On The Subject Of Americana

January 29, 2026

Souvenir shirts, band tees, workwear.

They exist to record movement, celebrate a moment in time, protect flesh on the job site.

A road taken. A concert attended. A job done.

A souvenir doesn’t proclaim ownership. It doesn’t plant a flag. It simply says: I was here.

This distinction matters.

Recommended reading: Ametora - How Japan Saved American Style by W. David Marx

Americana is unique in its global universality.

The finest denim is woven no longer in the mills of America. Bereft of their craftsmen, long since shuttered victims of corporate optimization. Yet denim persists. Codified, refined, dutifully reproduced on vintage shuttle looms by Japanese craftsmen.

In an ironic twist, blue jeans were so representative of American excess that, from the 50s to the 80s, they were seen as decadent contraband in the USSR.

Americana, at its core, is not a closed system. It’s a visual language shaped by travel, labor, and persistence. Denim, canvas, corduroy and ripstop. Cattle brands, sign painting, military surplus, gas station memorabilia. Garments and symbols that survive. And certainly not because they are protected, but because they are useful. They’re worn down, repaired, reused, and reinterpreted.

Much of what’s now called “heritage” was never ceremonial. It comes from workwear and uniforms, textiles intended for labor yet became mythic. Ranch hands, mechanics, roadies, lumberjacks, miners, infantry. These garments endure because the jobs endure. And much of the labor was done by people rarely acknowledged in the story they helped write.

In the Southwest US especially, this visual language is inherited from populations not often recognized in the canon of Americana; Indigenous cultures, Mexican vaqueros, Chinese, Persian and Indian immigrants, The Black Migration. These people aren’t adjacent to Americana, they are the foundational components of it. Proof that belonging is earned through presence. Nationalism be damned.

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Philosopher Jacques Derrida described this condition as hauntology: the persistence of a past that was supposed to disappear. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher later pointed out the future in which we now reside is a ghost of societal promises never kept. Futurism now retro itself, a mid century concept. What remains is the infrastructure without the optimism. Signs still standing. Roads still running. Work still happening.

I designed these pieces to feel familiar but uncanny. To linger as ghosts do. Not as nostalgia, but as cultural residue. This is not apocalypse as spectacle. It’s the fallout. A world that continues, but belief in it cast to the wind.

Burning Valley exists in that space. Not a nation. Not a mythic past. A stretch of road. A place you pass through, not pledge allegiance to. A reminder that culture survives through exchange, not enclosure.

This collection isn’t about claiming anything.

It's about acknowledging what’s still here.

And the people who built it.