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rustbeltjessie · 5 years ago

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Diary of an Emotional Masochist, Chapter One: Dignity and Shame

I am an emotional masochist. I’m the kind of person, who, when I’m already going through a bout of nostalgic melancholy, will decide to read old journal entries or look through old photographs. The kind of person who, when it’s three a.m. and I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about what loves have come and gone (to borrow a phrase from Edna St. Vincent Millay), will get up and Google search those loves. I am the kind of woman who, when I’m already sad, will listen to an album that devastates me. I have a long list of albums that it’s almost too painful to listen to, albums that remind me of such specific times in my life that listening to them takes me right back to where I was then. A different person would purge their record collection and iTunes library of such albums, but, like I said – I am an emotional masochist. On lonesome evenings, after a couple glasses of whiskey, nothing sounds better to me than spinning one of those records (or queueing up one of those playlists). This is one of those lonesome-whiskey evenings, so won’t you join me in indulging? We’re listening to Crooked Fingers’ Dignity and Shame.

From the first sparse, haunting notes of “Islero,” I am transported back in time to the summer of 2005. God, that summer. That terrible, wonderful summer. I’d fucked up my life the year before, and I thought that would be the summer I’d fix it, except all I did was fuck it up even more. God, that summer. That March, I moved away from Chicago after living there for five years. I planned on moving to Milwaukee come autumn, to start fresh in a fresh town. In the meantime, I moved back in with my parents. I wasn’t home, much. Nights, after work, I went to one of the two bars in Kenosha where all my sad drunk hoodlum friends hung out. On days off, I walked in the woods – the heat was relentless, and the canopy of trees offered cool green comfort. Or I drove to Chicago to see shows and drink with my friends and try to remember why I’d left; drove to Milwaukee to scope out neighborhoods, sit for hours at the Hi-Fi Cafe, go record and dress shopping. On one of my record shopping expeditions, I bought Dignity and Shame. It was on the Staff Recommendations shelf, and I liked the cover art, so I took it home with me – and it was serendipity, it was exactly the album I needed at the time.

As soon as I got home, I set it spinning on my turntable, and the first track – “Islero” – gave me goosebumps. The second track – “Weary Arms” – made me cry. It had sad cellos and a lonesome cowboy guitar, and Eric Bachmann’s voice was a raspy baritone: Beware of strangers knocking at your door. Old lovers, too. Don’t think for one second they’ve forgotten you. Oh, oh, oh. By the time the final, hidden track played, I’d melted into a puddle of tears and goosebumps on my bedroom floor. The album destroyed me, and it spooked me because so many of the stories sounded like things right out of my life, both from that year and six or so years before it. It was like Eric Bachmann had read my diary and set it to music. I wanted to write him a letter and say: “Get out of my head, god damn it! Get out of my aching heart.” It’s impossible for me to write about Dignity and Shame, or about the summer of 2005, without descending into hyperbole, sentimental poetry, and melodrama. My God, that summer was hyperbole, sentimental poetry, and melodrama. I was still young enough that it was acceptable to feel things that intensely, acceptable to talk about a sunrise over Lake Michigan by saying things like: “When the light shot through the horizon in streaks of peach and gold, it was the most god damn beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” Dear diary, listen to me.

My “Weary Arms” wrapped tight around so many lovers, that summer – four of them, plus a handful of brief flings. Later that year, I lamented that I hadn’t had as many wild love affairs as I’d had in years past, which, yes, says something unflattering about me. And Eric Bachmann sang: You have many enemies, for reasons no one’s certain of.

One night, while I sat at one of the bars and waited for my friends to arrive, a girl approached me. I didn’t know her, but she knew me. She sat down across from me and lambasted me for sleeping with a guy she’d been dating at the time…two years before. She called me a slut, and some worse things. I wanted to buy her a drink, to appease her. I couldn’t understand why she hated me so much. When I slept with that guy, I had no idea he had a girlfriend. So many enemies, so many lovers, but could a jaded girl like me heed an uptempo “Call To Love?” In that song, Eric took the role of a particular one of my lovers, and said: Won’t you hear my heart? I’m transmitting a call to love. On a night when the moon was orange-red and luminous, that lover said: “The moon is the color of your hair.” Another night: “You were born in the wrong era, Jess.” And, though I was a sucker for sentimental poetry, my guard was up. Lara Meyerratken answered for me: Don’t need my heart kicked ‘round the block no more. You may be smooth-talking, daddy, but I’ve heard it all before. I traded gossip with the “Twilight Creeps.” In this sweet-sad song with the bright piano and the shimmering backup vocals, I was both the singer and the sung about. I could have sung it to one of my lovers, should have said to her: Flower, don’t dig so deep so you don’t go anywhere. But the words were also about me: You say someday you’re gonna float away. Take yourself some kind of holiday. I often told my sad drunk hoodlum friends, the twilight creeps, that I needed to get the hell out of town. “If I could just get gone for more than a few days, go somewhere more than a few hours away…there ain’t no use in trying to make me stay.”

My lovers all wanted to make me stay. The flower-girl, I’ll call her Valerie. The one who spoke poetic words to me, I’ll call him Jack. And there was Lon, and Carmine. In different ways, for different reasons, they each wanted me to choose them over all the rest. Even a few of the week-long flings and one-night stands, older punk guys or younger hippie girls, said things to me like: “How did I get so lucky as to meet a girl like you?” Or: “So, are you my girlfriend now?” And when I said no, they called me a heartbreaker. A “Destroyer.” It’s a woebegone cowboy of a tune. Doleful drums, piano that tinkles like ice cubes in a bar glass, and a lap steel guitar – which, as far as I’m concerned, is the aural equivalent of an anti-hero walking off into the sunset. The song is all about how the singer is going to make someone his, and then he’s going to leave them behind. When they called me heartbreaker, I wanted to sing it: Lay down, just let it come, and resign your heart, today, to get blown away. “Valerie,” well, that’s why I’m referring to that lover as Valerie. Much like me, she was a punk rock girl turned heroine of a Tom Waits song (heroine of a Crooked Fingers song). She had thriftstore dresses and jailhouse tattoos and self-inflicted scars. “Valerie,” the song, has a sanguine strut, is a besotted love song, and I thought of Valerie, the girl: Red roses, silk, you in your sleek summer dress. You were light, revelation, oh, I love you the best. But she and I kept our love unspoken. We both had other romantic complications, and only touched each other on long hot nights after too many bottles of wine and too many pills. “Sleep All Summer” was my song for Jack, the young ex-goth whose mouth was pink and pouty like he’d been sucking on a strawberry popsicle. Our love was either all the good songs and kissing ’til our lips were raw, or it was screaming matches and hangover headaches. What bliss is this, and then he’d get attention-starved and whiny, and I’d burn hot and cold and say nasty things, and we’d say: “This is it, we’re through.” But – There ain’t no way we’re gonna find another, the way we sleep all summer. Why won’t you fall back in love with me? And we’d run into each other at the bar, and faster than our friends could say I told you so we’d be tangled up in the backseat of his car or rolling around by the lake, and the whole thing would start all over again. He’d play the martyr, and I’d say: I would change for you, but babe, that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be a better man.

And “Coldways” kill cool lovers. Lon was a folk singer from the north woods. He’d been one of my best friends for years already, and when we started dating I was so tired of complicated, fiery relationships that I mistook comfort for True Love. My heart still hurts when I think of how I hurt him. He wanted me to marry him and I just wanted to be drunk and in love, to listen to “Coldways”’s thrumming, swelling sound. To sing along: Come out, come on, tonight the city’s alive. “Wrecking Ball” has a jaunty, punchdrunk piano, and the piano had been drinking, but so had I. God, I drank so much that summer. On the rare night I spent at home, I holed up in my room, wrote long, sad, tales of people in the legend of my life, and drank blackberry brandy mixed with Sprite. Something like that would taste over-sweet to me now, make me shudder, but maybe the same part of me that craved sentimental poetry also thirsted for sugary drinks. And most nights, I wasn’t at home. Most nights, I changed clothes in my car after work. I swapped my reeking-of-pizza button down shirt and black slacks for one of my vintage dresses. A mint green confection, or a pink and white sundress. Something from the ‘50s, blue with red and white polka dots, or a slinky black number that a ‘30s jazz singer would have worn. And I sat at one of two bars, drank whiskey and Coke, or brandy old-fashioneds, or gin and tonics all night long. I waited for my friends to arrive, and I drank and smoked and entertained myself with one of the items I always had in my bag – a book of poetry by Dorothy Parker or Edna St. Vincent Millay, a deck of Alice In Wonderland tarot cards. And sometimes, someone would find me intriguing. I swear, I wasn’t a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but… I was a redhead in a retro dress (usually with a strand of fake pearls, too) sitting in a dive bar, smoking pastel-colored cigarettes, reading sonnets and tarot cards. Christ. Often, someone found me intriguing, chatted me up, and I wound up with yet another lover. I was a destroyer, destroying myself with booze and love. I was a wrecking ball. Eric Bachmann, accompanied by that barroom piano, sang: And you laughed and you danced, and it let you feel fine for a while. Hanging out with the kids who you knew soon would fall out of style.

