Robert Spangle and the Art of Being (Spectacularly) Wrong

I thought Robert Spangle was a suitcase brand. Then I though he was a bit of a knob.

There. I said it. When my friend mentioned him during a conversation about luggage (as one does when considering whether a Rimowa's value is hype or hyperbole), I assumed he was some luggage brand. Then I discovered he was a person. Then I read the copy for his clothing collection.

"A safe space for tribal nomadic masculine joy. For those that travel well & often."

My internal monologue was immediate and uncharitable: Oh, wonderful. Another trust-fund photographer cosplaying danger and selling the aesthetic back to finance bros who think owning tactical pants makes them interesting.

I was wrong. Comprehensively, spectacularly wrong. And the process of discovering exactly how wrong has been rather illuminating, both about judgment and about how we package authenticity for consumption.

The Assumption Problem

I'm very good at being wrong about things. I collect data about being wrong; it helps me be a little less wrong every day. But this particular wrongness had layers.

First layer: assuming Robert Spangle was a luggage brand, which in my defense, would have been a perfectly reasonable name for a heritage leather goods company. Very British. Very "established 1847." Not remotely what he actually is.

I'm not embarrassed about this, incidentally. I'm never ashamed of being wrong or not knowing things. I'm endlessly curious and love being taught new things, shown new things. The initial ignorance doesn't bother me. It's what you do with the correction that matters.

Second layer: seeing that marketing copy and immediately filing him under "pretentious wanker selling war tourism to civilians with disposable income." The phrase "tribal nomadic masculine joy" did not help his case. Neither did the beaten-up Rimowa prominently featured in his imagery, which felt like the luggage equivalent of pre-distressed denim.

Third layer: my own defensive reaction, rooted in being close enough to the daring of the Bang Bang Club. Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, João Silva. Men who documented the violent end of apartheid in South Africa. Men who didn't neccessarily market their trauma. Who didn't describe their work as anything other than necessary and terrible.

They were men who walked the fine line between tragedy and transcendence, between sublimity and chaos. Marinovich was shot at least three times and has since abandoned combat photography. Ken Oosterbroek was killed during the course of duty. João Silva had his legs blown off while working. Kevin Carter committed suicide, partly due to the exacting demands of conflict photography. Their gear got destroyed because that's what happens when you're documenting the final, violent days of apartheid in townships and hostels, not because battle damage is aesthetically pleasing. The moral complicities involved in capturing extreme human anguish and moments of demeaning death came with enormous responsibility.

These were not men performing danger. They were men living the distance between work and annihilation, their lives entangled with their work until the difference between the two became impossible to distinguish.

I was there too, at the tail end of it all. A teenager running in places where riot police dispersed gatherings with efficiency and bullets. Apartheid wasn't over yet, just ending, and the ending was violent and visceral. When I say this is slightly personal, understand that "slightly" is doing considerable work in that sentence.

When I encountered someone seemingly packaging conflict zone photography as lifestyle brand, my immediate reaction was: absolutely not.

The Exploration

But I'm also constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone. So I looked deeper into Spangle's actual work. And here's where the uncomfortable realization began: I'd dismissed someone based on marketing copy without understanding anything about who they actually were.

Robert Spangle joined the United States Marine Corps at seventeen. He served with 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company, deploying twice to Afghanistan. After leaving military service, he studied bespoke tailoring at Maurice Sedwell on Savile Row. He also studied fashion design. British GQ requested he take up photography in 2013, and he's been traveling upwards of 35 weeks a year ever since.

This isn't someone playing dress-up with danger. This is someone who's lived multiple serious lives before most people figure out one.

His photography is not performatively dangerous, not disaster tourism, but genuinely accomplished work. His coverage of Ukraine isn't the self-aggrandizing "look where I dared to go" stuff I'd assumed. It's careful, considered documentation. The images show people, not spectacle. Context, not chaos.

But what really stopped me was discovering his book Afghan Style. In 2021, Spangle returned to Afghanistan where he'd previously served as a Marine, to explore "a fashion study of the Afghan man." Not combat photography. Not conflict reportage in the traditional sense. Street style photography. In Afghanistan. Before and after the Taliban takeover.

Think about that for a moment. He traveled to Afghanistan to document the way people dress because he had a theory that style is an innate part of humanity, something inalienable from the human condition, not dependent on living in a fashion capital or even a stable country.

What looks like "street style photography" when shot in Milan becomes something else entirely when shot in Kabul. The craft is the same. The context transforms everything.

The Dissonance

So now I'm sitting with this profoundly uncomfortable contradiction. The marketing copy that made me roll my eyes still makes me roll my eyes. "Tribal nomadic masculine joy" remains an absolutely ridiculous phrase that I cannot say with a straight face.

