Margin for Error
thoughts on the drama surrounding Raymonte Cole's fashion brand launch
Bonjour! I’m writing this from the ER, which is a sentence I did not expect to type this week but here we are. Turns out a very enthusiastic week of skiing in Courchevel has consequences, and mine arrived at approximately 11pm on a Wednesday. I’m fine, or getting there. I have a full dispatch on my alpine adventures in tomorrow’s newsletter.
Last night though, I had 5 hours and bad wifi and Twitter, which meant I was fully caught up on the Raymonte Cole clothing line discourse by the time they discharged me.
Quick disclaimer before I get into it: Raymonte has me blocked. This is because I commented on a post where he told Essence Magazine to fuck off after they wrote a genuinely nice piece about his birthday trip. You can read more about that drama here. I don’t follow his content, I’m not a fan, and I want to be clear about that upfront because I’m about to defend the principle of what happened to him this week and I’d rather you know my position than wonder about it.
So this week Raymonte Cole, a Black gay lifestyle and travel influencer known for his unfiltered commentary and propensity for landing in online drama, launched TERMS, his first independent clothing line. The drop included hoodies, sweats, and basics, promoted as a passion project built without major collabs or sponsorships, on his own terms, hence the name. Before anyone even got to the actual clothes, a tweet griping about the oversaturation of influencer brands got widely read as shade directed at him specifically.
Raymonte clapped back, his people clapped back, critics called the line weak and called him messy, and the whole thing devolved at a speed that would be impressive if it weren’t so familiar.
A few years ago Denzel Dion, another Black gay lifestyle and fashion influencer probably best known for palling around with Rickey Thompson, was in this exact position. When he launched NOID, an artsy, high-priced, unconventional line that some reviewers memorably described as giving “Mary Poppins vibes,” he got the same treatment, people calling it overpriced, low effort, AliExpress, the full rotation. He showed up to publicly defend Raymonte during the TERMS rollout and immediately caught strays himself, with “AliExpress” jabs getting aimed at both lines within the same thread. I get a sense of deja-vu watching the Raymonte situation unfold, two Black gay creators attempting to build something with the same pile-on but different names on the hoodie.
Now not to be that friend that’s too woke