I’ve left two songs out, dear diary. I did it on purpose, because they are the two that hurt the most. They are also the two that heal the most. The kind of songs that make me weep, then tell me to dry my tears. “You Must Build A Fire,” oh, it is one of the saddest songs. It begins with only two guitars (a finger-picked lead and that god damn lap steel again), and Eric’s voice is so plaintive, sounds like it’s about to crack, and he sings: Oh, gracious love, you were so kind to me. You only broke my heart, let my arms and legs stay strong. So I could swim upon the open sea, searching for another love. Floating along aimlessly. I haven’t told you about Carmine, yet. Carmine was a musician who looked like a magician from an old-time carnival. The year before, he’d ruined me in a worse way than any other lover ever had. (As a friend put it, he was one of the ones who fucked me up so bad I was pretty much ruined for anyone else.) He ruined me, but I let him back into my life. That summer, we got together. It was supposed to be closure, but of course it just opened everything up again. He said: “I want to be with you. I want to try again.” I said: “Okay, yes, let’s start over. I want to be with you.” He said: “Only if you break things off with all your other lovers. I want to be your only.” The nerve, giving me an ultimatum like that when he was even more of a notorious libertine than I was. And the song sang: I had someone, a love I thought was true. But sometimes you just get tired, and you must try not to die. And give your love, though no one may receive. You must build a giant fire, for the whole wide world to see. It sounded like that whole heartbroken, hot summer. Oh, where are you, love?

The title track, “Dignity and Shame,” is a piano ballad that told me: To be sure, there ain’t no cure. There could be no one to save you. It is the track I return to over and over, more than any other track on the album. Though my life has calmed down a lot in the decade since that summer, sometimes – that feeling comes, you’ve been here once before. That wicked feeling you don’t want to feel no more. And then, Eric Bachmann (get out my head, god damn it!) sings: You’re not the same as the day that you came. You can choose dignity, or shame.

I choose dignity. I carry my broken heart like a torch in the night. Little keeper of light, burning deep, burning bright in the dark.

[originally appeared in Witchsong in October 2015]

#jessie lynn mcmains #my writing #music #memoir #crooked fingers #dignity and shame #2015 #2005 #love #lovers #heartbreak #panic attacks #drugs #alcohol #lyrics #this is still one of my favorite pieces of music writing i've ever written #and since witchsong has gone dark i thought i'd share it here

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dippedanddripped · 5 years ago

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One afternoon in 1999, when the designer Shayne Oliver was in the sixth grade, he came across a magazine ad for Dirty Denim, a line of “pre-soiled” jeans by Diesel. The ad featured a collage of faux paparazzi photographs documenting the meltdown of a fictional rock star. Oliver was struck by the campaign’s tagline: “The Luxury of Dirt.” “That blew my mind,” he told me recently. “Spending money on something that looks dirty? I was, like, ‘This is genius.’ ” He informed his mother, a schoolteacher from Trinidad named Anne-Marie, that he needed a pair immediately.

Oliver’s father had abandoned Anne-Marie before Shayne was born, and she had struggled to raise him on her own. They lived in a tiny apartment on Halsey Street, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Oliver, who attended some rough schools—he witnessed knife fights in the halls—was highly intelligent, and Anne-Marie was determined to nurture his gifts. She stood up to people on the street who heckled him because he was effeminate, and fought with school officials who wrote him off as a rowdy black kid. She didn’t have the money for the jeans, which cost three hundred and seventy-five dollars, but she respected Shayne’s sense of urgency. “How are we going to afford Diesel clothes?” she asked herself. She soon began working evenings at the Diesel store at the corner of Sixtieth and Lexington. She got an employee discount, and her kid got his jeans.

Oliver began accompanying Anne-Marie on her shifts at Diesel, folding shirts, examining seams, and offering customers unsolicited style advice. Although his suggestions were impeccable, after a few weeks the management told him to stay home, noting that it was illegal for twelve-year-olds to work in retail. Undaunted, Oliver walked a few blocks to a Roberto Cavalli store. Employees there were so charmed that they offered him an unpaid internship. He didn’t take it, but he continued to visit the store—and pester the staff. “I would just be in the shop, hanging out all the time and talking shit,” he recalls. “It was fun.”

Oliver was a recent arrival in New York. He was born in 1987 in Minnesota, where Anne-Marie had immigrated to pursue a teaching degree, and he had spent his childhood shuttling among female relatives in St. Paul, St. Croix, and Trinidad, before settling with his mother in Brooklyn, in 1998. In St. Croix, at the age of five, he had begun making his own fashions out of scraps of fabric scavenged from his grandmother, a dressmaker. After moving to the United States, he started cutting up items in Anne-Marie’s wardrobe. In an effort to discourage this practice, she took him on regular trips to Jo-Ann Fabrics. He kept looting her closet.

When Anne-Marie rode the subway with Oliver, she noticed him staring at men who were wearing streetwear brands like Mecca and FUBU. “Why are you looking at all of these guys?” Anne-Marie asked him. “You’re all up in their Kool-Aid!” Oliver protested that he was inspecting them for their clothes, which was only half a lie. He began cutting up his jeans and ripping out the crotch, which made him a target at the Pentecostal church that he and his mother attended. “I was being expressive!” he recalls, adding that other parishioners expressed themselves by speaking in tongues. At thirteen, he quit the church.

That year, Anne-Marie sent Oliver to a public school in Long Island City which focusses on the arts. For weeks, he came to class wearing a head scarf, and was often mistaken for a Muslim girl. (“I should’ve played that up a little bit,” Oliver told me. “Muslim girls get a lot of attention.”) Shortly after he enrolled, Anne-Marie rented for him a videocassette of “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 documentary about voguing competitions in New York. A year later, he became a member of the House of Ninja, one of the groups featured in the film. “The Ninja people were all offbeat and not glamour kids,” he recalls. They encouraged him to explore various looks, and in competitions, he said, he “swayed between ‘vogue femme’ and ‘runway.’ ”

As a teen-ager, Oliver began applying his ingenuity to his hair: “There was one point where I was mixing textures—it was, like, a mullet of dreads and then permed on the sides. I’m sorry, that hairstyle was so nasty! It was ridiculous. It was so good.” He went out most nights, commuting between the largely white electroclash scene centered on Club Luxx, in Williamsburg, and the mostly black and Latino scene on Christopher Street, where he liked to “smoke, go to the pier, and then vogue.”

Before entering the tenth grade, he transferred to Harvey Milk, the country’s first high school for L.G.B.T. youths. Many of the students there wore three outfits a day: one for their neighborhood, one for school, and one for going out. It could be dangerous to wear the wrong thing in the wrong place, so kids kept outré clothes in their backpacks and changed on the subway platform. Oliver, though, prided himself on assembling outfits that worked in all three environments: butch enough for Bed-Stuy, smart enough for school, glam enough for the club. He devised subtle, colorless ensembles, the drape and shape of which sent coded messages to the educated eye. “If you have on all-black, you can go unnoticed on the block,” Oliver explained. “Then you go intothe city, and someone who’s thinking about clothing in a different way notices all the cuts and layering.” Styling choices helped him adapt his look to different contexts. Oliver liked wearing tight poom-poom shorts, but on his way to school he pulled them low, so that they sagged “in a masculine way.”

At Harvey Milk, Oliver made friends with another boy who was obsessed with fashion, James Garland. Each was an only child, raised by an indulgent single mother who had given her son the master bedroom. They recorded television broadcasts of runway shows and pored over the designs. Garland liked the debonair luxury of Tom Ford; Oliver preferred the forbidding moodiness of Rick Owens. Before long, the boys began making clothes, conducting photo shoots in Fort Greene Park, and staging runway shows at school. They generated new pieces through collage, stitching together items from vintage shops, children’s jackets from thrift stores, and treasures from their mothers’ closets.

