Gross Jar – Gross Fashion

It may not be the easiest thing for an outsider to wrap their brain around, but somewhere in the course of filling it with whatever manner of filth we could get our hands on and marveling at the stomach-wrenching results, the Gross Jar went from being a simple experiment in freeform biology to becoming a close part of the Vice family. We beamed with quiet parental pride at every bout of heaves our little buddy provoked, and fretted anxiously for its welfare whenever the weather outside turned sour. In return for all of our care and concern, we were rewarded with two full, life-affirming years of complete and utter putrescence.

You can imagine how hard it was for us to accept the fact that this happiness would someday have to end, but over the past few months we began to see the signs that the Gross Jar was slowly coming to the close of its golden years. Its thick, chestnut-tinted stew thinned and faded with age, and the musk whose foulness we thought would keep on growing forever eventually plateaued and settled into a stable maturity, like when you’re mixing different types of booze and it hits that point where no matter what you add it just tastes like rubbing alcohol.

We decided that in keeping with the spirit of the Jar, rather than mourn its passing we should celebrate the joy it brought into our lives by sharing it with the rest of the world. And so we are proud to introduce, just in time for spring, a line of t-shirts tie-dyed in the bowels of the Gross Jar so that you can carry its repugnant essence encrusted on your body wherever you may go.

VICE STAFF
 

Tie-dying with a Gross Jar is easy and fun (sort of). Step one: Empty your jar into a wide-mouthed bowl or Tupperware. Next take a t-shirt tied up with rubber bands and dunk it in the juice until it’s good and soaked.

 

While clearing out the Gross Jar’s layers of accumulated muck made us all a little misty, it did give us a chance to finally see our little buddy from the inside out and revisit all those special ingredients which went to make its vileness so magical and unique. Join us as we traipse down memory lane, checking in on our favorite deposits and seeing where they are today!

Raw chicken, facial scabbing, skim milk, flu spit, chicken blood, piss, and eggs: The inaugural load—these ingredients melted together pretty rapidly to form the base stew, even eating completely through an uncracked egg to welcome it into the mix. As our excavation neared the bottom though, we unearthed what we’re pretty sure was a small remnant of the chicken meat. Either that or some sort of stillborn ultra-amoeba.

Jizz: For all its staying power on old socks and towels, our ejaculate faded into the woodwork of the mother load in just a matter of days, adding only slightly to the Jar-brew’s increasingly gelatinous consistency.

Shit: Rounding out the basic excretions, this hearty little turdling set off the Jar’s transition from milky pink to rich, septic brown. Its contribution to the Jar’s tangy bouquet also resulted in our friend’s banishment from the office to its rooftop nest.

Rat: The biggest fear we faced in plunging our gloved fingers into the Jar’s murky depths was pulling them back out wedged inside the rib cage of a skeletal half-rat. Fortunately for our continued sanity, the digestive prowess of the sludge completely consumed every last trace of this little guy, right down to his little rat skull. You heard that right: The Jar disintegrated an entire rat, skeleton and all.

Used tampon: After bobbing daintily at the surface for a couple weeks secreting its womanly essence unto the brine, this generous donation from one of our staffer’s GFs settled to the bottom and swelled into a spongy clump of thread. It plopped out onto the rooftop while we were dunking one of the shirts with string intact, eliciting the bemusement and nausea of all parties present.

Vomit, baby pigeon, tapeworm, liver fluke, lamprey, and girl’s tooth: Entered at what we believe to be the peak of the Jar’s momentum, each of these deposits dissipated completely into the muck by the next round of additions.

Brewer’s yeast: We originally thought this payload was a failure for not blossoming into some kind of foamy garbage-monster, but looking back it was at this point that the Jar’s aeration first achieved the strength to break lose of the sealed lid. So maybe we owe it a little more credit.

 

And voilà. You’ve got a shirt completely unsuitable to be worn anywhere near other people or drinking water.

Cockroaches, cow eyeball, and testicle casings: While the eye and nutskins went the way of their forerunners with relative haste, you can imagine our elation when upon upending the Jar at the end of our shirtmaking, BOTH of our cockroaches’s bodies came tumbling out a little spongy, but otherwise no worse for wear. We’d always written off that old acorn about roaches and the apocalypse as hyperbole, but consider this our conversion.

Pitbull scab: Warranting only passing mention in the magazine, this dog-fighting souvenir more or less just served to tide the Jar over between main courses.

Dreadlock, ear wax, pus-encrusted Band-Aid: The hippie trifecta—of no less surprise than the survival of the roaches was pulling out the second t-shirt and finding the majority of the dreadlock clinging to its sleeve. It looked like each end had been frayed down a good inch or so, but the middle of the stalk was still holding strong. This is on par with when they found that 150-year-old poison in Napoleon’s hair.

Radioactive cat shit: Lost at the time amid editorial shuffling, we’re pleased to finally report that one of our friends took their cat in to get radioiodine ablation for its thyroid then let us take one of its gamma-ray-enriched turds (which made one of our staffer’s hand tingle through rubber gloves) and mate it with the Jar.

Toxic soil: Feeling bad for keeping it cooped up on the roof for so long, we decided to give the Jar a proper summer vacation and took it road-tripping upstate to Niagara Falls’ famed Love Canal neighborhood, the Daytona Beach of environmental-disaster sites. Sadly no flipper-babies resulted from its feast of contaminated dirt, but the Jar did score a fetching new hat.




If you’ve ever had to work with noxious chemicals or in a Japanese restaurant, you know how much of a chore it can be to get the smell of work off your hands come quittin’ time. Dealing with one of the most rank and heave-inducing substances known to man, we at Vice are grateful to the fine people at Nancy Boy for their line of high-quality, all-natural bath and body-care products which make the process of post-Gross Jar deodorizing quick and easy. Their tea-rose-scented Body Bar cuts through the hellish stench of rotten flesh and bodily excretions in half the scrubbing time of ordinary soaps, and without leaving our delicate hands all cracked and dry. And after a hard day of feeding the Jar’s opprobrium and suppressing our gag reflexes, we can think of no better way to unwind than to lay out a gender-normative balance of Nancy Boy Butch and Fem Parfums around some tea candles, draw a hot bath with some Dr. Hauschka Holistic Lavender, sprinkle a generous handful of Nancy Boy Citrus Bath Salts in the tub, lather ourselves in a silky, peppermint-infused film of Nancy Boy Invigorating Body Wash, and let all our cares and fears of contagion melt into a dazzling rainbow cascade of candy-coated oblivion.

Of course, sometimes our hectic schedules don’t allow us to indulge in such pampering. In times like those we find it no less refreshing to scorch away the top few layers of skin with a splash of Lye and mask up with a liberal misting of Christophe Street fragrance, made by the sister of acclaimed New York leather daddy Christophe Andre. It’s like being gangbanged by luxury, but in a fraction of the time.