But the person behind that marketing and the clothing collection I'd dismissed as pretentious nonsense? It's actually well-made. The pieces look like they're meant to be used, properly used, not preserved as costume jewelry for adventurism. There's a functionalism to the design that makes sense when you realize it's designed by someone who actually understands what works in genuinely hard conditions.

This dissonance reminded me of something the art theorist Rudolf Arnheim wrote about in Art and Visual Perception. Arnheim argued that balance is essential to art because art needs form to express meaning, and balance allows art to present the most effective form to convey that meaning. He believed that visual perception constantly seeks balance, and when confronted with imbalance in artistic form, our perception strives to resist it and return to equilibrium.

What I was experiencing with Spangle was precisely this kind of perceptual imbalance.

Arnheim's theory suggested that we perceive visual compositions through the interplay of weight, location, depth, size, and color, which creates dynamic visual experiences through tension and direction. The same principle applies to how we perceive people and brands.

On one side of the scale: genuine accomplishment, serious work, legitimate credentials, functional design. On the other: marketing language that sounds indistinguishable from every other lifestyle brand selling borrowed credibility. My mind was trying to force these elements into balance, and the equation wasn't resolving.

But perhaps that's the point. Perhaps the tension itself is the composition. Arnheim noted that tension in art whether through tilt, deformation, or overlap, breaks the Gestalt balance tendency in our visual perception, and our minds strive to resist the imbalance and demand a return to balance. The discomfort I felt wasn't because Spangle was fraudulent, but because he represented something genuinely complex that refused to resolve into a simple judgment.

The marketing and the substance exist in productive tension. Neither negates the other. The balance point isn't where I expected it to be. Instead, the fulcrum sits in an uncomfortable middle ground where both things can be simultaneously true.

This is the problem with judging people by their marketing. Or rather, this is my problem, because I fell directly into that trap. And it's a trap I should know better than to fall into, given that I spend considerable time working in ecommerce, where the distance between marketing language and actual product quality can be... substantial.

You learn to be suspicious. You learn that beautiful marketing often compensates for inadequate substance. You learn that the more elaborate the story, the less likely the product is to deliver.

Except when it does. And then you're just sitting there feeling like an idiot for having assumed the worst.

What He's Actually Selling

The clothing isn't for João Silva. It's probably not for any working photojournalist trying to expense a flak jacket and hoping their publication's insurance covers kidnapping. The pricing alone makes that clear. But that doesn't mean it's not good, or that Spangle isn't the real thing.

This is where it gets interesting from a business perspective.

Rimowa cases were designed for Lufthansa pilots and serious travelers who needed luggage that survived constant handling. The scratches and dents that accumulate on aluminum cases are meant to be evidence of use, not carefully curated lifestyle signifiers. But Rimowa has long since moved beyond its utilitarian origins. Most Rimowa owners will never put their cases through the kind of abuse they're designed to withstand. They're buying heritage, aesthetic, the idea of serious travel.

Is that bad? I don't think so. The cases are still well-made. They still function superbly. The fact that most buyers are using them for business trips to Frankfurt rather than conflict zones doesn't diminish the engineering.

Spangle's doing something similar, but with considerably more legitimate foundation. He's not borrowing credibility from someone else's experience. He's built a genuine body of photographic work across fashion weeks and conflict zones. He created products that could genuinely perform in harsh conditions, marketed them with language that appeals to people who will mostly use them in considerably safer contexts, and built a brand around authentic experience that most of his customers will never have.

The question is whether that's cynical exploitation or simply understanding your market. And I'm starting to think it might be neither. It might just be someone who's lived an unusually rich life figuring out how to sustain that life commercially.

The Business of Authenticity

Here's what I've come to understand about selling things online: authenticity is simultaneously the most valuable and the most commodified quality you can offer.

Customers are drowning in choice. Every product category has hundreds of options at every price point. Quality has been flattened by global manufacturing to the point where the $50 version and the $500 version are often made in the same factory with marginally different materials.

So how do you differentiate? You tell a story. You create a brand that means something beyond the functional attributes of the product. The problem is that everyone knows this now. Every brand has a story. D2C brands have perfected the art of the founding myth, complete with the "we cut out the middleman" pitch that's been recycled so many times it's essentially meaningless.

When everything is marketed as authentic, nothing is. Except when it actually is. And then the challenge becomes: how do you signal genuine authenticity when the market is saturated with performed authenticity?

Spangle's answer appears to be: do the actual work, then market it in a way that sounds exactly like everyone else marketing performed authenticity. Which is either brilliant or tone-deaf, and I genuinely cannot decide which.