After creating their first line of T-shirts, named Ammo, and their first collection, Cazzy Calore, Garland and Oliver graduated from Harvey Milk and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Garland flourished there, but Oliver chafed against the curricular constraints and dropped out in his freshman year. In 2006, he diverted the tuition money that Anne-Marie had saved for him, and launched a fashion line with his friend Raul López, who also hung out on Christopher Street. Oliver called the new line Hood By Air. The phrase suggested a style that was proudly ghetto and proudly élite (“putting on airs”). Within a few years, the label had become the most prominent high-fashion brand to have emerged authentically from street culture.

Oliver’s original mission with the label was to bring to fine menswear what he calls the “thug silhouette”: the shape created by a long T-shirt paired with saggy pants, as if the wearer had a very long torso and very short legs. He also believed that he could turn streetwear basics such as oversized hoodies and multipocketed jackets into high-concept luxury items.

By 2007, Hood By Air clothes had begun showing up in boutiques in downtown Manhattan. The collections cannily combined the audacious (trousers with a dozen pleats) and the accessible (silk-screened T-shirts). The first Hood By Air T-shirts featured bold graphics and slogans like “Back to the Hood.” Oliver and López had the shirts custom-made by Dominican tailors, and they were expensive: two hundred dollars apiece. From the start, they sold well.

In the aughts, Manhattan boutiques were awash in designer hoodies (many of them by Jeremy Scott and Raf Simons). Oliver judged their stitch too fine, their length too short, their colors too bright, their patterns too busy. He felt that designers who appropriated streetwear had a fascination with urban men but were also afraid of them—he considered their skittish engagement to be “peckish,” “gross,” and “disconnected from the real masculinity” driving street culture. He told me, “It’s, like, ‘I think that guy is really hot, but I don’t know how to approach him, so I’m going to put elements of myself in him.’ There’s a power play where you’re inspired by something but you don’t want to give it credit.” Turned off by these “fey” imitations of streetwear, Oliver made clothes that were aggressively harsh and masculine. The graphics on his T-shirts often played with urban-horror imagery: a panorama of a prison yard, red marks evoking blood spattered by gunfire. At the same time, instead of hinting at homoeroticism, he foregrounded it. The first Hood By Air editorial video, uploaded to YouTube in September, 2007, featured a model repeatedly grabbing his crotch.

Oliver also embarked on a conceptual exploration that he calls “formalizing sloppiness”—highlighting the transitional phases between dressed and undressed. “It’s like when someone is horny and in a T-shirt, and it’s dropping off the shoulder,” Oliver explained. He liked conjuring those alluringly awkward moments when an amorous couple still has a few items of clothing on: “The idea of that being so open and so vulnerable—it’s, like, ‘Where’s my pants? Where’s my underwear?’ ”

By the end of 2009, López and Oliver had put Hood By Air on hiatus. López founded his own clothing line, and Oliver focussed on hosting a new dance party called GHE20G0TH1K (Ghetto Gothic). Held in various spaces in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, the gatherings united disparate musical tribes—urban, goth, queer, punk. Oliver ran GHE20G0TH1K with his friends Jazmin Soto (a pansexual Latina) and Daniel Fisher (a straight white Jew). Soto was in charge, but Oliver sometimes took a turn as d.j., and he favored a dark sound. “At the time, no one was playing Marilyn Manson, and I was playing records that resonated that way—the idea of, like, fear of the world,” he recalls. “I was prying into my past—all my history of being provoked.” Many of the party’s charismatic attendees wore Hood By Air T-shirts. Interest in the brand was so strong that Oliver decided to relaunch it.

This time, he had crucial help from Leilah Weinraub, a filmmaker who was working on a documentary about a lesbian strip club in South Central Los Angeles. (The film, which she plans to release in 2017, comes off as a female-focussed update of “Paris Is Burning.”) Weinraub, who was Soto’s girlfriend at the time, began doing projects with Oliver, and one day they shot a look book for the designer Telfar, a mutual friend. Oliver was among the people cast, and Weinraub was unafraid of challenging him. She recalls, “He was wearing the wrong piece—a shawl—and he refused to be styled. He said, ‘Style me like a lady’—he had on this I’m-a-demure-woman voice. I asked, ‘Can you stand a little more like a man?’ The room stopped.”

In 2012, Oliver asked Weinraub to work alongside him on the relaunch of Hood By Air. (The partnership with López was completely dissolved.) She said yes. Weinraub, who is eight years older than Oliver, told me that she felt protective of Hood By Air. “It was at the point where other people started seeing it as a success,” she said. “And at that point people start to rob you—blind. They start to trick you.” She was wary of mainstream cultural figures looking for a quick way to acquire edge—of invitations to, say, “work on Katy Perry’s team.” Shortly after Weinraub became Oliver’s partner, investors offered to buy Hood By Air and put Oliver and Weinraub on fixed salaries. She was appalled. “This isn’t fucking Motown!” she said. Hood By Air, she declared, would remain closed to outside investors while it was in its “incubation period.” (To date, the company hasn’t accepted any outside investments—an arrangement that is virtually unheard of in the fashion industry.)

In order for Hood By Air to maintain control of its intellectual property, Weinraub believed, it had to grow quickly and attract media attention. Otherwise, the company’s designs would be pirated by bigger labels, which treated avant-garde street culture as a resource to be plundered. In a 2013 article in the Times, Guy Trebay suggested that Riccardo Tisci, the creative director of Givenchy, had referenced Hood By Air designs “without crediting them.” (A spokesperson for Givenchy said, “Hood By Air has never been a reference for our brand.”)

Around the time that Weinraub joined Hood By Air, it presented a runway show at Milk Studios, on Fifteenth Street. One of the models cast for the show was the rapper A$AP Rocky, a friend of Oliver’s at the time. Rocky’s participation helped the brand reach a wider audience, affording it a measure of protection against fashion-world vultures. Rocky also boosted Hood By Air’s reputation by incorporating endorsements of the label into his lyrics. His devotion eventually cooled, though, and in 2014 he released a diss track that included criticisms of the brand. He gloated to a reporter, “I birthed it, so I can kill it.” But Rocky was too late. Hood By Air had established a cult following among affluent teen-agers, avant-garde adults, and pop stars like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Kanye West. The label was critically acclaimed, too, winning the Swarovski Award for Menswear, from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and a six-figure prize from L.V.M.H. Although Hood By Air remained rigorously experimental, it also became profitable, as fans lined up to buy T-shirts with the H.B.A. logo, which cost as much as six hundred dollars each. According to Hood By Air, its sales have doubled every season since 2013. The brand’s reach remains unimpressive by Gucci standards, but business has been good enough to give Oliver “the ability to do whatever the hell I want” in the studio. (He still shares an apartment with his mother, in Prospect Heights.)

Last September, I visited a cramped office that Hood By Air was renting on Hester Street, on the Lower East Side. The space, crowded with garment racks, could have been mistaken for a costume shop, were it not for the giant poster boards propped against the walls, which were covered in mini-Polaroids of harsh, alluring faces. Attached to each photograph was a Post-it scrawled with a concept: “spanish hustlers,” “obscure fetish.”

A dozen men and women, including Leilah Weinraub, sat in a circle, with only one subtle sign of hierarchy: Oliver was the only person not taking notes. Since 2012, Hood By Air had grown into a small collective, and its members were meeting to finalize plans for the Spring/Summer 2016 runway show. They had been joined by an outsider, Rich Aybar, a freelance stylist. Born on the Upper West Side to Dominican parents, he looked like a cross between a Rastafarian and Rasputin.

Oliver was dressed in jeans, a black vest, and a Hood By Air necklace—a chunky chain and a padlock—that he never removes. “Ooooooh!” he said. He had just received a text. “Connie just got confirmed for the door.” He was referring to Connie Girl, a doorwoman who was famous for being impossible to get past and impossible to book. “Taste that,” he said. “Ta-a-a-aste.”

“What’s the lighting like at the space?” Akeem Smith, Hood By Air’s chief stylist, asked. His hair was in small braids gathered into pigtails, and he wore a T-shirt bearing the words “The Black Genius.”

“Bright,” Weinraub replied. “White-blue.”

“Clinical,” Oliver said, approvingly. The show was being held at Penn Plaza Pavilion, a cavernous, fluorescent-lit building, opposite Madison Square Garden, that was slated for demolition. Hood By Air shows are traditionally held in unglamorous spaces.

Several people got up to leave, and a smaller group began discussing the casting of models. Each season, labels compete to book them, and Cathy Horyn, a critic at large at New York, told me that Hood By Air had some of “the best casting of the season, and I mean anywhere.” The brand is known for “streetcasting”—enlisting people who aren’t professional models.

