Two stories this week share a structure that is easy to miss. The New Yorker asks whether psychedelics have gone right-wing, tracing how ibogaine, a Schedule I substance, was ushered into Trump-era policy circles by Bryan Hubbard, Rick Perry, and Joe Rogan. Meanwhile, Highsnobiety reports that Yohji Yamamoto's Y's sub-label worked with Tokyo label Fake as Flowers to bring ancient Indian kantha embroidery into Japanese streetwear. Both are stories about a fringe practice finding a new institutional home and losing something in the translation.
Counterculture as Raw Material for Power
The ibogaine story is striking because it tracks almost perfectly with the pattern Fred Turner identified in his work on Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog: counterculture tools get absorbed by the establishment not through co-optation but through genuine enthusiasm from people who want the benefits without the politics. Rick Perry did not become a psychonaut. He found a molecule with a veteran PTSD use case and brought it to a constituency that responds to military-adjacent wellness narratives. The transformation is complete when the radical edge is gone and the functional core remains, rebranded.
Ancient Craft as Luxury Signal
The kantha story runs the same play in fashion. A textile tradition with centuries of working-class South Asian origins gets elevated through a collaboration between two Japanese labels, sold at Y's price points, and positioned as authenticity in an era of algorithmic sameness. Ralph Lauren's Gee's Bend quilt collaboration, also covered this week, performs the same move with African American handcraft: 210 years of tradition, now available as luxury. W. David Marx's work on taste and subculture, explored in his Culture Slop conversation, traces how the cycle always ends here: the underground becomes the premium tier.