My favorite fashion writer, Robin Givhan of the Washington Post, has a story on the desi entrepreneur who has devoted his life to solving the following problem:
“I see a guy with a great suit on and nasty socks, I think, ‘Come on, finish the job!'” he says.
Great suit, nasty socks: truly one of the great fashion missteps of our time and one that many of our gentlemen readers will surely recognize. You know the feeling when you’re getting ready for a big meeting and realize all you have is holey, lumpy or mismatched socks? Well, Vivek Nagrani is here to help, at a mere $125 a pair. Hey, that’s only $62.50 per sock!
Nagrani makes a “Gatsby” sock with the image of a woman sipping a martini, strategically resting along a man’s Achilles’ tendon. “She’s holding him up,” he explains. Another pair of socks named “Luther” have a floral pattern winding up the inside of the calf; the flowers are revealed only when a man sits down and crosses his legs. He named another pair of socks “Brian,” after a customer who is attached to his dog Bottle Cap. The socks have stylized paw prints all over them.
You can read all about Nagrani in Givhan’s article. Meanwhile, I took a look at his corporate website, to learn more about this captain of industry, and found this description of the Nagrani brand:
The V.K. Nagrani label is privileged to create products for the diplomatic, scientific, military, artisanal and financial elite. With no surprise, men who define themselves by their distinct character rather than their possessions remain our most loyal customers and become our revered friends. Whether named by collection or by connoisseur, we grace such men of influence with our name. After all, the spirit of V.K. Nagrani is a sine qua non of any depiction of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or, quite simply, a life of luxury and elegance.
The day you see the “Churchill” — “lemon yellow with stripes of coco and blue” — haughtily peeking out beneath the impeccable cuff of my bespoke pantaloons, you’ll know that I no longer have time for plebeians like you.
$150 a pair? $62.50 per sock?
I don’t need help with finding the perfect sock. However, I do need help finding the mysterious “other” sock. I buy them in pairs, but once they go into the sock drawer the sock gnome inevitably steals one as I sleep.
yeah, yeah, fixed.
Aha. I buy my socks three pairs at a time, and all six singles are the exact same pattern. So, I don’t even notice anything missing until I have only one left. So, you see, the war against the Sock Gnome is winnable.
The aspirational brother Nagrani’s all well and good (other than his f*cked up politics; “aristocracy”? excuse me?), but if you want to be a real player in the sock business, talk to Niwu.
Ni-who?
Niwu, that’s who. The little town in China that socks it to ’em by producing 3 billion pairs a year.
The business has made the town brash and ugly (which is arguably true of anyplace that makes its money from hose and britches), but it’s also keeping Niwu above the poverty line, and (you knew this was coming) enriching WalMart.
The Sock Gnome walking away with one of these socks could trade it in for a bottle of Johnnie Walker!
aha, was my problem too. Till i discovered sock rings. But now i have to run my socks through them as soon as i take my shoes off, instead of just thowing them up on my fan… oh well.
Yo those sound and look like contraceptives gone wrong.
Paze, I hear you.
This is why I always pair my scoks with a nasty suit.
cute title =)
Finally great to see more desis doing fashion aside from the tired Anand Jon. Haven’t heard of any others that have met the President, so he must be sock-worthy.
I paid that much for a suit, once.
how gay was this post? how gay is this guy?
Wait, so… Siddhartha has a favorite fashion writer?
I dig the socks though.
Snicker.
He seems so very happy in that picture of him and his socks, I think I’ll make it my wallpaper 🙂
reminds me of SPORTO UNCLE (circa. 1981) whose overzealous wife would dress him like an athlete for a sport that didn’t exist, comprising of a signature Le Coq Sportif shirt along with logo-ized Prince track pants made from velour. This lethal auntie-melting ensemble came finished with a pair of Bata AirMax(TM) chappals, that made use of FlowMax(TM) technology, employing a special duct system between his big nasty toes and the toe-loop that braced them to the sandal, allowing them to “breath” while he’d scoop up little children like wiffle balls and give them great, big SPORTO UNCLE hugs.
I wouldn’t be caught dead in those socks.
sa:
very/very
these socks are targeted to the same super-bored audience that considers items in “SkyMall” magazine as representative of a legitimate consumer niche and believe that a knight in shining armor (page 83) or life-size chess set made of alabastor would indeed look “great” in the garden.
i’m not having any of it. WAITER, MORE TUBE SOCKS, PLEASE.
I love it….a socksnob!
OK but seriously now that the other thread has finally died a long, slow and painful death, I’m going thru withdrawal and everytime the main page on SM loads I get see Mr. Nagrani all giddy and happy with that smile hanging out with a bunch of socks over and over and over again. Frankly he’s freaking me out!
Pasha (Brit Bangladeshi) makes men’s clothes in Brick Lane, London…but the site is hella hard to navigate to see his stuff.
Mine disappear b/t the dryer and drawer. I believe there is a vortex in my dryer.
The deprecation of the value of one sock in a pair when the other is lost is a cute economics problem. Effectively, even though bad luck strikes one pair (or the sock monster in your tumble drier), in one fell swoop, both your socks are now worthless. In fact, Mr. K has the perfect solution to this problem. In fact, to take the whole strategy to its logical conclusion, it would be good to buy only black or only white socks. Then, if you start with B pairs of socks of a particular color, the kleptomania of your drier will only reduce the value of your pool of socks by 1/B. Whereas if you have B/2 seperate pairs of different colors and textures, you would end up with a loss of 2/B of your value, effectively a margin of 1/B. Hence, as B tends to infinity….. I am getting carried away.
