Product Review - My First Haul (and shopping experience) with Poshmark.

 After getting my new Nike Trail Running shoes, I felt a little bit bland with the limitations I have on my change-of-clothes options in my wardrobe, particularly in the hot Southern California middle of the summer. I’ve been opting for golf shorts and moisture-wicking, antibacterial fabric tank tops that I got to sample, first, through Amazon Vine. I bought a second set of these, in other words. The clothing purchase and the shoes purchase coincided on one day, mostly, so the colors match, but still, I felt it was a little bland. I wanted some neon pink, of something, and my mind wandered back over to my most recent high-end jacket and long sleeve purchases that I had made, during the pandemic. 

A Nike Trail sticker, featuring the Nike Trail series graphic, in pink.

I started out searching for a neon pink Windrunner, which is the name of a Nike athletic sort of windbreaker, with a special 26° trim coming down the front of the jacket. It’s made of polyester, and it’s lightweight, but Nike makes them with cool designs, every now and then. I went with Google Shopping, to begin my search, like I do with most of my online purchases, when I want to comparison shop. I came up with several neon pink windbreakers, some of them notable second-place mentions, a couple of them Windrunners, but they were not my size, and I became attached to the notion of having a real Windrunner jacket again, since I’d lost mine, somewhere along the way. I got a cigarette hole in that one, anyways. I felt more confident that I could preserve and maintain my clothing better now, at this point. I felt like I’d made a good decision, in picking out nice shoes for me to wear. 

I had considered this pink kangaroo pocket windbreaker, but in the end, I guess it wasn’t quite the right pink for me, I was going for a bit more on the fuchsia side of the spectrum.

So, I went comparison shopping, on Google, and I visited a few new-to-me marketplaces, and picked out some of my favorites, and I set them aside, in the tabs of my browser, and kept searching. I found a Nikelab jacket ad that intrigued me, so I clicked on the inventory ad, and it led me to Poshmark, an online marketplace that I had never really visited and shopped at. The jacket was only $30, and supposedly it was marked down from $1,000 (probably an exaggeration, but it made it seem like it was a killer deal, at the time). Since it was affordable, I went ahead and purchased the jacket, despite it being summer. I had been staying out late, on some nights, and it would get a bit chilly, so I recalled wishing that I had a light jacket during those times. 

Once I made the purchase, Poshmark invited me to start a profile with the site, and I could track my order, get deals, etc., so I made an account. I figured that putting my money in to some new clothes was a good move, and I might eventually come back for more. Quite soon after starting my account on Poshmark, I started getting News notices. I was getting a bunch of followers! Poshmark is very much a social buying and selling platform, which you can see from some of their screens. I really got in to the premise of a socially adept, interactive website and app, where users can post and shop for clothing and more, make offers, message each other directly, view more items from seller closets, and comparison shop, with such a fashion-oriented purpose about it.

Poshmark’s home feed splash page, where user-hosted shows are featured.

My Poshmark News feed.

A search for the latest Nike product listings on Poshmark pulls up a feed like this.

Once my shipments arrive, later this week, I’ll update with some photos, and see how they look on me!

Update: The next day.

The Nike Electric Orange Chalk Windrunner Parka Jacket, next to my LED spotlight, featuring the type of neon pink that I like, somewhat a rose/fuchsia tone.

Don’t you love it when mail and packages arrive early? I do, and this oversized jacket/parka from @lazo_co arrived swiftly, and ahead of schedule, from Colorado to Los Angeles (the package was mailed out on Saturday, and arrived on a Tuesday). I liked the bright colors and lightweight material, and it’ll do well for me on days when it rains. It’s the first of three items that I ordered, over the weekend. Check out Hana Z’s store on Poshmark for tons of other cool athleisure fashion finds for men and women at great prices. I found some more bright-colored golf shorts that I like, at a glance.

The sea foam green golf shorts caught my attention.

I love the aqua blue turquoise color of this pair of golf shorts. 

In the days to follow:

The next day, I received my second jacket that I ordered off of Poshmark. This one was the first that I ordered, as it features the shade of pink that I was seeking, along with a giant Nike Swoosh logo, across the chest, in red, with the bottom portion in orange, to contrast. There were some things that I hadn’t considered, in ordering off of Poshmark, such as Chinese counterfeit Nike gear, which, I believe, this piece is, and it says “Made in China,” on the tags, yet it features YKK zippers, and there’s no mesh lining to the jacket, which I’ve known Nike to do. It ends up being a little bit messy, when wearing it, during the summertime, when I’ll be sweating a lot, since the jacket is 100% polyester. It wasn’t labeled as a Windrunner, just a windbreaker, but I still expected the same quality I’d known before, in their other jackets. 

The Nikelab windbreaker I purchased. 

I like the colors on this piece. 

The next day, my third piece arrived. It’s a sweater, and I bought it with cooler weather in mind, or nighttime outings, during warmer months. It features colorful sleeves and flanks that go with my shoes; that was the attraction to this piece. 

This sweater seems like it’s vintage, with old school fonts on the tags. 

I deposited some more money in to my bank account, and I ended up buying the seafoam green shorts that I liked, as well as some shorts that matched the color on the bluer shorts that I also liked, since the original pair of shorts had gone missing. 

Vineyard Vines’ seafoam green golf shorts.

