Remember when John Mayer was obsessed with watches? Well, Papa’s got a brand-new bag. His new thing is layers and layers of Tibetan robes, as seen on his most recent album cover, but do not mistake them for bathrobes unless you want to seriously irk him. Mayer tells GQ that the tabloids haven’t quite caught on to this subtlety. “It’ll end up in People magazine that I was wearing a bathrobe,” he says. “And it’s like, ‘Well, actually it’s a totally hand-painted, natural dye … It’s made with real indigo and crushed up ladybugs!’” Luckily, he has a small legion of defenders who set those people straight: “Maybe you get made fun of in People, but who knows who [Visvim designer] Hiroki Nakamura is that reads People magazine? Then there’s one or two people who jump into the comments and go, ‘No, actually that’s Visvim. That’s really hard to come by. That represents a lot of hard work by artisans in Japan.’” Thank goodness for those accuracy fetishists!
A robe, you see, can have many uses: “You can use it as a background to take pictures of things for Instagram. You can use it as a blanket. You can use it as a tent. I’ve watched movies under it on the airplane — it’s breathable! You can use it as a paparazzi shield.” Not to mention their forgiving silhouette: admits Mayer, “I was heavy, and layers favor the heavy man.”
