Happy Friday!
You’ve probably seen her on your Instagram feed: a woman awash in natural light, wearing a cocoon-shaped dress in a shade of golden turmeric or faded paprika. She wears flat leather sandals, has unkempt-but-pretty hair, and is likely in the company of a handmade ceramic, a succulent, or a piece of avocado toast. She is LA’s Silver Lake shaman, and she’s coming soon to a city near you.
The Silver Lake shaman is the heir apparent to the Brooklyn lumberjack—a lifestyle concept popularized by the young dwellers of New York City’s hippest borough. As Brooklyn became an international brand, selvage denim, artisanal whiskey, and Edison bulbs have proliferated in the “Brooklyns” of Paris, Chicago, and Tokyo. Although the reign of the Brooklyn lumberjack has felt eternal, it seems now that his final winter has waned (he flourishes in cooler months), and the springtime of a new aesthetic is upon us. Close your eyes and breathe in the Palo Santo.
In recent years, the cultural lens has shifted to Los Angeles, and to a very a specific idea of it at that. This is not the LA of spray-tanning, silicone, and Malibu mansions, any more than the Brooklyn lumberjack was related to the power suits of Wall Street in their Manhattan skyscrapers. No, the shaman’s natural habitat is more desert canyon than beach. It lays to the east of Hollywood, in the hills of Silver Lake, Los Feliz, and Echo Park, where this weekend hoards will descend from their sun-dappled bungalows to visit the Echo Park Craft Fair—the epicenter of this easygoing wave, which is on the verge of becoming a global tsunami.
A craft fair?? Yes, a craft fair—but one with the cultural clout and merch to attract the savviest fashion people sticking around LA after yesterday’s Dior show (pictured at the top and bottom of today’s letter, lest you doubt this look is going global). The annual Echo Park Craft Fair was established in 2009 by Beatrice Valenzuela and Rachel Craven—whose flat, padded sandals and convex caftans, respectively, are important pieces of the Silver Lake shaman’s wardrobe.
The event now boasts a roster of artists and vendors that reads like a source list for this highly desirable, super chill lifestyle: wide-brimmed straw hats from Clyde; floral-printed Fleetwood Mac-style frocks by Dôen; mushroom protein and Sex Dust (yes, Sex Dust) from Moon Juice; coconut sugar-sweetened almond butter from Solstice Canyon; so many ceramics, and probably some sage bundles for smudging. All the aforementioned vendors also sell online, so you can browse their collections for a little piece of LA living—or just follow them on Instagram, and live vicariously.
Another offering at the Echo Park Craft Fair: High-end emergency ”survival” kits by Preppi, stuffed with luxe supplies such as Malin + Goetz toiletries, Tcho chocolates, and Field Notes stationery, as well as practical essentials: space blankets, boxed water, and tents.
For Quartz this week, Matthew Sedacca wrote about “liberal preppers,” the growing US movement of left-leaning survivalists who stockpile provisions and swap tips in Facebook groups. Matthew spoke with Art Markman, a professor of psychology who researches decision-making, who told him that prepping for an emergency gives people a way to deal with the stress many are feeling in today’s extreme political circumstances: “The threat (whether real or not) of apocalyptic war or economic collapse,” he said, leaves people feeling helpless and fearful, so “learning some homesteading techniques might actually help to remove their stressors.”
I can’t make it to the fair because I’m in New York. Instead, I will pay tribute to the Silver Lake shaman’s spirit mother and style icon at the Brooklyn Museum Exhibit, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern.”
Before you spit out your Moon Juice, consider that O’Keeffe curated her lifestyle—and managed its documentation—in a manner not unlike today’s Instagram stars (complete with photographer husband). “Georgia O’Keeffe has never allowed her life be one thing, and her painting another,” said her longtime friend Frances O’Brien in 1927. This exhibit illustrates that by displaying O’Keeffe’s clothing—pin-tucked white blouses, androgynous wool suits, wrap dresses, and Ferragamo flats—alongside her paintings.
If you can’t get to the Brooklyn Museum, there’s also the book version of Living Modern, as well as Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe, a new cookbook inspired by the artists’ recipes and recounted tales of meals with her. Calvin Tompkins wrote in the New Yorker about one dinner at O’Keeffe’s New Mexico home, Ghost Ranch, in which an erratic oven took off one of the artist’s eyebrows. Oven incident aside, Tompkins’ memories of O’Keeffe’s minimalist aesthetic and appreciation of her surroundings paint a picture of the ultimate Silver Lake shaman, who greeted him at the door dressed entirely in white.
“In the evening, with the sun at your back, that high sage-covered plain looks like an ocean,” O’Keeffe told the writer. “There is nothing in this house that I can get along without.”
This Sunday is Mother’s Day in the US. Do something nice for yours—or for someone else’s, or yourself—and have a great weekend!
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The grand final in the Eurovision Song Contest—the campy, pan-European singing competition where geopolitics play out on a stage fitted with wind machines, neon lights, and synthesizers—will take place in Kiev, Ukraine this Saturday! Eurovision, originally conceived to unify Cold War Europe, started in 1956—pre-dating the European Union by decades. The drama this year (or rather, one piece of it) started months before the competition, when Ukraine banned Russian competitor Julia Samoilova, due to an alleged “illegal visit to sing in Crimea” in 2015. You can watch 26 countries’ pop anthems on Saturday beginning at 9pm CEST (2pm EST) on the BBC in Europe or streaming on Logo’s website, YouTube page, and the channel’s app in the US.