Maybe it's both. Maybe when you've actually lived the life, you're allowed to sound ridiculous describing it. Or maybe the ridiculousness of the marketing language is precisely what makes it work for the intended audience while filtering out skeptics like me who aren't the customer anyway.

The Uncomfortable Truth

I think what bothered me initially is that his marketing works. "Tribal nomadic masculine joy" is ridiculous, but it's also effective. It speaks to something people want to believe about themselves, or want to project to others.

In ecommerce, we talk about "aspirational positioning" as if it's neutral terminology. But aspiration is just a polite word for selling people an identity they don't have. Sometimes that's harmless. Sometimes it's how you sell $400 jeans to people who work in air-conditioned offices. Sometimes it's how you sell tactical gear to people who will never be in a tactical situation, adventure equipment to people whose greatest adventure is a hiking trail with good cell service, or conflict-zone-tested clothing to people whose biggest risk is missing their flight.

Is that wrong? I don't think it's wrong, exactly. People are allowed to buy things that make them feel a certain way, even if that feeling isn't strictly connected to how they'll actually use the product. Half of commerce is built on this principle. With Spangle, though, the gap isn't between his experience and his marketing. The gap is between his experience and his customers' experience. And maybe that's just... commerce. Maybe that's always how it works when someone who's actually done interesting things tries to make a living from it.

The Correction

Here's what I've realized: my initial reaction said more about me than about him.

Growing up hearing the tales of men for whom conflict photography was vocation, not brand, shapes how you see these things. I was present, however briefly and foolishly, in spaces where violence was real and immediate, not aesthetic. The idea that someone might build a lifestyle collection off the back of that work felt like appropriation. Like taking something serious and painful and turning it into purchasable identity for people who wanted to look like they'd lived dangerously without actually doing so.

But Spangle has done the work. More than that, he's done multiple kinds of work that most people wouldn't attempt one of. The fact that his customer base probably skews toward people with more disposable income than conflict zone experience doesn't invalidate the work itself. It just means he's figured out how to sustain an unusual life through commerce, which is harder than it sounds.

In business, we optimize for conversion. We test copy until we find what resonates. We build brands around whatever narrative performs best in the market. The story that sells is the story we tell, regardless of whether it's the truest story we could tell.

Spangle's photography stands on its own merits. His Afghan Style work would be excellent whether or not it was connected to a clothing line. But the clothing line exists, and it uses that work as foundation for its brand narrative designed to appeal to customers who will never do what he does.

What We're Really Buying

Men's fashion has always consumed military and work aesthetics. Trench coats from WWI, flight jackets from bomber crews, cargo pants from actual cargo work. The difference between functional design and aesthetic appropriation is sometimes just a matter of who's wearing it and why.

Spangle is more legitimate than most because he's actually lived multiple versions of the life his brand suggests. But he's still selling to people who haven't lived any version of it, and the marketing language acknowledges this by creating "safe space" for masculine performance that doesn't require actual danger.

The Bang Bang Club would probably find the whole thing bemusing. The idea that someone would buy expensive clothing to look like they do hard travel when they're just... doing hard travel because it's the job. But they'd also probably respect the craft of the photography, which is what actually matters.

In ecommerce, we talk about "solving customer pain points" and "meeting needs." But a huge portion of what we sell doesn't solve pain points or meet needs in any functional sense. It meets emotional needs. Identity needs. The need to feel like the kind of person who would wear clothing designed for conflict zones, even if the closest you get to conflict is deciding which streaming service to subscribe to.

That's not a criticism. That's just recognition of what commerce actually is. We're not primarily in the business of selling functional objects. We're in the business of selling feelings, identities, aspirations. The object is just the vehicle.

The Landing

So here I am, having started with "this guy seems like a pretentious knob" and landed at "this guy has lived an extraordinarily full life and I've learned something about my own biases and possibly about how we sell things."

I've learned something valuable about the dangers of snap judgments, about how collecting data on being wrong occasionally leads to being corrected in useful ways, and about how authenticity and commerce make uncomfortable bedfellows but bedfellows nonetheless.

Robert Spangle is not a knob. And me being initially wrong about him doesn't diminish the quality of what he's actually creating. Though I'm still never saying "tribal nomadic masculine joy" out loud. Some hills are worth dying on, even if they're nowhere near as serious as the hills other people have actually died on.

I still need a new suitcase. (Considering asking Mr. Spangle to design one - that way I'd be even less wrong). P.S. I do appreciate the fact that using Ken's photograph of Kevin as part of this article might make me a bit of a wanker /shrugs.