The group stood and went over to a casting board, which was crammed with photographs of prospects. “We have to edit,” Oliver declared, inspecting the images. “We have to be really hard right now.”

“I think your story up there is really strong,” Aybar said. “It’s, like, Undernourished Retards—in a beautiful way.” He liked the “living-under-the-bridge vibe.” Then Aybar started ripping photos off the board. One boy, a Ryan Lochte type, was deemed “too dopey—a white guy in the most boring way.” Oliver asked that another male model be removed for having a swishy walk that struck him as off-brand. “It’s gay-y-y-y-y,” he said. After thirty minutes, a dozen pictures had been taken off the board.

The designing of clothes follows a similar group dynamic. Paul Cupo, the brand’s fashion director, told me, “The top concept is Shayne’s concept, and there’s a very select group of people that are allowed to contribute to this concept. Shayne then comes up with some shapes and silhouettes he wants to show, and then I plug in fabrics and colors.”

Cupo, an Italian-American from Bensonhurst who favors loose tank tops and sneakers, showed me a creation for the upcoming show. “The basic idea is a bomber,” he said. Instead of using nylon for the shell, however, he had used taffeta—a material often fashioned into ball gowns and wedding dresses. It was a surprising choice, he acknowledged with a smile: “It’s sort of a weird fabric for ‘young edgy cool designers’ to be using.” A Hood By Air bomber jacket sells for nearly a thousand dollars.

few days later, at Penn Plaza Pavilion, Hood By Air sent a male model down the runway in a tight bun, a shirtdress, and black heels. The shirtdress, made with black silk, was divided into sections, which had been loosely lashed together with chainlike zippers. The bottom had a feminine band of ruffles, as one might find on a dress worn by Michelle Obama to a state dinner. The middle was a wraparound panel of fabric that, from a distance, resembled high-waisted athletic shorts. The top was a button-down shirt with a crisp collar and oversized chiffon sleeves. Like a chimera, the shirtdress was incongruous but beautiful.

The model, who had been spotted on Instagram, was a twenty-seven-year-old from West Harlem named Mello Santos. He had a thin mustache and a goatee, and as he walked down the runway he allowed the zippers holding the outfit together to start coming undone. Dark silk was peeling off his torso like a rotten-banana peel, and the garment threatened to self-destruct at any moment, revealing Santos’s many tattoos (and parts of his anatomy). From some angles, Santos looked like a cross-dressing gangster; from others, like a futuristic pop star.

Subsequent models showed off equally mongrel creations: bomber jackets recut into togas, backpacks made from tufted sofa pillows. Some models looked like bullies, others like prey. A recording of the Jamaican dancehall performer Buju Banton roared over glitchy speakers. “Circumstances made me what I am,” he sang. “Was I born a violent man?” For the finale, each model took a seat on a raised platform, as if posing for a class picture. Together, they looked scary but sexy, butch yet femme.

The collection was called Galvanize, and the idea for the runway show was to evoke the ramshackle school that Oliver briefly attended as a youth in Trinidad. To galvanize is to electrify—to shock and inspire. But it also means to coat scrap metal with a layer of zinc; it’s the poor man’s version of gilding. Galvanized steel is a common roofing material in Trinidad, and the show’s name suggested a duality about growing up in the West Indies: Oliver claimed that the education he received at the school was exceptional—“college-level English in fourth grade,” he said—but the building was decrepit. This duality extended to the students’ clothing. Oliver and his classmates modified tattered, hand-me-down uniforms so that they became fashionable looks. The Galvanize collection—manufactured in Italy from sumptuous materials but with roots in a Caribbean schoolyard—was gilded streetwear whose aim was to electrify the audience and inspire a new generation to carry the countercultural torch.

The show impressed many critics. Sally Singer, the creative digital director of Vogue, told me that Hood By Air had presented one of the season’s top collections. Cathy Horyn, the New York critic, who was seeing a Hood By Air show for the first time, wrote that the clothes represented a “shock from the future” and a “fist in your face.” She told me that Hood By Air’s startling designs were welcome mutations in an era in which high fashion is controlled by bland international conglomerates.

Several critics described the clothes in the Galvanize collection as “deconstructed.” Deconstruction—whether of a novel, a soufflé, or a shirt—means breaking down a concept into its constituent parts, often with an eye toward destabilizing our vision of the whole. In fashion, it’s traditionally associated with accentuating raw edges and functional elements like seams. Hood By Air’s collection, however, riffed on the modifications that wearersmake to those designs—details like slashing, cropping, and sagging, which typically define a look only after professionals have finished their work.

Galvanize was an homage to the expanding cohort of shoppers who use clothing to revise standard images of race and gender. (Weinraub calls such consumers “modern people.”) In blunt terms, a rich white woman can wear a Hood By Air garment and feel modern because it makes her look like a poor black man; a poor black man can wear it and feel modern because it makes him look like a rich white woman. Whereas other labels had merely broken down design, Hood By Air was breaking down identity.

A classic deconstructionist turns garments into sculptures and models into scaffolding; Martin Margiela often covered his models’ faces. In the show for the Galvanize collection, the models’ faces—adorned with splotchy, wraith-like makeup—were key visual elements. The splotches paid homage to YouTube makeup-contouring tutorials, evoking the moment just before blending tools transform a painted monster into a Kardashian.

Despite the show’s triumphant reception, it did not unfold without flaws. There was a monumental error in the execution of the choreography: the models failed to crisscross, as directed, along the venue’s multiple catwalks, with the result that much of the audience saw only half the collection. It was a mistake that might have sent a tyrant like Coco Chanel or Alexander McQueen into a rage. Oliver, though, was unfazed. After the show, he appeared briefly at a bar on the Lower East Side, and spent only fifteen seconds conferring with Weinraub about the mistake before moving on to a more vexing problem: someone had given Oliver’s mother the address of a rented penthouse where the Galvanize collection had been put together, and where a post-show gathering would be held. (The Hester Street office was too small to accommodate dozens of models.) Anne-Marie had just arrived at the penthouse with pink hair and an entourage of younger Afro-Caribbean women. Oliver was forlorn. “This is exactly the moment I want to turn up!” he moaned, rubbing his cherubic head, which was shaved, and clutching at a floor-length sweater-dress of his own design. “Now my mother is there with her friends!”

I happened to know the identity of the culprit who had supplied Anne-Marie with the party’s address. It was Weinraub, who enjoys seeing Anne-Marie at every runway show. Her own parents have never come to one.

In late March, items from the Galvanize collection began to arrive in stores. Barneys New York installed life-size silicon replicas of six Hood By Air models in its four windows on Madison Avenue. Two of the models were Hood By Air regulars named Chucky and Sunny—Angelenos whose bodies (and faces) are covered in tattoos. In the window, the fake Sunny wore a pleated pant-dress, and his mouth was held open by a guard typically used in dental surgery. Chucky wore a padlocked baby pacifier and a purple leather shroud that might look good on a Jedi. It was the first time that the windows had featured mannequins in menswear. When I stopped by to see the display, in April, crowds of tourists, joined by local one-per-centers, had gathered to gawk. Many observers reacted with baffled revulsion. Inside the store, meanwhile, none of the radical clothes worn by the mannequins were for sale. The Hood By Air racks were instead filled with logo tees. The runway pieces may have blown fashion critics’ minds, but it was the T-shirts that had changed the way people dressed.

Leilah Weinraub studied film as a graduate student at Bard. Before joining Hood By Air, she had no experience in business. Her official title is C.E.O., but she told me that the designation is “fictional.” She recoils at any suggestion that she is Oliver’s Pierre Bergé—the commanding executive who helped Yves Saint Laurent become an international brand. She took the title of C.E.O. in part so that she would be taken as seriously as a man would be: “If I were just Shayne’s friend, and a woman, and me, people would just be, like, ‘O.K., bitch, get the fuck out of the way.’ ”

As Hood By Air has expanded into a collective, she explained, everyone with authority is essentially a creative director—even if, like her, they don’t literally design clothes. The early phases of the label’s design process take place in group texts that unfurl over weeks. For the Galvanize collection, eight employees contributed to what she calls a “running personal diary.” In addition, the label has an iCloud folder for sharing found images—Hood By Air’s equivalent of a mood board. Weinraub wouldn’t let me examine the entire folder for the collection, but she sent me a selection of the materials. There were photographs of Ike and Tina Turner, a jpeg of Aunt Viv, from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and a picture of a Chinese acupuncturist who stuck two thousand and eight needles in his head, in honor of the 2008 Summer Olympics. “It’s memes,” Paul Cupo, the fashion director, explained to me. “It’s never really literal—you’ll never see a jacket on our reference board.” In 2015, when Women’s Wear Dailyasked Hood By Air for an “inspiration photo,” the label sent back a screenshot of porn.

