Happy Friday!
When someone recently asked me to compare my current lifestyle in LA to New York, where I spent the prior 13 years, I realized it could pretty much be boiled down to a single, daily experience. When I lived in New York, my favorite moment of the day arrived when I crossed the threshold of my apartment, dropped the bags I had schlepped home on the subway, and took off my clothes. The joy was most concentrated in the moment I un-hooked my bra. Home! My whole body would sigh in relief. I would dig out a sweatshirt, grab some pants with an elastic waist, and think about what to eat for dinner.
Since leaving New York, I rarely experience that moment. It’s not like I’m swanning around LA bra-less in a caftan (though there is a bit of that) but there’s no doubt dressing here is easier. In New York, the second we leave our homes we are out—exposed to thousands of people, in the elements, without the protective bubble of a car.
That gives our clothes a different weight, Emily Spivack asserts in the introduction to her new book, Worn in New York: 68 Sartorial Memoirs of the City. The oral history of the city that follows gives her theory credence, voice, and color.
“What piece of clothing reminds you of a significant moment or experience in New York City?” she asked quintessential New Yorkers. She got highly readable answers from the famous (Fab 5 Freddy on the straw hat that crowned his look in the 1990s) and the unknown (former Metropolitan Museum guard Ariel Churnin, on tearing off the clip-on tie that made her invisible).
Their stories range from the quotidian to the remarkable. Taken together, they form a human tapestry of one of the world’s greatest cities. And they remind us that no matter where we live, we all have our own stories—some of them folded up in our bureaus and hanging in our wardrobes.
The same sorts of everyday garments described in Spivack’s book are now on display in Items: Is Fashion Modern?, the first fashion exhibit New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has held in 70 years, which opened this week.
Curator Paola Antonelli selected 111 items she felt had significant impact over the last century. The list sounds like what one might pack into a time capsule or spacecraft to represent modern humans through clothes: door-knocker earrings, Converse high-tops, keffiyehs, little black dresses, Breton shirts, dashikis, hoodies, saris, and—let’s be honest—yoga pants. (Plus a fanny pack for good measure.)
Unlike the Met’s flashy designer exhibits, MoMA’s sounds less likely to dazzle than to provoke thought and self-recognition, using clothes to reveal who we are, and the way we really live.
While MoMA asked whether fashion is modern, several journalists covering the Spring 2018 shows—which unfolded over the last month in New York, London, Milan, and Paris—pondered whether it was relevant at all, against a backdrop of unending, unfathomably terrible news. No one captured this dissonance quite like The New York Times’ Matthew Schneier, who quoted a heckler outside a show at London Fashion Week:
“’There’s nothing to see in there but overpriced jumpers,’ he announced. ‘Overpriced jumpers this way, everyone. If you want to see some overpriced jumpers on undersized women, you’re in the right place. Why you’d want to do that is beyond me.’”
Schneier and his cohorts ultimately did find some relevance in the spring collections. The clothes that cut through the noise married calm confidence with high-end craft, and, sometimes, even a dash of humor. And they seemed almost always to be anchored with flats. From Marc Jacobs’ bedazzled Birkenstock-style sandals to the curlicue-toed sneakers at Loewe, the season’s strongest looks seemed to say: we’re trying to stay grounded, and still have a bit of fun.
Ignore the FDA: love is a real ingredient. The US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Nashoba Brook Bakery in Massachusetts, admonishing the bakers for listing “love” as one of the ingredients in its granola and bread, claiming it to be an “intervening material.” Whoever wrote this ruling has clearly never been in a house perfumed with fresh-baked granola, or received a jar of the homemade stuff.
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Nekisia Davis’ olive oil and maple granola, from Food52. Mix 3 cups old-fashioned oats, 1 cup hulled raw pumpkin seeds, 1 cup hulled raw sunflower seeds, 1 cup unsweetened coconut chips, 1 1/4 cups raw pecans, 3/4 cup pure maple syrup, 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar, and 1 tsp salt in a large mixing bowl. Bake at 300°F, stirring every 10-15 minutes, until the granola is toasted, about 45 minutes. This is just a jumping-off point for substituting your favorite nuts and seeds—even adding orange zest and warm spices—before baking, and stirring in dried fruit (cherries! currants!) afterwards. Don’t forget the love.
In a world gone mad… I’ve been listening to Tom Petty all week, and enjoyed Randy Lewis’ final, bittersweet interview with him in the LA Times, conducted at Petty’s home in Malibu just a few days before he died. The LA Times shared Lewis’ audio recording from their meeting. You can hear Petty talk about how the persona that he and his band projected—however wacky it may sometimes have been—was all them.
“You can see young bands, and they go to a photo shoot and a stylist comes and brings their clothes and dresses them,” says Petty. “We would have laughed ourselves silly at someone even mentioning that…we’d have never done that! You are what you are.”
As for the music, he says in the interview, “It’s either good or it’s not … That’s usually the best review, is the applause.” Somewhere, he’s getting a standing ovation.
Have a great weekend!
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中秋节 Speaking of Full Moon Fever, many in China, much of Asia, and Chinatowns around the world will celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, marked by the full autumn moon, this weekend. The celebration dates back more than 3,000 years to the Northern Song Dynasty, and is widely celebrated with strings of paper lanterns, family reunions, and mooncakes—dense sweet and savory pastries filled with red bean and lotus seed pastes, and sometimes dotted with a small, golden-yellow salted duck egg at the center. If your city has a Chinatown, there’s likely to be a party. (LA’s is on Saturday night.) At the very least, the bakeries will have mooncakes. Share one with a friend under the stars, or a tag a pal in Quartzy’s new Instagram account to send them a #virtualmooncake.