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Butterfly Sconces - Afra and Tobia Scarpa

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Obsessed with this jacket by Undercover 🥹

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Has anyone figured out how to wear vintage slip dresses? I adore vintage satin or lace slips but they’re so sheer that I can’t figure out what to wear underneath. Do I wear… another slip? Do I embrace the transparency and let my undergarments shine? Help

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Whitney Hayes 

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the row

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Nile Guirad

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April Recap

Hello all! (I don't know if I have real followers or if everyone on here is just a bot... but in any case, I wanted to try something new with this semi-neglected blog.)

I don't know if anyone else here has recently experienced a wave of social media fatigue. The sheer amount of content online - mostly exhorting you to buy more things to fix imaginary problems - lately feels overwhelming. The other day I had a sudden wave of nostalgia for early 2000s social media, especially how things felt a little more curated - how you would seek out a handful of individuals who matched your interests. These days, with algorithms pushing hundreds of new influencers your way every day, it feels impossible to pick out the signal from the noise.

In that spirit, I thought I would start writing a little monthly recap of things that I tried and loved. This will range from everything from books, to fashion, to skincare, to hobbies... I hope to maybe start a bit of a dialogue online, to share some things that I enjoy, and to try to cultivate a lifestyle full of things that I truly love, instead of mindlessly following the latest trend I've seen online.

So without further ado, here's the April recap of Things I Tried and Loved.

Deleting social media apps for a few days

By which I mean any apps with short-form videos, i.e. Instagram and Youtube. I’ve never had Tiktok as I know I would be hopelessly addicted to it, but have managed to justify keeping Instagram and Youtube on my phone for social and “educational” purposes. The problem is, whenever I’m busy or stressed, my coping mechanism is to lie in bed and spend literally hours scrolling through Instagram Reels, until my mind feels simultaneously numb and overstimulated.

It’s usually in such a state of social media-hangover that I decide to stop spending so much time online and delete these apps from my phone. This usually lasts for a few days before, in an itchy state of withdrawal, I cave and reinstall them. But so far I’ve lasted about a week, and the longer I go on, the less I want to go back on them. It’s amazing how much time is freed up when you’re no longer spending 1-2 hours a day scrolling on your phone.

Tumblr, of course, does not count amongst the aforementioned apps. I consider it to be a more evolved form of social media.

Sizing up in jeans

I’m not sure at what point my life I decided that jeans were meant to be inherently uncomfortable. Even though I’ve eschewed skinny jeans for a while now, like a good reformed Millennial, I’ve never let go of the mentality that jeans should still be snug around the hips and waist to be “flattering”.

Now, at long last, I have come to the simple realization that I can wear whatever jeans I want. By simply going up one size from your true waist size, you can have jeans that don’t: 1) require small, awkward jumps to pull on 2) take your underwear along for a ride every time you take them off and 3) cut off your circulation every time you sit down. A miracle.

Clinique Black Honey lipstick

I am not a lipstick wearer. I have tried to embrace the “French girl” look, wherein a dash of lipstick somehow pulls your entire look together, but the truth is when you otherwise look completely haggard, wearing a bright red lipstick actually makes you look a bit insane. I’ve actually had the Clinique Black Honey Lipstick for a while, but rediscovered it kicking around in the bottom of a purse the other day. And wow, I forgot how much I love this simple product. It provides just a little bit of color without making it obvious I’m wearing a color. It does not dry out my permanently chapped lips (though I still wear some Vaseline on top of it). It feels very elegant to slip the little silver tube into my bag or purse. 5/5.

Reading about etiquette

After reading Jane Austen’s Emma and laughing at the various social mishaps that the characters get into, I went on a journey of reading about etiquette and what the hell happened to it over the past two hundred years. Not that I miss the strict dress comportment expected of men and women back then, or women in general being banned from a variety of activities, but I do think there were some romantic tendencies which we lost and were never satisfyingly replaced. Like formal balls. Handwritten letters. Ladies wearing gloves. I know that some people still write letters to their friends in fits of nostalgia, but in an age of instant communication I feel that this would probably be a one-sided effort and met with some confusion before eventually petering off.

Paying for things with cash

Like many North Americans, I am mildly irritated by the influx of tipping requests for things that we used to not tip for, like buying ice cream at a counter or getting an oil change. There is a very simple solution to this, which is to carry cash for these types of services. I haven’t carried cash in so long that I somehow forgot about this workaround. Paying with cash removes the awkward moment where the machine is tilted towards you and the cashier watches as you punch in the minimum suggested 18% tip for scooping ice cream into a cup. If you hand over exact change or the minimum amount of cash required, they cannot judge you for not reaching into your pocket and pulling out extra cash for a tip. Somehow, this feels totally different than selecting “No tip” on a machine. I don’t know why, but it does.

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Julie Pointer Bath by Michael A. Muller

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Photo by @christietyler on IG

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Photo from the Parisian Vintage. I checked out their store in Paris and they had the most amazing pieces.

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https://www.instagram.com/p/CczYJbppfp_/

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Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins was the original office siren and I will not hear otherwise

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philo baby

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