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As you read this, I will be at sea on a cruise to Bermuda. Cruises, while not necessarily an activity of high taste, are certainly one way to disconnect from the constant hum of obligation.
David Foster Wallace, best known in the popular psyche for arming a neo landed gentry with a literary security blanket, is best known to me as the diarist of a seven-day cruise experience in “Shipping Out”, his 24-page essay published in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s. A longer version appeared in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
It is full of scintillating observations. One example: “Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I've decided; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It's just about the only body area where you actually want more hair on older men.”
Open waters can test the behaviors of even the most unflappable cosmopolites. Ever seen Triangle of Sadness (2022)? Do not watch before embarking on a cruise.
This is, perhaps, what makes cruise culture so fertile for observation: a self-contained ecosystem of excess, where class signifiers and personal boundaries are temporarily suspended in favor of midnight buffets and shuffleboard tournaments.
In “Shipping Out,” Wallace dissects this with surgical precision. The essay is less about travel and more about the existential dread that creeps in when leisure becomes compulsory. A cruise, in his telling, is not an escape but a magnifying glass—held to the deeply American desire to be pampered into oblivion. It’s taste as spectacle—a concept Serviette knows well, and occasionally turns upside down.
It’s worth noting that fragrance, too, lives in this tension between indulgence and identity. Much like a cruise itinerary, a scent dares you to follow its arc, its story, its hidden motifs. And like Wallace’s observations from the Lido deck, what you discover might be deeply revealing.