I got these shorts in a size smaller than I’d been wearing, because I’m planning on losing weight in the coming months. The Poshmark ad showed a ruler with the same waist size as my current normal size, so I trusted that they would fit. They’re a little snug, but they fit alright, and I got a compliment about the pastel colors of my outfit as soon as I left my place wearing these, right after I got them. I got a second compliment on another day, as well, and I’ve only had these shorts a few days. I really like the color on them, it matches nicely with my bright colored clothes.

A pigeon wearing my summer outfit.

Next, I revived one of my Covid-19 Pandemic-era favorites, the mint green Windrunner, just like I’d purchased from Nordstrom, back then, for $100. I wore the jacket all the time, so I have fond memories of it close to heart, when it came to reclaiming jackets for a haul. It took some searching to find and discern that this color is the same one as the original Windrunner that I’d purchased, and, as it turns out, a photo of the jacket requires some image adjustment to obtain the true coloration of the jacket, digitally. On Poshmark, I was able to get a discount off of the original department store price, and I paid $82, after tax and shipping. Although there’s plenty of Windrunner jackets, of varying designs out there, I was glad, in this case, to get a brand new one just like the one I’d had before, for sentimental value, as it was a mainstay of my wardrobe, several years ago.

My original color Windrunner jacket. Here, it’s new with tags, so I get to live out all of the adventure all over again, from the beginning. 

(Recent) original and authentic Nike Windrunner jackets will feature this tag on the inner body of the jacket.

I got another Windrunner, also. This one, I got as a bargain deal for $20 on eBay, actually, but there are more floating around, out there, on various online marketplaces, still, if you’d like to emulate the look, on your own. 

The Nike AR2191-012 Windrunner Jacket. It hearkens back to a 1978 design vibe, apparently (I wasn’t around, then). 

It’s a challenge to find this one by description; you’d need the series and make number in order to get good search results on it, and there are several other same make and series jackets available online, if you want to copy the look.

This one is probably my most favorite, out of the windbreaker jackets that I purchased. It goes well with my outfits, and I got more than one compliment on the jacket, the first time I wore it out. It’s definitely an eye catcher, and it’s stylish and a bit funky, with its bright colorblock patch design and choice of color palette. It’s good for wearing neon colors with it, if you’re in to that.

The impact of coronavirus has left it's mark upon the casual downtown Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

What's one to do about this impending and ominous, though obscure, threat of contracting a potentially very deadly virus?

On one hand, we can embody some rational common sense about the means and scope of the impact of this vast news-story topic drop, and see it for what it truly is, to a large degree. First of all, for a pandemic to have reached so many nations, to such a degree of repute, such that the disease itself could be identified as having stricken a victim, tagged and classified as such, is somewhat murky, I'd say, within the scope of understanding that it came out of a Chinese fish market, to begin with. 

People who are unfamiliar with Chinese meat markets would ostensibly view such a foreign and unfamiliar cultural facet as strange; the Chinese, being an unattainable cultural divide to bridge, in their more traditional manifestations, of older generations who have never learned English, (and vice versa; many Americans would never learn Chinese) - this phenomenon creates a clear opportunity for the exploitation of an insider's pedigree about a looming generalization of cultural malady and over-production at the steed of what largely seems to center around what ended up being a bum Valentine's Day weekend, imaginably, for many people involved. 

Let's face it. People are destitute, and over spending on their budgets and credit accounts, to a large degree. These things happen in cyclical fashion, yet there hadn't been a clear cut demographic of identifying these individuals, as my generation had, in the iconography of the metro-sexual. On one hand, that archetype still lives on in popular culture - simply (perhaps) different people, all being wrought through the engineering of consumer psychology in to well-targeted patrons of online retail and persona-based advertisements.

The subliminal impact of the ad-bearing mechanism is a tender subject to have breached, for many consumers, in that their visual identity and assimilating personas and outward portrayals of themselves, leveraged upon "fitting in," is at stake. People long to be admired and adored, as a universal nurturing need, of our primitive limbic mind selves, which operates underneath the surface.

To be succinct, I can admit that I'd overworked myself, quite commonly, over the past several months, or so, and it had become a chronic condition. Back pain, inflammation - that sort of thing. But the exploitation of the intrigue and mystique of the unfamiliar is an obvious concession within the scope of this coronavirus news topic drop, if one were to dig just beneath the most superficial of things.

Am I that uncommon, and so far out of reach, that an objective deconstruction of personal experience, given outgoing, pro-sociable inclusion and observation should go unheeded? I feel that the things I find and imagine to be common of myself, given others, to be, historically, a fairly level-gauge playing field and perspective, since I traverse through many cultural populations, and I interact indiscriminately with individuals and intelligence personnel, with relevant imagery, on a very consistent and regular basis, which I'd offer, is a reasonable agreement that my objectivity is a fairly well-grounded one. Hopefully I communicate to the literate population with little to hinder the boundaries between written words and capable understanding.

Moving ahead, pushing forth on productivity, given our human constraints of our physical selves, and also, given that our subliminal egos are perhaps bruised, for the sake of that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models, being deployed and delegated, over humanly capable endeavor, is bound to be one of the humbling and intrinsic facets of that we are limited by human frailty, and everyone could use a break, at some point, and coronavirus offers that contingency a common layperson's chance at duly failing to fulfill responsibilities, whereas (to be redundant), we all needed a break from work, for how much productivity we had produced, and for what that wrought of our exertions, and exhaustion.

 

 

iPigeon.institute mission statement (from realpigeonsofla.tumblr.com)

We strive to be as pigeons, at heart. Any more than that, and are we worse off, as a whole? Any less, and have we failed as humans? Less lovable than an animal?