SELECTED WRITING

Originally published in Magasin

Re: Fashion News

With every Pavlovian wince at the sight of red type—another piece in the second delivery of the second Phoebe Philo edit must’ve sold out—comes flushes of self-righteous, even perverse, appreciation for the left-behind.

Shorts are hard to upsell, given their dearth of actual material and reputation for insidious thigh-framing, but Phoebe’s tailored pair marry the tap silhouette du jour with an edging-on-twee A-line slant that gives everything breathing room without sacrificing Philo’s crisply mature sensibilities, while the butt-bisection of strategic paneling imbues a resolutely maxi skirt with the suggestion of literal cheekiness that has defined the decade’s hype-iest minis, though this skirt handily evades the horny police, berry-colored wool puddling a bit at the toes.

Since becoming a household moniker this past year (if your household is the basement of the SSENSE warehouse), Edward Cuming’s SS24 has proven that its name isn’t the only pervert Rorschach test the brand offers.

Each piece is subtly obscene: an orange knee-length skirt gives new meaning to “knife pleats,” bleeding neon green as if slashed by a switchblade, while a jersey dress’ off-duty neckline leaves the door to a new generation of the nip slip wide open behind it.

There is this near-ineffable measure of adulthood that has nothing to do with age, “maturity,” lived experience, or anything with a basis in rationality.

It’s why there are 20- and 30-somethings who feel on some secret level like they’ll never be as adult as Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries, though they may have decades on her forever-18-year-old iteration. Call it sophistication, call it presence, whatever this quality may be, Maximilian Davis' debut collection for Ferragamo has it in spades. From the magma-hued Wanda mini bag, its molten shades restrained by its straightforward structure, to the Drape bodysuit that shows no decolletage but somehow renders a strip of skin in the middle of the back even sexier, the collection is imbued with a definitively adult sensuality—rarefied in this era of trickle-up aesthetics, where tweens tend to set the pace. The collection is exclusively available until November 30th.


Re: Sales

Eckhaus Latta’s AW22 collection is now on sale and ripe for the picking.

If you're craving something with cilantro, a sprig is printed on one of the brand’s famed lapped baby tees. For something heartier, try these wide-legged corduroy trousers stitched with all-over floral detailing. Dessert could be chocolate brown sandals that puff like a pastry around your ankles or a decadent shearling jacket.

Issey Miyake’s seasonal sale is catnip.

A dress like a greatest hits album features Miyake’s astute color play, signature abstract rendering of a silhouette, and of course, plenty of pleats. Another is segmented into pods, alternately clinging to and blooming from the body like an exoskeleton waiting to be shed. Swelling with hand-pleated ripples, Miyake’s take on a blazer is another show-stopper. With discounts up to 40%, now might be the time to feed the Issey-shaped void in your wardrobe.

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Creative copy + three poems for gush

gush is a revelation and its ripple effect, starting with the perfect thong and cascading into your life in whatever shapes it takes on next. For people who feel their hearts in their whole bodies, perennially unbuttoned, this underwear is an ode to the limb-melting indulgence of making (an outfit you) love. gush thongs are flattering, not flattening, like liquid thoughts we share in the dark. Crafted in sustainable techno-fabric in New York City, each pair is obsessed with your body, the sweetest transgression in honor of something sacred. They sit high on the hips without pinching, and are never afraid to be seen.

1.
There’s something so quiet
About the slow drip
Of a faucet in the next room
And your life
In the moon in love
In your sleep your thighs
Get to know each other

2.
The night slipped
Inside itself
When you tried
To follow her

3.
Your skin decided
To show itself
The moon cracked
The sky glass
As everything fell
To its knees

Originally published in i-D

Move over Catholicism, Jewish drip is the new saviour of alt-fashion

Generations of Jewish tweens aspiring toward alt aesthetics have grown up sneaking onto their computers on Saturday mornings — shirking the Shabbat electronics ban — to log into their Tumblr accounts or Instagram feeds, where they’ve been confronted with a difficult reality: not only does the Christian hegemony define most of mainstream, global culture, it’s claimed the exit routes as well.

