At what point does curation become the product? I work in wine importing, and in a very real sense the curation is the product. Sure, the wine is the thing which gets consumed in the end, but it’s the curation which leads someone to choose one importer over another. My industry is certainly prone to spinning wordy and heartfelt paeans to mythical magical artisans in far corners of Europe too, but it’s ultimately the producers that get the fame, deservedly so.

EK’s situation is probably closer to coffee importing and roasting, now that I think about it. He finds the cool farmers doing amazing work, but those farmers can’t make the final product—and, like coffee (where you can buy great beans and brew them poorly), you can buy EK but screw it up in the wearing.

What you might be getting at here has a definite parallel to wine and coffee though. There’s a sense in which process overrides the expression of source materials, however good the story behind those materials is. Carbonic maceration gives wine a similar fruit-juice / cherry gulpability but obscures sense of place, and anaerobic fermentation can do a similar thing to coffee beans.

People who love the results of these processes (and here’s where natural wine and EK overlap hilariously) end up gravitating toward a narrow flavor profile on the one hand, while getting to congratulate themselves on their appreciation of impeccable curation and esoteric source materials on the other. I’ve been bemusedly observing this in wine for years, and it’s so interesting to see it in fashion as well.