Weinraub is one of only a few lesbians in high fashion. (Others include Patricia Field and J. Crew’s Jenna Lyons.) She grew up in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, the daughter of an African-American textile designer from Compton and a Jewish pediatrician from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is small with squinty eyes, broad shoulders, and an almond-shaped face. The skin around her eyes is darker in tone; these raccoon-like circles are so formidable and stylish, and presented with such aplomb, that strangers often can’t decide whether the coloring is congenital or cosmetic.

Rebellious from the start, Weinraub ran away from home several times as a teen-ager. In response, she claims, her parents threatened to put her in foster care. (Her parents deny this.) As a compromise, Weinraub went to high school in Israel, through an exchange program.

After a year, Weinraub returned to L.A., legally emancipated herself, and looked for a job. Her uncle knew a buyer at Ron Herman, an upscale clothing store, and helped Weinraub secure a shopgirl position. “It was in Brentwood,” she recalls. “There would be kids shopping there that were my same age. I hated it.” She soon took a job at Maxfield, a boutique with a more progressive bent. Its owner asked her to help oversee the books section, where she befriended a regular who liked to linger in the store and discuss topics such as slavery, America, and Judaism. It was the director Tony Kaye, who had just made a film about a white supremacist, “American History X.”

One day, Weinraub saw Kaye’s face on the cover of a magazine. She read an interview inside and noticed something: many of Kaye’s answers borrowed language that she remembered using during their conversations at Maxfield. Weinraub sensed an opportunity. She called Kaye and said, “I want to do this for you full time. I’ll be your voice, I’ll answer all your questions, I’ll do your research.” There was a catch: Weinraub was feuding with her family again, and she needed money to pursue higher education. She told Kaye, “If you send me to college, I’ll be your professional student, and you can own all my papers.” Kaye agreed, and began paying her tuition when she enrolled at Antioch College, in Ohio. When Weinraub returned to L.A. for breaks, she assisted Kaye on commercial shoots and chauffeured him around the city. The arrangement lasted until Kaye got a girlfriend who demanded an end to the tuition payments.

Kaye famously lost control of “American History X” in the editing suite, when New Line Cinema allowed Ed Norton, the film’s lead actor, to do the final cut. (Kaye disavowed the version that was released.) The incident left a lasting impression on Weinraub: if you don’t control celebrities, they’ll end up controlling you. She was happy to leave people like A$AP Rocky behind. As she put it, she preferred to go it alone and make Hood By Air’s “own world happen.” She was adamant that she would not temper the label’s provocations. “People are into high concepts and respond well to them,” she assured me. “People want drama. They love it.”

The penthouse that Hood By Air rented in the weeks before the Galvanize show had cathedral ceilings, a vast terrace, and an eight-person hot tub overlooking the Lower East Side. An apparent extravagance, the penthouse was leased in order to save money on hotel rooms by providing a live-and-work space for collaborators flying to New York. This frugal-luxury strategy would succeed, though, only if the palatial digs survived the week intact. (The label has a history of losing hotel damage deposits.) To keep the proceedings professional, alcohol was banned from the penthouse until the work was finished.

Five days before the Penn Plaza Pavilion show, I visited the penthouse, which was fragrant with expensive leathers and gleaming with racks of lustrous silks. Models began to arrive, lining up like supplicants to be dressed by the label’s clergy. Hirakish, a twenty-two-year-old African-American artist and musician from New Orleans, was one of the season’s most charismatic new models. He was walleyed and skeletal—you could see every bone in his cranium. For the show, he was to be dressed in a slashed wedding gown and accessorized with a strip of gauze affixed to his forehead, as if he had just survived a street fight. He was in drag, but the effect wasn’t campy: he looked mutilated but threatening, like a zombie. Hirakish had moved to New York a month earlier, after breaking up with his girlfriend, and this was his first fashion show. “This is what I dreamed of,” he confided, gazing at the penthouse’s occupants, who included several d.j.s whom he followed on Instagram. “This is the modern-day Andy Warhol.” (I never heard the principals of Hood By Air compare their workplace to the Factory. Instead, they referred to the label as a “family company.”)

As evening fell, I spoke with Ian Isiah, Hood By Air’s “global brand ambassador” and an in-house muse. Isiah can pull off the label’s clothes with confidence—or, as Oliver puts it, with “a lot of swag.” Isiah wears the brand exclusively, and between runway shows one of his responsibilities is to attend events where he will be photographed. He also coaches celebrities on how to wear Hood By Air properly. Six feet tall, he shaves slits in his eyebrows and styles his hair in tendril-like dreads.

Isiah went out to the terrace. Disrobing and getting into the hot tub, he said, “Now, this is a fashion interview.”

Isiah had been helping to recruit other models for the Galvanize show. The label, he said, had sought to create a unique tableau: “Black doll-babies. Transgender babies. Little skater boyish-boys. Boys with rashes on their face—less albino, more scabs everywhere. Braces! There’s a braces girl on the board.”

Isiah told me that the more established fashion brands were trying to keep current by copying Hood By Air’s streetcasting (and, sometimes, by poaching models with the promise of more money). But he wasn’t worried about the competition. “All the grannies of the ten-year anniversaries”—he was disparaging Alexander Wang, who was celebrating his label’s decennial—“are trying to latch on to what’s happening now, which you can’t do by getting a random model. You need a culture behind it.”

Oliver appeared, and Isiah urged him to get in the tub.

“What, you want me to do Mariah?” Oliver asked, alluding to Mariah Carey’s passion for swimming fully clothed.

“Yas!” Isiah squealed. “We got a dryer.”

Oliver decided to forgo clothes. A casting associate named Walter Pearce walked onto the terrace. A frenetic twenty-year-old with sixteen thousand Instagram followers, Pearce looked like a member of the cast of “Kids,” but he had come to the Lower East Side by way of Chappaqua, where he graduated from Horace Greeley High School. Like Oliver, he had dropped out of F.I.T.

“I started interning for Shayne when I was fifteen,” Pearce said. “They literally raised me.” A gifted streetcaster, Pearce was responsible for bringing on Hirakish, the New Orleans model. “He’s a legend,” Pearce declared. “And it’s not only because his look is unreal; it’s because he lives the life—he’s a maniac.”

Oliver confirmed that Hirakish was “extremely H.B.A.” He grabbed a towel and took a seat on a nearby bench. “I have conversations with him, and I’m, like, ‘Whoa, his mind is so insane—I want to work with this person.’ ” Hirakish’s mind was so insane that, later that night, he urinated inside the penthouse elevator. The mishap panicked Oliver until he discovered that there were no security cameras to record the violation. Oliver admired Hirakish’s uninhibited spirit, and felt a duty to place people like him under Hood By Air’s wing: “It’s almost, like, not orphanage-y, but I want to see these energies succeed.” (Later, he added, “New energy is very intimidating—it rewrites what has been created. We all get jaded by experiences in life, but I try to create environments for younger kids.”)

Pearce, who is gaunt and pale, got into the hot tub, and Isiah cooed, “Oooh, we got trade in the water.”

Cupo and Akeem Smith, the stylist, joined the group, along with several interns. Weinraub eventually got in, too. Many of the people in the hot tub, if viewed from behind, would be hard to identify in terms of race and gender. Oliver and Weinraub had complained to me that fashion critics often described their work with terms like “unisex” and “gender-fluid,” which evoked shapeless androgynes. Oliver hated “unisex,” because the word was unsexy. Weinraub had a similar problem with “gender-fluid”—in her estimation, it was “not hot.” She had come up with a syntactical solution, though. “You can say it differently, and it could be hot,” she said. “Like, ‘Wait, I smell gender fluid.’ ‘I’d like a little gender for my coffee.’ ”

By now, more than a dozen Hood By Air employees were in the hot tub, and the gathering looked at once absurd and utopian: creative directors splashing and laughing alongside their junior associates. At one point, Weinraub spoke ruefully of how Hood By Air was perceived by outsiders. She said, “People are, like, ‘The super-gender-bending, nonconforming, all-day-all-night party that’s coming at you so windy! Who’s a boy? Who’s a girl?’ Then you’re embarrassed by your own life.” ♦

#hood by air #streetwear blog #fashion blog #urbanwear blog

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margarittet · 7 years ago

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Quick thoughts on 13x08

Disclaimer: It’s 6 am here after a sleepless night, so this is kinda rambly.

No special order.

