Happy Friday!
New York Fashion Week wrapped yesterday, and I recently spoke with one of my favorite documentarians of the extravaganza: the photographer Landon Nordeman. His forthcoming book, Out of Fashion, is filled with flash-lit images of the weird, wonderful in-between moments that take place off the runway, when most of us are looking at our phones.
“That one is called Pink Push-Up,” Landon told me of one of my favorite photos from his book. He took it after the Marc Jacobs show in New York, at September Fashion Week in 2014. The designer had turned the Park Avenue Armory into a pink suburban dystopia: pink house, pink carpet, pink gravel runway. Jacobs’ show is the grand finale to New York Fashion Week, and this one, with a soundtrack guests listened to on noise-cancelling headphones, was particularly immersive.
“All of it was good,” said Landon. “But this was the best moment.”
As people cleared out after the show, one guest dropped onto the floor, out of nowhere, and started doing push-ups. Naturally, Landon started taking pictures. When the moment had passed, the woman told him she was a fitness specialist and felt so excited and inspired by the show, she just had to do push-ups. It was her way of expressing gratitude and appreciation for what she had just seen—sort of like a child, jumping up and down.
Pink Push-Up is my new favorite concept. It makes me want to do pink push-ups.
The Os Gemeos exhibit I recommended last week inspired a similar reaction in reader Ray Colletti, who shared this photo of himself in the gallery: “When you go to an art gallery that harkens to the b-boy era, ya gotta bust a move.”
This store might be a bit small for that. After the Eckhaus Latta show in Chinatown, I found my way to CW Pencil Enterprise, a jewel box of a pencil shop I’ve meant to visit for months. There I found a fat, soft-leaded Caran D’Ache highlighter pencil—yes, that’s right a highlighter pencil—that I subsequently thought about for four days straight. I’ve since returned to buy pink and yellow versions. They’re excellent for highlighting handwritten notes and printouts without smearing the ink (but don’t work so well on glossy magazine pages).
If you get one—or if you’re just a pencil person—I also suggest the weighty Möbius and Ruppert sharpener.
A new kind of Instagirl. In the Instagram age, a sure way for designers to get their fashion shows lots of attention has been to put an “Instagirl“—a model like Kendall Jenner, with millions of social media followers—on the runway.
Slowly but surely, fashion labels are starting to show more imagination, and this season’s fashion Instagram universe looks a little less uniform.
Chromat’s Becca McCharen-Tran put her tech-y athletic and swim-wear on models who were curvaceous, transgender, and muscular. Tome designer Ryan Lobo aimed for “every race on one runway,” and the result was a beautifully varied cast. Even J.Crew put its collection on staffers, friends, and family in a wide range of ages, skintones, and sizes.
Instagram is amplifying the effect with its #Runwayforall hashtag and program, that highlights the stories—and Instagram handles—of models such as Jillian Mercado, Mama Cāx, and Shaun Ross. I’m following.
Speaking of amplification. This week, an anonymous White House female staffer told the Washington Post about a trick women in the Obama administration have used to make their voices heard in meetings. As Cassie Werber summarized: “When a woman made a good point, another woman would repeat it, and give credit to the originator. This made the idea harder to ignore, or to steal. The women called the technique ‘amplification.'” I have been repeating this idea all week, and wish I could give credit to its anonymous originator at the White House. Instead I’ll just say: Thanks!
We learned some other new words this week:
Presenteeism: This is when you go to work even though you’re sick. Hillary did it, and then spoke yesterday in North Carolina about the value of taking a few days off when you need it—and the importance of making that a right, not a privilege.
Interpener: This is a sommelier for weed, skilled in the art of interpreting its terpenes, which give different strains their unique aromas. If you complete level 2 of the course, you get a lapel pin!
Scrumdiddlyumptious: You probably already knew this one, but the Oxford English Dictionary has officially added six of Roald Dahl’s words, including this splendiferous one, to its volume.
May your weekend be scrumdiddlyumptious—filled with pink push-ups, amplified ideas, and rest if you need it!
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High Maintenance is now on HBO with six new episodes. No show in recent years has made me want to do pink push-ups quite like this one, which follows a New York City weed dealer into the homes and lives of his clients. The creators, husband-and-wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, started this as a web series, and if you haven’t seen the first season, I’d suggest starting there. (HBO has those up too.) I laughed out loud last night re-watching “Matilda,” starring Sinclair and Blichfeld’s real-life niece, and “Rachel,” with Downtown Abbey‘s Dan Stevens as a stay-at-home dad who wears his wife’s Rachel Comey dresses. This one has poodles on it.