On getting a marketing email from Ten Thousand Villages: I thought: I’ve bought some things I really loved from Ten Thousand Villages, and the little dopamine-hungry part of my brain then wanted to repeat that experience: it was good once, surely it will be good a second time and a third time! Herein lies the trap. I love things, I love aesthetics, I love style: but I don’t want to be sold to anymore. I don’t want to just consume. I want to actually use things.
- What does it even mean to use a thing? I started wearing the clothes I like best, in my house. I work from home: I wear them sitting in my mess of an office; I wear them lying on my yoga mat doing stretches and trying to recover from work nonsense. I wear those clothes I like while cooking dinner and getting cooking smells in them. I learn so much about a piece of clothing by doing this. Mostly I am paying attention to how the garment feels and only minimally to how it looks. I mean, I probably bought it based on how it looked. Wearing it at home, by myself, over and over, tells me whether my appreciation is more than skin deep.
- This is also a good way to decide to get rid of something. Sometimes when you see it on the hanger in your closet, you like it; but once it’s on your body you understand why it gives you a vaguely bad feeling.
- I unsubscribed from Ten Thousand Villages.
I got a haircut this past week and it was just… a disaster. I rely on my haircut looking good most of the time and it does. not. look. good. I feel unsettled. I have an appointment to get it colored and I think I’m going to hit pause on that. Sometimes I examine that urge for aesthetic newness and think: Am I redirecting my creative energy into creating myself, rather than creating some piece of poetry or prose or just random art? And I think this is something women certainly like to do and are also encouraged to do. Sublimation of creativity into forms that serve the outer rather than forms that serve the inner. And I’m saying: you need both; but often they get very unbalanced.
- I produced a couple of new drafts of poems this week and somehow, didn’t give myself any credit for this at all. Why not? Was it easier to feel aesthetic success in a haircut than in a piece of imperfect writing?
I was thinking about how the style-adjacent YouTube creators I most and least enjoy are the ones with Big Main Character Energy. I subscribe, I watch them, I get fed up, I unsubscribe. Now, I like a strongly held opinion. I respect some opinions even when I don’t agree because it tells me a story about that person. But there’s a fine line between navel-gazing that’s – strangely – helpful and relatable vs navel-gazing for navel-gazing’s sake. This type of creator gets big enough and suddenly, their comments sections are just filled to the brim with a level of parasocial worship that sets my hair on fire. Is this their fault? It really isn’t. But I can get lost in other people easily and I prefer to be my own main character.
- See also: The abysmal way Chappell Roan is being treated. I can’t cope with participating in that discourse and now I just read it and won’t engage with it. Social media gives you this portrait-formatted video of a person and your dumb brain starts to tell you “this is my pal.” And that’s not your pal; that is a person you don’t know and it’s weird to feel like you know them. I’m starting to think that – for me at least – it’s weird to even have such a strong opinion about them. I dream of excising all the para- from my social.
- I don’t know what differentiates between a Main Character Energy and The Rest of Us; I have thought for years that it has to do with ego, and my own inability to develop the kind of ego I need to have to be a successful artist.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Trends I Do Not Like. Herewith:
- Just WHY. Wearing a sweater as a scarf (or as a belt); putting a sweater over your shoulders or around your waist with no actual need or intention to ever actually wear the sweater on that day. We have a piece of clothing that does this… it is The Scarf.
- In honor of the apparently out-of-style scarf, I sorted through my scarves this week. I really considered the colors and patterns I keep collecting and realized I still enjoy most of them. I put four in the donate pile and moved the rest to a folded situation rather than a hanging situation. I’m not saying this will get me to wear them! But I will get to enjoy seeing the colors and patterns. And I would not be any more likely to sling a random sweater around my neck.
- I wish Quiet Luxury would shut up. I think “quiet luxury” has taken over every style discourse to some degree and it always just reads as preppy to me and thus I have no patience for it. I think it’s great if your style actually is on the preppier side and those clothes make you feel like yourself, but I also just have a hard time believing every single person only wants to wear plain white t-shirts from Cos or Uniqlo or whatever the current zeitgeisty shop is. It could be that I watch too much of a certain kind of fashion video and read a certain kind of Substack style dispatch and so I have accidentally surrounded myself with these things.
Despite hating a style uniform that mimics everyone’s obsession with The Row/Toteme/Khaite (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), I have lately gravitated back to: jeans, and a black top. Dark blue denim and a black shirt have just never let me down. I don’t feel it’s the most out-there, weird, or creative outfit, but I always feel good in it. Is this my version of a “style uniform”? Oh god. I’m just as bad as everyone else.