I can just imagine this Vivek Nagrani’s parents and their friends talking about him…”han, he is doing very well, making very high-class products, becoming a big fashion designer. But why are the young people these days spending hundred-hundred dollars on socks, I don’t understand. You can get the same thing for Rs 50 at Charagh Din. Chalo, these children think life is all fun and money is all for spending now, and just wait till they have to send their children to good schools…”
This is not winning! This is simply escalation and accommodation to the Sock Gnome, ceaselessly against the tide.
Oy. Go home, breeder.
I still fail to see how the socks he is holding up can “finish off” a great suit!
But are they comfortable? There’s nothign worse than uncomfortable socks. I was recently embarrassed by how incredibly happy I became when I realized my favorite Thorlo hiking socks were on sale at REI. Oh the bliss. . .
I think this is not quite right. In the first case, your pool of socks would go from 2B to 2B-1. So by your formula for value reduction (which seems to be F(n)=1/n where n is the number of socks you start out with)), wouldn’t the value decrease by something along the lines of 1/2B? And if you have B/2 separate pairs of socks, then the value of each sock would decrease, again by this formula,
But I think the beauty of Mr. Kobayashi’s solution is that the value of each sock loss except for the 2nd to last sock is minimal, whereas the value of the 2nd to last sock’s value is close to infinite. Which shows that there’s not a linear correspondence between the number of socks and the value of the socks if they’re all the same make and model. I’d say something more like the value of each additional sock is something more like (1/B^2) where B is the number of socks, but again, this is a personal preference which probably has to do with how rapidly socks are lost, how much availability of sock pairs is valued, how much an odd number of socks (regardless of the actualy number) bothers someone, etc.
Regardless, yes, your basic point still hold: you’re better off with more socks of the same type if you don’t want odd socks 🙂
2B or not 2B? I haven’t a f*cking clue what you kids are talking about, but I sure love the sound of the quoted sentence. Can we call it “the Kobayashi Rule”? An algorithm for determining the maximum number of goods at which both price is tolerable and the impact of the dreaded Sock Gnome is minimal and delayed…
Might I also suggest a Nagrana Exception? In instances where a brother actually prefers to wear colored socks, there’s a disincentive to apply the Kobayashi Rule, as pair matching becomes a much more complex issue. However, assuming there’s a correlation between a love of colored socks and a willingness to pay top dollar, and there’s next day delivery from top merchants, the Nagrana Exception becomes unnecessary, and my rule eponymous holds.
Hmm, somebody call the Bank of Sweden…
or Arkham…
I like this idea. At the same time we can continue geeking out by placing the phrase in the pantheon of popular vernacular along side the Kobayashi Maru Test.
Neither size, nor texture, nor color of the sock matters. It’s how you use it.
walked into his showroom off 5th Ave and bought 4 pairs thanks to Siddartha’s comment about moving beyond us plebians. They actually do feel like they massage your legs. More importantly, the man took 45 minutes from his PoweR publicist and phone calls to personally analyze my sock style. He says it all “it’s not for everyone”
what if this mister starts makin undies … what do u think he wud price it up for … ‘;)’
“Seven years ago, Nagrani founded Ovadufut Hosiery, which specializes in men’s luxury socks but is now expanding into men’s underwear and small leather goods such as briefcases and overnight bags”
Undies are en route.
Could somebody please explain to me how those socks look different to the cheap ass Kmart ones that the stylish Mr. N seems to despise so much?
They look pretty ug to me…especially the gross terracotta ones on the left. I would have to take a lot of Prozac to smile like that next to socks like those.
Saurav, as much as I hate to admit it, you are perfectly right! What matters (the utility) is that there is one pair of matched socks to wear. Hence the utility function drops off to 0(no perfect pair) only when you lose the 2nd to last sock. It’s 1 otherwise. The function falls off very quickly if one owns unmatched pairs.
Yes, yes, lets call it the Kobayashi Rule of Marginal Sockloss.
But I agree…his socks are too f*cking hipster for formalwear. Everyone knows that every gentleman gets his pairs from Jermyn Street. And fiscal conservatives (personally or politically) stick to black.
A true aristocrat would know that good socks should not be washed.
For that price, I hope they come with an airtight guarantee that any guy who wears them will wake up the next morning with at least 3 beautiful women in his bed.
Failing that, I guess you could make some fairly amusing sock puppets out of them.
. Jai, Is that why the guys always keep their socks on in certain movies of an adult nature? 🙂
Thats how they got into the movies…
Folks, I hate to be my usual heel or to toe the line on this thread, but come on! At a ridiculous $150 a pair, Nagrani really socks it to us!
Thank you, thank you. I’m playing in Brooklyn all week, folks.
Wooops, that should be $125/pair. Reading comprehension FTW! Sorry…
I wouldn’t know 😉 I guess it depends on exactly which part of their anatomy the guys concerned are wearing the sock…..
Apparently it can get quite cold if one is sandwiched between a dozen babes and everyone is politely showing everyone else how fond they are of each other. “Friends with Benefits”, I believe it’s called.
So you can’t blame the poor guy for wanting to get his feet warm. He wouldn’t want his teeth to start chattering at the wrong moment, know what I mean. Brrrr.
Typo, I meant to say “wanting to keep his feet warm”. Presumably there would be various ways of getting one’s feet warm in such situations. Apparently. SM’s resident fluffer would probably be in a better position to discuss all that.
I just get my socks from Costco.
A modified version of your proposal has been submitted to the relevant journal for peer review.
I would probably pay Mr Nangrani $150 for a pair if his socks can make my feet smell good after 8 hours on the job. Is it just me or are most desi wimin in NYC into sucking male toes.