From the 2010s rosary-heavy The Virgin Suicides cosplay to the proliferation of Praying’s “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” bikinis, the past few years of irony-dappled, pseudo-traditionalist, Christian aesthetics have been a central tenet of alternative fashion. The “Heavenly Bodies”-themed Met Gala in 2018 solidified this association in the collective consciousness. More recently, the cultural seance that was the so-called ‘Indie Sleaze revival’ opened up a channel for the resurrection of Tumblr-era Catholic core amongst a new crop of edgy adolescents.

In the background, however, another force has been building to a fever pitch that now underlies every facet of the sartorial scene, despite remaining largely unacknowledged: Jewish aesthetics. Specifically, the visual facets of Ashkenazi Judaism have traced the paths of its people from Eastern Europe to the rest of the world by way of New York City. More nuanced and far deeper-reaching than cutesy bagel iconography, though, the Jewish influence in fashion is fascinating in its manifestations.

The momentum of Jewish style sprouts from a similar phenomenon as that of Catholic core — as Biz Sherbert noted in i-D in 2021, fashion has had a “come to Jesus” moment, so to speak, largely divesting from the appropriation of overtly racial aesthetics in response to wider conversations around racial inequality. In 2023, many white fashion lovers have the awareness to critically analyse the origins of the latest waves of “coolness”, recognising that a trend’s cultural capital was generated in a context that precludes them from joining in wholeheartedly. Some trends, of course, have no racially charged ties, but they also lack the special feature that drives the appropriative impulse in the first place — a visual connection to community, the transcendental, the sacred.

The thing that sets Jewish aesthetics apart from their Christian counterparts is a lack of iconography that is foundational to the latter religion. Most interpretations of the Torah forbid the creation of visual representations of divinity, so there isn’t a Jewish equivalent to the immediately-identifiable Virgin Mary, clad in blue and stained with waxen tears, or, more obviously, the crucifix. This means that Jewish style is defined mostly by its materials, silhouettes and an ethos of high-low cultural duality.

As any kid saddled with reading a disappointingly unsexy portion of the Torah for their B’nai Mitzvah can tell you, a huge percentage of the text is devoted to the granular detailing of materials, from those used to build the Ark of the Covenant to those accepted as sacrifices to God. While other middle schoolers get to opine on chapters that cover incestuous scandals, weird sex stuff, or, at least, some good old-fashioned patricide, these tweens must parse literal laundry lists — an infamously boring passage of Deuteronomy prohibits wearing blends of wool and linen (incidentally, it’s in the same chapter that declares “crossdressing” sinful. A flop).   

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Originally published in passerby

re: YouTube rabbit holes
If you or your video-watching copilot have never seen Francis Bacon’s paintings, imagine a human body turned inside out, the spine of a cow dripping with its rent flesh, images that not even Cronenberg could conjure up, all hewn in oil and canvas with gorgeously fantastical stylism. This video takes a tour through his canon alongside the artist himself, sharing his thoughts: “What horror could I make to compete with what goes on in the world every single day?” Bacon insists his paintings aren’t creations of nightmares but rather affirmations of the inescapably disturbing facets of our society, physicalizing and objectifying the sensation of violence in order to reckon with its intrinsic presence in life.

If this line of artistic thinking piques your interest, travel further down the catacombs with this short video on Paul Thek, a tragically under-appreciated artist eulogized by the likes of Susan Sontag after his death from AIDS, whose most compelling works were waxen sculptures of humanlike cuts of mystery meat. Thek’s relationship to bloody, visceral imagery was not intended to shock, but to detach and re-contextualize: “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers” was Thek’s reaction when he visited the Capuchin catacombs, which are decorated with decaying corpses. He picked up what he’d thought was a piece of paper — it was a human thigh. Thek said “We accept our thing-ness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.” If the rabbit hole you want to go down is existential in character, these artists’ works and thoughts can truly be catalysts of joyful acceptance.

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