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Now that is cold in Seattle, and there is snow on the ground, and lots of ice on the street, it is a good time for the fact of the ugliness of gloves to be stated and not be doubted. A world without them would aesthetically be better. This garment is to the eyes what barking dogs are to the ears. The latter ruins the richness of the call, which in human and bird song achieves its highest forms of beauty. The latter ruins the hands, which for the human are very special. To shut the hands up in leather or cloth is a violence upon what it is that makes us the kind of animal we are. The freedom these lovely digits enjoy from locomotion is pretty much the Eden of human intelligence (and some believe communication), which is the ability to generalize. A foot is about the one. The hand is about the many.



It is for this reason that clothed hands send nothing but bad signals to the deepest parts of the human mind (I will not speculate at this point what one gloved hand does to the human mind). Both hands in gloves, however, certainly transmit less (and at times troubling) information to others. It is like a gambler wearing sunglasses to hide the sclera (white parts) of their eyes. Clearly seen eyes tell us a lot about what a person is thinking, about their soul. Gloves do something similar. But with hands, when they are gloved, we sense something sinister is about to happen. Hollywood knows all about this kind of narrative terror. And it's more than just about hiding fingerprints from the eyes of the law. It's also about displacing yourself. With your hands free, you feel you are you. When the killer's hands are in gloves, he feels they are not his own. The gloves (not the man) strangle the victim.

That said, our digital editor Chase Burns informed me that gloves are becoming a thing again. He pointed out recent top-level fashion movements that feature people like Jaden Smith wearing gloves. Fair enough. But there is one thing that Chase shared with me that took my mind off gloves and onto the peculiar pop career of the celebrity Kanye West. He was featured this summer in Virgil Abloh's very splashy (and trippy) fashion show in France that made it clear to me that Kanye should leave politics altogether and focus on the fashion world. He is in his element there. But the gloves have to go.