- DEAN IS AFRAID OF SPIDERS AND IT’S CANON,

- Dean is 200% braver than me, I would NOT have put my hand in that opening (he also totally channels Audrey Hepburn in that scene)

- Dean has very strong thoughts on flowery Doc Martens, and I live for it,

- he also is the last person who should be mocking anyone for liking vintage stuff (when did the nineties become vintage, I feel so OOOOLD!) - Dean, you ass, if you weren’t this cute you would get your butt kicked regularly for being a snobbish hipster with your old car, your cassette tapes, your weird books and a jazz vinyl collection

- Dean is being objectified left and right in this one, by both boys and girls - it’s not cool, dudes and dudettes, please stop!

- Sam is a nerd who knows difference between basilisk fangs and gorgon fangs, and he would love to see your supernatural collection, thanks for asking

- Meredith loves her Harry Potter, doesn’t she? We had horcruxes in 12x05, Harry Potter general shoutout in 12x16, and now we have a couple of things that make us think about the series: the basilisk fang, the series of tasks to get to the price (including a blood sacrifice), also the fact that both Sam and Dean would fill the requirements of “the smart one”, “the one who’s been to hell” a’la Harry and Neville being both the boys who could fullfill the prophecy. Barth chose Dean to go with Alice, and open the safe, and Sam to go and deal with Luther. If he chose them less stereotypically, the outcome could be very different (we don’t know if Sam would’ve let Alice burn the bones i.e.), just as Voldemort chose Neville instead of Harry

- “Don’t get dead”, “You too.”, is Winchester for ILY

- how exacty did Barth get Dean’s number? did he get it from Asmodeus, off Cas’ phone? or is Dean’s number public knowledge in Hell now? did Barth inherit it with Crowley’s job? I NEED ANSWERS

- also, what is it with supernatural creatures coming to the Winchesters for help now? The witch Daniela last week, the demon this week? You know you’re famous when even the bad guys trust you more than their own kind

- you know Dean had a huge crush on Winona Ryder as a teenager, with her goth fashion and her black eyeliner

- the first clue for you, boys, should be that Cas in now talking to Sam about his work instead of making sexy eyes to Dean over the phone - Asmodeus seems to favour Sam anyway, every since 13x02. Right now, he probably knows it’s safer to call Sam than Dean while impersonating Cas, but I hope Dean will soon realize something is off

- I wonder if the fact that the spell was stolen from Cambridge has anything to do with BmoL

- Sam watches action movies to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones in tight costumes, and it’s canon

- Dean is ok with being called dumb, but not with Sammy being called dumb (but still, he is not just a pretty face apparently, thank you very much, somehow everyone is always surprised)

- “after Crowley I told myself: no more demons” - we all’ve been there, Dean, honey, we all have this one type of person we dated where we go “never again!”

- they are not gonna make Dean hook up with fake Wynona, right? Because that would be weird

- she also gives off a complete Charlie vibe which makes it even weirder

- somebody, please tell Dean there is no new “Game of Thrones” until July 2018 - I don’t want to be this person

- so now Dean got to be both a cowboy AND Indiana Jones in the span of three episodes - at this rate he will get to roleplay as a pirate, a spaceman and a Disney princess by the end of the season.

#I will be so sorry for writing instead of sleeping #but oh well #spn 13x08 spoilers

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mastcomm · 5 years ago

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When Dressing for Work is Part of the Job

Barneys New York and Opening Ceremony may be closing, but fashion e-tailers are doing just fine. Last fall, Moda Operandi, the luxury site where customers can order clothes directly off the runways of fashion week, opened a 30,000-square-foot office in Industry City in Brooklyn.

It serves as the company’s creative hub, and scores of Moda Operandi’s 350 employees can be found there arranging shoots, styling clothes and writing code. Here’s what some wore to work on a recent Friday.

Lauren Santo Domingo

Age: “43? I’m guessing.”

Occupation: co-founder and chief brand officer

So you’re the Gwyneth to this Goop?

That’s a nice analogy. Sure.

What’s the skirt?

It’s the Row. Great American tailoring. We launched it on Moda a couple seasons ago. I love their point of view.

What have you matched it with?

My top is also the Row.

Do you get a discount or something?

Yes. My shoes are also the Row.

Your work boots?

They’ve got a practical heel, wouldn’t you say? When I started working at Vogue, we wore stiletto heels every day. Compared to those days this is quite evolved.

Tyler Sparling

Age: 23

Occupation: fashion editor

Nice camo.

These are my favorite vintage RRL camouflage cargoes, given to me by the fashion director here, Josh Peskowitz.

He’s giving you his old clothes?

I get his hand-me-downs. They have a great story: They’re from the first or second RRL collection. He wore them to death and passed them on to me.

That’s kind, I guess.

I’m wearing them with a cashmere sweater from the Row.

The Row? They must pay you very well here.

They do not. But I got to go to the friends-and-family sale and it was 90 percent off.

That must be the hottest ticket in fashion.

It got violent at times. This is actually women’s.

Nissa Booker

Age: 46

Occupation: head of talent

How do you dress for work?

I think about comfort first.

Really? Even at Moda Operandi?

Well, comfort and style are not mutually exclusive. I have on classic Prada pumps, which are surprising very comfortable.

Why does every woman say that their heels are comfortable, when they’re clearly not?

They’re not telling the truth. But there are some heels that are comfortable. It can come down to fit and quality. I’m a sneakers girl. I wore sneakers on my commute today.

Lisa Aiken

Age: 34

Occupation: buying director of women’s wear

A leather coat topped with a sweater. I’m not sure I’ve seen that look before.

It’s a vegan leather blazer by Nanushka. It’s got a lot of attitude.

What about your jeans?

My jeans are Slvrlake. Their fits are exceptional.

What makes a good blouse for you?

I’m quite European in that you can generally see a flash of lingerie. I’ve got the Khaite knitted bra underneath.

Is that what Europeans do?

We generally have a hint of bra.

What do Americans do? A hint of J. Crew sweater?

It’s very different here.

Ganesh Srivats

Age: 43

Occupation: chief executive officer

You’re the C.E.O. and you’re rolling around here in a sweatsuit.

Separates, though. It’s not a onesie.

What if you had a big meeting?

Same deal: investors, board meeting, doesn’t matter.

Does that put people off kilter?

There’s a way to dress down and still dress smart.

Is this your uniform?

It’s pretty much in the hot zone of my look.

Hot zone? Where are your shoes from?

This is a very limited-edition Converse with Schott NYC. I’m a sneakerhead, but who isn’t these days?

Amber Schiffer

Age: “Age is a construct”

Occupation: director of innovation

I like your fuzzy beret.

Vintage Sonia Rykiel, R.I.P. I have over 100 eBay alerts for different vintage things: clothing, décor, all kinds of stuff.

Is that what you do all day here?

No, but when you want to shop vintage you have to be super-prepared.

Your dress looks like something worn by a Victorian girl who was murdered by her nurse.

One hundred percent! Stacey Nishomoto. She’s the creative genius behind this line that’s well known in arty-girl circles called the Corner Store.

What’s on your feet?

The shoes are Chanel. Classic. And the anklets my boyfriend had made for me at New Top in Chinatown.

Fanyi Zhang

Age: 27

Occupation: senior data scientist

You’re dressed very cool for a data scientist.

Well, I work in fashion and tech.

What did you like first: data or fashion?

Don’t tell my boss, but fashion.

Tell me about your jacket.

It’s from Nanushka. It’s vegan leather, it’s so soft. I love the laid-back style. The skirt is vegan leather from Nanushka as well.

What about your turtleneck underneath?

It’s from & Other Stories. The color is warm for winter.

Cortne Bonilla

Age: 26

Occupation: product writer

That’s a very chunky turtleneck.

Turtlenecks are mainly what makes up my wardrobe: gray, cream, white and black.

Why?

I’m always cold, and I love having my neck covered and being able to tuck in my hair. I love the Norwegian, minimalistic way of dressing. They call it hygge.

Do you feel any pressure to dress a certain way here?

Sometimes, maybe like 20 percent pressure. But mostly, we enjoy it.

Those are chunky shoes.

These are the new Pradas. They’re basically my children. They’re a little bit goth, which is kind of what I’m into.

What kind of music do you listen to?

Metal.

Jake Oliver

Age: 35

Occupation: private client adviser

I like your Raf Simons Calvin Klein turtleneck.

I have it in every color possible. I don’t like to wear coats, so I wore just this.

Don’t you get overheated in the office?

I’ll step out from time to time. My colleagues will ask, “Are you ready for a stroll?” And I’ll say “God, yes.”

