the movies on weekends, after school, whenever I had a chance I was trying to be on Fax. Supreme, Diamond, The Hundreds… these weren’t big brands yet in 2007. They were just places you went if you knew.

And if you saw someone else wearing the same thing, it meant something. You didn’t even have to talk. It was just understood.

What happens in fight club stays in fight club.

But now that feeling is harder to find.

There’s a T-shirt I wear all the time—just a simple white tee from a small brand In LA. I want them to win. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also want to be able to walk in and get what I need without everything being sold out.

It’s not about keeping people out. It’s more about not wanting something to lose what makes it special.

I’ve always been drawn to things that feel one-of-one. Clothes that look lived in. Pieces that feel like they’ve had a life before you got to them. So when I see something mass-produced to look “unique,” it kind of misses the point.

Because the value was never just in how it looked. It was in how I found it.

At one point, I took that idea too far. Buying things just so no one else could have them even if they weren’t in my size. Trying to hold onto something that was never really mine to control. That didn’t last—it’s expensive and dumb.

Now I try to let things be what they are. If I fuck with it, I fuck with it. If I miss something, I miss it. If I’m late, I’m late.

But I still believe some things should feel earned.

Because clothes—at least to me—have always been more than clothes. They’re a reflection of what you’re into, what you notice, what you care about. They say something about you before you say anything at all.

So I don’t think it’s about gatekeeping in the way people make it seem.

It’s more like… wanting things to still mean something.

And maybe the real question is—

in a world where everything is so easy to find, is it wrong to want something to feel a little harder to get?

Random story: How I found out about Akimbo Club before you did

In the summer of 2021 I spent two months in Provo, Utah shootingCalifornia King.

When I was in Utah, I made it a point to hit every Goodwill and thrift store I could find. In Provo, I stumbled into a small but tight community of vintage sellers. I stopped by a spot called Second Pick, and they pointed me toward ThriftHood — I ended up there almost every day. I loved it.

At first, I just asked around — people I met in Provo, then Instagram — looking for more stores and hidden spots across Utah. That’s how Tanner from Deep Blue reached out. He told me it was cool I was supporting the smaller local shops, and I told him I’d come through. I used to get my haircut in Salt Lake, so I’d stack my drives with as many stops as possible — turning a simple trip into a full day of digging.

When I finally pulled up to his shop, grabbed a few things, he mentioned another vintage seller down the hall. We walked over, and that’s when I met Sam. At the time, his office was packed wall-to-wall with Russell hoodies — stacked on every shelf. I found some insane pieces there that I still have. Back then, I was deep into collecting Russells — it felt early, like something not everyone was paying attention to yet. My friend James was the only other person I knew who cared about them the same way. For what I was looking for, Akimbo was a gold mine. They were doing weekly drops and selling out of everything. There are still a few hoodies I missed that I’ll never forgive myself for not grabbing.

Over time, Sam and I built a real relationship. We were into the same details — paint-splattered pants, perfectly worn black tees that had faded to grey, the subtle distressing around a hoodie’s hood. It felt like we spoke the same language. Eventually, he and his partner Porter started making their own blanks. And what used to feel like my hidden source — my personal fix for Russell hoodies — has turned into something much bigger. It went from seeing one or two pieces here and there, to me sending them photos whenever I spotted someone wearing one, to now not going out without seeing one.

I’ll always gatekeep to some extent. But there’s something satisfying about seeing good people build something real — and somehow, not lose the feeling that made it special in the first place.

I say all this to say. I’ll never give up my white tee spot.

"A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a pebble without imperfections." — Confucius