We now inhabit a different world than the one that debuted Noah the Brand’s first video in October 2020. That premiere was projected onto a makeshift white sheet pinned to the Tompkins fence, at a time when nobody could hang out indoors en masse. Alex Greenberg’s follow-up to Jolie Rouge is unbranded (that random dude in the comments asking what happened to the Noah skate team will remain perplexed), but feels like a continuation of that initial project.
Us members of somehow still-functioning society are no strangers to pendulum swings: anything that veers too far to one side is due for a correction. Safe, digestible art gets confronted by messy experimental art. An army of skaters in slim highwaters eventually gets run over by a parade of Big Boys and their imitators.
Except is boring art ever more than a reappraisal away from being a “return to form?” Can your pants really be out of date and not simultaneously years ahead of their time?
Jumpman Jumpman Hjalte Halberg on production wow
After ninety minutes of rustling around and three position changes, a rookie group of stagehands figured out how to affix a white sheet on the Tompkins fence last night, so that Noah’s inaugural video, Jolie Rouge, could premiere. There’s a “how many skaters does it take to hang up a sheet?”-formatted joke in here, but it’s Saturday, the temperature is in the mid-70s, and the QS office should be empty right now.