And you’re wearing a denim tunic by Jacquemus.

It’s a little difficult to get on. I don’t know if you wear a lot of tunics.

I do not. I see you’ve rolled up your pants.

I tell my clients: If you show your wrists and you show your ankles, you look taller.

I can’t tell if your shoes are a tasseled loafer or chunky sneaker.

They’re Margiela. It’s when sportswear meets office wear meets alien wear.

And your two-tone socks?

They’re Jacquemus as well. Overpriced. They were like $45. But as I always say, “If it fits, it ships.”

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#Life style

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jennmapp · 6 years ago

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5 Last Minute Halloween Costumes From Your Own Closet

Trick or Chic

It's one week until Halloween 2018 and after exhausting all of your creative energy crafting a Raven from Fortnite costume for your 6 year old, the last thing you want to think about is your own ensemble.

Sorry! There is no excuse for sitting out the best holiday of the year - especially when I can show you how to craft a costume in five minutes flat.

In true Tiny Closet, Tons of Style® fashion, each of the 5 last minute Halloween 2018 costumes ideas below were created with clothes from my own closet and a few key accessories - many of which you probably own or can order on Amazon right now and get by tomorrow.

Using the same philosophy I teach my clients about creating a forever wardrobe, the trick to nailing these character driven costumes lies in styling and signature accessories. Your actual garments are secondary!

5 Last Minute Halloween 2018 Costumes From Your Own Closet

Last Minute Halloween 2018 Costume Idea #1: Karl Lagerfeld

The head creative director of the fashion house Chanel as well as the Italian house Fendi and his own eponymous fashion label, style icon Karl Lagerfeld is influential, super cooky and controversial (he once said women wearing sweatpants is a sign of defeat - and, TBH, I agree). The the most notable thing about Lagerfeld, and the very reason he makes a great costume, is his definitive and unwavering signature style.

Karl Lagerfeld Last Minute Halloween Costume Essentials

Clothes from your own closet

Black blazer

White collared shirt

Slim black pant

Black boots

Signature Accessories/Styling

Powder white hair pulled into an aristocratic low pony tail

Dark sunglasses

Black necktie

Silver necklace and lapel pin

Fingerless moto riding gloves

Last Minute Halloween 2018 Costume Idea #2: Coco Chanel

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was a French fashion designer, business woman and the founder and namesake of the iconic Chanel brand. Coco Chanel's imprint on style is so deeply embedded in popular culture that we may not even realize it was she who coined the phrase "Little Black Dress." Coco Chanel was also singularly responsible for popularizing the Breton stripe shirt when, inspired by uniform tops worn by sailors in the French navy, she introduced the look in her 1917 nautical collection, forever changing the face of casual womenswear.

Like her successor Karl Lagerfeld, Coco Chanel makes a great costume for fashion lovers and #Chanelophiles because her personal style is definitive, classic and immediately recognizable.

Coco Chanel Last Minute Halloween Costume Essentials

Clothes from your own closet

Black long sleeve slim fit top

Black or white linen wide leg pant

Flat shoes

Signature Accessories/Styling

Pearls, pearls and more pearls

Jaunty hat

Camellia accent

Red lip

Fake cigarette

Pro Tip: Karl Lagerfeld + Coco Chanel makes a great couples costume for fashion lovers. If your man isn't game, try it with your BFF or hairdresser

Last Minute Halloween 2018 Costume Idea #3: Frida Khalo

Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican artist inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. A revolutionary and feminist icon, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Among other accomplishments, Kahlo's self portrait "The Frame" was the first of any Mexican artist to be displayed in the Louvre, but she is most widely recognized for her intentional unibrow and mustache. Frida Kahlo went from a somewhat obscure artist to a pop culture symbol of feminism when she was played by Selma Hayek in the the 2002 biopic Frida. The film, directed by Julie Taymor earned an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for Hayek and went home with several more Academy Awards including one for costume and makeup. Frida Khalo makes a perfect costume for left wing feminists and art lovers of any gender because of her unisex grooming practices and powerful representation of the resistance.

Frida Kahlo Last Minute Halloween Costume Essentials

Clothes from your own closet

Peasant style top (extra points for embroidery detail)

Maxi skirt

Signature Accessories/Styling

Unibrow and mustache

Braided up-do

Flower crown

Drop earring

Brightly colored necklace

Brightly colored shawl

Pro Tip: Carry a vintage picture frame to hold in front of your face to represent her famous self portrait, The Frame

Last Minute Halloween 2018 Costume Idea #4: Lydia Deetz

This "strange and unusual" teenage character from the 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice is an icon for generations of angst riddled goth girls. With her pale gamine face, dark under eye circles and ever darker sense of humor, what's not to love about a young Wynona Ryder? Lydia Deetz is an easy to execute last minute halloween costume idea because she basically wears all black, some lace and an oversized sunhat. Lydia's piece de resistance is her pilfered copy of "The Handbook For The Recently Deceased." For hair and makeup, piece your damp bangs into points using strong hold gel and apply lots of pale face powder.

Lydia Deetz Last Minute Halloween Costume Essentials

Clothes from your own closet

Black top

Maxi skirt

Signature Accessories/Styling

Pointy bangs

Pale makeup and dark under eye circles

Black lace cape

Black lace choker

Oversized black sunhat

Camera around neck

Copy of the "Handbook for the Recently Deceased"

Pro Tip: To create your own copy of "The Handbook for the Recently Deceased," download and print the image above and tape it to the front cover of a book you already own

Last Minute Halloween 2018 Costume Idea #5: Spider Woman

My mashup Spider Woman is a truly last minute Halloween costume idea you can create with seasonal decorations available at any craft store or on Amazon. Search for "Creepy Cloth Decoration" and grab a bag of fake spiders. Use household scissors to cut a hole in fabric large enough to fit your head. Allow fabric to drape over an all black outfit. Stick the some spiders. Make this last minute Halloween costume idea your own with your choice of makeup and accessories. I chose a "Creepy Chic" theme and used a decorate headpiece and funeral style flowers from Michaels. You can style your Spider Woman as goth, macabre or Elivra-ish with appropriate wig, makeup, jewelry and footwear.

Spider Woman Last Minute Halloween Costume Essentials

Clothes from your own closet

Anything black (dress, jeans and top)

Signature Accessories/Styling

"Creepy Cloth Decoration" fabric Halloween decoration

Fake spiders

Fake funeral style flowers

Creepy chic headpiece

You Look Boo-tiful!

Did you try any of my last minute Halloween costume ideas? Join the Tiny Closet Survival Guide Facebook group and share your look. Stick around after October 31 for daily style challenges, live outfit videos and plenty of capsule wardrobe chatter.

Be the bright and Happy Halloween!

xoxo Jenn

#Halloween #cosplay #costumes #karl lagerfeld #coco chanel #Frieda Kahlo #Frieda Khalo #Lydia Deetz #Beetlejuice #shop your closet

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allmymisters · 7 years ago

Text

Mr. Etch-A-Sketch

When you date an artistic person, you have to accept all their sensitive sides. Some tend to be self important, moody, and flippant, but also easily intriguing and passionate. This is the tale of Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, an artist in training that began one eventful evening and ended on a tearfully rainy day.

Mister was unexpected. The ones you fall hard for always are. I was 22 and at my second attempt of my college career. VCU at that time was an art driven school and was mostly made up of outcasts and those seeking the sought after, “Liberal Arts Degree” After failing at my future Fashion degree, I didn't know what I was going to be when I grew up. At that time I really didn’t care about anything real worldly either. All I cared about was falling in love, going to shows, and finding freedom. Wasn’t that what college was for...again?

I had just gotten out of a fauxship and Mister was just another boy I had seen at another party who I found to be interesting. This night was no different than any other Friday night in the Fan District and this night would consist of drinking with friends at one of the three main party houses. I would do the usual, take way too long to figure out what I was gonna wear, because black is very hard to differentiate sometimes. I would meet up with my lady entourage, drink a beer, listen to some music, tell each other who we hoped to run into and then we would venture to a gathering to be held at one of the main party houses. We had three. These houses would form a bit of a triangle starting with the legendary Red Zero with at least 10 occupants. A place of remarkable memories and a den of Star Wars geeks. Right down the road was 411. I had no idea how many people actually lived here, but the guys were older and intellectual making them great purveyors of philosophical babble. Then there was 1208, which consisted of a slightly younger population, but had the best house shows and where all the cool indie kids hung out. Come to think about it, I never really knew who actually lived in that house at that time. We were invited by the boys of 411 for a kegger this particular night and it would be my first time attending. We all agreed to meet at Lana's apartment that night. There we would wait for three more lady friends. When I arrived, Lana asked if we would mind if her roommates joined us. I met the first one whose lanky body barely covered a half painted canvas in his bedroom. He was sweet and had really great sneakers. He listened to Tortoise as he painted his canvas with muted colors of orange and yellow. Lana's apartment was nicer than most apartments my friend's occupied. Funny enough, I stayed in the apartment downstairs one weekend a few years back. Some college students came with mom and dad's money and their apartments showed.

