Stewart: Consumer design has gotten lazy
Haphazard logos and impractical accessories abound
What's the point of a belt buckle bottle opener if the buckle faces sideways? Ross Stewart has an answer.
By Ross Stewart (Contact)
Monday, August 13th, 2007
I went shopping with some friends recently and realized that clothing designers have gotten to a point of complacency and laziness that has never before been reached.
Emblems are stamped haphazardly on shirts, jeans, and jackets; I suppose that makes them unique. Yet this type of design requires little thought, and some clothing requires just a little more thought. Take belts for instance. While looking for shorts the other day I took a quick look at belts in one of the many trendy stores on the block. They had the usual belts, you know, of leather and fabric. Then my eyes looked over a belt in the middle of the rack twice. I did this subconsciously. I must have been using the part of my brain that enjoys the taste of beer, which is a part of the brain that is consequentially affected by beer.
It was a belt whose buckle doubled as a beer bottle opener, but the opener runs in the same direction as the belt—that being horizontally. When the part of my brain that enjoys beer looked at the belt, it seemed like quite the cool idea. But with some further thought, I realized the design wasn’t well thought through. If one were to grab a beer from the fridge and try to impress someone by opening it with the buckle, it would spill all over the crotch region.
My second thought was if someone grabbed a beer from the fridge and wanted to open it with the belt, it would have to be taken off. This kind of goes against the reason for wearing a belt, because you’d be left standing there in your britches.
After leaving and pondering the idea of a belt buckle beer bottle opener, the reasoning for the design dawned on me. It’s quite obvious really. The first way of using the buckle would result in spilling beer all over your crotch, which would make you have to take off your pants (aha!).
The second way, which involves taking off the belt to open the beer, would make your pants come off much easier (or if you’re like me, make them plum fall off). (I don’t really understand why my pants even have a button to keep them on; my belt does all the work.) So this beer belt buckle is designed to make you, basically, get drunk and take your pants off. I’d like to commend the inventor of such a device—one that both allows an individual to imbibe alcohol and also works towards the removal of pants. Neither of which can be a bad thing, right? I mean, of course, in moderation.
Stewart is a Wichita junior in journalism.
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