what to read, and what to wear while reading it
Some of these are books. Some are shirts. All of them are here because they belong to the same preoccupation.
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The Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, under Christopher Prendergast’s general editorship — a different translation from the Moncrieff Remembrance of Things Past many people met first. Seven volumes, each with its own translator, the last three of which reached American readers only recently.
Where it begins: the madeleine, Combray, and the long descent into involuntary memory.
Balbec, the sea, and the first serious education of desire.
The salon as a machine for sorting people; the narrator learns its grammar.
The novel turns and looks directly at what it had been circling.
Love as surveillance. The most claustrophobic volume, and the most honest about jealousy.
De Botton reads Proust as a practical guide — unserious in tone, serious in effect.
Devotional-intellectual streetwear: part philosopher icon, part tantric diagram, part literary homage.
Abhinavagupta in luminous neon, framed by a radiant mandala. Part tantra, part tech satire.