The front door opened suddenly with a bike tire leading and another roommate to follow. I immediately recognized him from a house show a few months back, except he had magenta hair at the time. Nope, no Lana, I didn't mind if these dudes accompanied us at all. Not one bit. Hopefully, that thought wasn't completely displayed in some goofy form of a smile as I replied to her earlier question.

Mr. Etch was of average of height – 5’11” maybe. Shorter compared to my particular criteria. He came equipped with sketchbook and pen, a Sharpie, and a distinct voice which orated a higher pitch and slightly feminine. He dressed like most boys of the time, cords and vintage tee with a cardigan ala Mr. Cobain. His hair was right below the ears, black and loose, a soul patch adorned his chin and two rings hung from his earlobes. The cuteness factor was up high with this one, but he also had a twitchy nature about him, like he was ready for some excitement. He wasn’t like the artistic types I was accustomed to growing up with. There was no mope to him. No brood or obscurity to him. He was indeed a flirt which complimented my own quiet brooding nature.

We fell in love during a game of telephone. What was supposed to be “The monkey is in the kitchen with a banana in his ear, “ turned out to be “I’d really like to hang out with you sometime." Well played sir. Well played indeed. I fumbled this game by having to guess what was originally whispered. So, I turned to my friend and whispered in her ear, “I’m getting up to get a beer because I have no idea what was said.” Got up. Walked towards the keg and poured myself another beer. Game won.

He was quirky. He was expressive and fun. The night of the party I went home with him and the others and ended up staying for a few days. We talked about music, art, tv shows, movies and we smoked a lot of pot doing it. It was the kind of infatuation which happens in an instant, where you lose yourself completely. It's full of passion and throwaway sentiment. You forget what time it is or what day it is. Cell phones were non-existent so there were no distractions. For the next few weeks, I went down an Escher staircase with him. Everyone approved of our dating status, except his guy friends I think. I took too much time away from them. I would attend his band gigs and his art shows. We would meet for coffee in the middle of the day between classes, while I was still going. He was absolutely adorable with me and I with him. You can gag now. The first week we were together he asked me to join him for a fashion party of sorts. How ironic it was in the last apartment I resided, the green porch light still present. We were asked to come in some sort of costume. Mister decided on a bright orange basketball jersey with an ascot-like tie atop a black short sleeved button down and plain black pants. It was quite comical and while he decided on a more humorous ensemble. I, opted for my basic color scheme of black and white. I tended not to step out of my element at that time. Little did I realize that the red lit warmth of the apartment amidst a sea of balloons would be the location of my first dose of Ecstasy. Fantasia played on loop on the TV. “You can just take half, it will be ok,” he coaxed me. All I kept thinking was, “Can I die from this?” He had this smile about him. It was a smile that belonged to Loki. His brown eyes sparkled and his gaze made me feel as though I was the only other person in the room. The next thing I know, that tiny bit of a pill was in my mouth. My world was about to get a lot bigger.

Our relationship was pretty serious, I thought. As serious as a 22 year old can be about such things. We had met each other’s families. I had practically moved in with him. We were the couple that stayed in the bedroom for days only to utilize the bathroom and eat shells and cheese occasionally. We listened to Philip Glass, Sonic Youth, and the Boredoms constantly. We made sure to watch the X-Files diligently and we would go on about the mysteries of the universe and pick apart the genius of David Lynch. He was entranced with all that was noise and his artwork reflected that kind of frenetic chaos. He would sketch these layered shapes with bears, faces, and random objects all embedded in this labyrinth of colored lines. It was truly meditative.

I'm a pretty adaptable person. I tend to transform to who I date. He was no exception. I went from the moroseness of being a goth girl to transforming into an Electric Kool-Aid kid. My blacks became oranges and reds and blues and my curiosity about drugs became more loose. My first raves were with him. He introduced me to a whole new world of dance and movement. Oh, how he loved to dance. His dancing was just another way to get his art out there. He would get lost on the flashing lots and strobes and then he'd find me. I don't know if it was the Molly or if we really did have this cosmic connection with each other, but it felt fantastic.

Although my introduction to the world of recreational drugs was with him, I found it only to be a short phase in my life that seemed like an ongoing adventure with his. Soon, getting high became uninspiring to me. I had done all the drugs that weren't hazardous to your immediate health --- LSD, Marijuana, Mushrooms, Molly, and Opium. I had a good time when it was an event-like circumstance. Going to art shows and parties were more interesting for sure, but there were times when it was depressing. Being on Shrooms in the woods at night when you have an intense feeling your boyfriend is over you, is not a fun-filled evening.

He lost himself in his work constantly, sometimes sketching and creating for hours ---painting, filming, photographing, writing songs. I noticed he began to distance himself from me. Our outings became less and his drug use became more predominate in the relationship. He would have conversations I didn’t get and philosophize about numbers and patterns constantly. He would snap at me in frustration and leave the house to get away from me. He started finding excuses to go to his studio or extend his band practice time and I felt as though my pining was becoming a plastic bag around his head. He then decided to go on a trip out West and when he returned all infatuation was deflated.

It's true, I was what I had feared being the most...The Clingy Girlfriend! We sat in his car as it rained. I had remembered the day we had gone out to a movie and returned home as it poured. That was a good day. We danced and laughed in it like we were kids. Now, I just stared at the rain from inside the car as I tried to ignore the fate of our relationship.

He said I was too much for him, that he didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore. I could feel the burning in my chest, working it’s way up my esophagus and the lump sat in my throat. I cried, the way I always did, with begging and pleading that I could make it work. His apathy hit me hard and I knew that was it. He dropped me off at my friend's apartment and drove away. I wiped the tears and knocked on the door for what would become the consoling party --- Lot's of alcohol, pizza, and why me's.

In the next few weeks, he would call me and ask if I wanted to come over. We would ultimately have sex and then he'd gently nudge me out the door. I wasn’t emotionally secure at that time in my life, so every time I did that I had a spark of hope. I didn’t have the capacity to be apathetic in that realm. I would see him at random parties with random girls, including very good friends of mine. That stung a bit. He still had that cute mischievous smile. He would soon find a new girlfriend. He would soon move away and it would ease my pain for a while, but we would not speak for some time after this. I would tell myself I wasn’t good enough and that’s why he left. I would tell myself I wasn’t ambitious enough with my school or that I wasn’t pretty enough. I had all kinds of excuses and was really a pathetic mess for a while. Years later, he would come back to Richmond and I would see him crossing the street after a show. He looked up and waved with that smile. I knew we wouldn’t be far from each other again, but I had moved on and was in a new phase of my life. I will never forget the day I randomly saw him at the bar we used to frequent. We were catching up on each other's lives and he kept looking down at my hands. He gazed at my chipped red fingernails and said, “Mmmm….chipped red fingernail polish, I remember that.” With a wicked smile he would say it and for just one moment I thought, “Ha, I’m still with him.”

It took about eight months, give or take a few weeks of back and forth, for this relationship to run its course. In that time, I managed to be as clingy as the static from the dryer sheets on my socks, but I also learned that I'm worth more than I had given myself credit for. I didn't need to impress him because he was occupied with stepping out of his head. He didn't live in my world and I didn't want to be in his. He had taught me a lot about art and I used to love watching him draw. I still have all the pieces he gave to me and I look at them fondly. It reminds me of the brief moment I had with him and all his floaty thoughts he put to canvas.

He married a few years ago. I went to the wedding and saw all the friends I had during that time in my life. We danced like we used to and hugged each other while sharing memories of fun times together. We are all grown up now and in different parts of our lives and at that moment, as we laughed, I recalled all of us sitting on the floor in his room that very first night I met him. The night I began my kaleidoscope adventure with him. I glanced over at him and he was already looking at me and I smiled. He returned it with a wink and that was my cue to depart. I said my goodbyes, understanding that I would not be seeing these ladies again for quite some time, got up and slowly walked out the door, like some fucking John Hughes movie. I realized I was no longer his muse and he was no longer part of my landscape.

#etch-a-sketch #artist #all my misters

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