What Does Dressing Up Mean Today?

I understand that we’re all dressing more casually these days, especially so since the pandemic. But there is something special about going to a play or a nice restaurant, and increasingly I’m seeing folks at such places dressed in what they’d wear to the supermarket or to do chores around the house — which kind of makes me sad. Are we losing something? — Janet, New York City

***

Dressing up can be one of the great joys of life. It is a shared human ritual, a mode of self-expression and a sign of respect. It helps mark time and set moments apart. It is an external expression of inner psychological and emotional states. It is a message to those around you.

That’s not me speculating or playing up the importance of clothes because I’m a fashion critic. It’s an actual thing, known as enclothed cognition — and that’s what you’re sensing has been lost.

A term coined in 2012 in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky, enclothed cognition refers to “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.” Essentially, the paper posited that the physical experience of wearing clothes, when combined with their symbolic meaning, affects how we think about ourselves and about other people.

That hypothesis was proved through an experiment involving white lab coats. When people, like doctors, wore them, they tended to pay more attention to what they were doing. The act of wearing the coat changed their behavior.

That is why fairy tales almost always invoke the literal magic of getting dressed. Why people used to dress for the theater, for dinner, for travel, for job interviews, for church, for cocktails, for parties. Why, when I am working at home, I put on my shoes to tell myself it’s time to focus.

But as you say, while we still dress for the big rituals of life, it seems increasingly that more everyday events are considered … well, not worth the trouble.

Somewhere between Silicon Valley’s declaration of independence from the suit and the rise of athleisure, dressing up became conflated with dressing expensively, uncomfortably and (even worse) according to outdated social conventions. Doing so was seen as something you were supposed to do, rather than something you might choose to do, and rejecting those conventions was seen as progress.

What is actually happening, though, is that we are scrambling our signals.

That doesn’t mean we should rush back to the safety of old-fashioned dress codes. At this point, those have definitively gone the way of the dodo. But it does mean we have to reconsider what getting “dressed up” really means, and that has less to do with any mass social definition than with a simple state of mind. Or so I found when I started asking around.

“To me, dressing up is about intention,” the designer Joseph Altuzarra said. “It has to do with the act of getting dressed with purpose and thoughtfulness, with a conscious decision to step into a particular version of yourself.”

Ikram Goldman, the owner of the Chicago retail emporium Ikram, had much the same response. Dressing up, she said, is about “looking polished” — though that term is largely in the brain, and eye, of the individual.

Goldman’s definition of polish: “Never wear jeans; no flip-flops; hair, nails and makeup done.” For Altuzarra, you can dress up in “perfectly fitting jeans and a crisp white T-shirt” as long as there is emphasis on the “perfectly fitting” and the “crisp.”

For his part, Law Roach, the “Project Runway” executive producer and Zendaya’s image architect, said he feels dressed up when he’s wearing “jeans held up with an Hermès scarf for a belt” or one of the “vintage Armani suits from the ’80s I get from a little store in Brooklyn.” [ed. image architect. that is a new one.]

The point, he said, “is putting something on that makes you feel special.” Something that implies a certain amount of care and consideration. Something that signals to your brain, as Adam and Galinsky might say, that what is about to happen is worth anticipating — and triggers the dopamine hit that comes when you realize, as Roach said, that “having somewhere to go is more of a luxury than ever before.”

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images

Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing. [ed. me too!]

I think he's probably the best science fiction short story writer alive, and possibly the best short story writer, period. [ed. well...]

I've read every one of his stories at least twice, and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate more like seven times. I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

This review covers what he does extremely well, especially unique elements that other science fiction writers have not done as well, or at all.

He Writes “True” Science Fiction

Science fiction critics often divide the genre into:

• "hard" science fiction: aka engineering fiction, stories built on scientifically accurate extrapolations of real physics and technology (think Arthur C. Clarke)

• "soft" science fiction: aka science fantasy, which uses scientific trappings as window dressing for character-driven or sociological stories (think Star Wars).

Ted Chiang has written stories plausibly categorized as either, but more excitingly, many of his stories are neither. He often writes what I think of as true science fiction, where the principles of science themselves are meaningfully different from our world, but still internally consistent.

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

In Seventy-Two Letters, technology springs from Jewish Kabbalah. Golems and divine names drive industrial progress in a steampunk world.

Excitingly, he does this not just with natural sciences but social sciences as well. In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present.

This comes up in his other stories as well:

• In Division By Zero, mathematics itself is broken from within.

• In Hell Is the Absence of God, divine intervention is empirically observable and follows consistent rules

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expect hard science fiction; Chiang is doing something different. Chiang creates different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

Technology is Often Good

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

Now it’s hip and trendy to think of every new technology as the Torment Nexus. Most science fiction today feels like Black Mirror, which ran 7 seasons with exactly one happy ending.

Chiang bucks this trend. Joyce Carol Oates:

It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that [...] ask[s] anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.

In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. Chiang resists those cliches. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, memory augmentation technology allows the narrator to understand his own self-deceptions, and work towards becoming a better person and reconciling with loved ones and even himself. In Liking What You See: A Documentary, a technology that gives users acquired face-blindness allows the main characters to meditate on the nature of human beauty and the shallowness inherent in privileging the beautiful.

Even in situations where the story is overall tragic, like when the characters are faced with existential crisis (in the individual sense), or existential catastrophe (in the world-ending sense), technology isn't the villain but the vehicle for understanding unbearable truths (whether about the world or about ourselves).

Chiang consistently shows us the potential of technology to help us become more human, and have a deeper appreciation for the world and our place in it.

The Lived Experience of Compatibilism

“Compatibilism is a philosophical stance that reconciles free will with determinism. It argues that free will, understood as the ability to act according to one's desires, is compatible with the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by prior events. Essentially, compatibilists believe that even if our choices are predetermined, we can still be considered free and morally responsible if those choices are a result of our own internal states, like desires and intentions.” 

Does that make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me. In practice, compatibilism says something like “free will in the normal, pretheoretic sense of the term, doesn’t exist. Your choices still meaningfully matter nonetheless. You can’t meaningfully get out of the bind philosophically. What you can do, however, is make peace with it.” [...]

In Story of Your Life [SPOILERS], the narrator learns an atemporal alien language and begins experiencing past and future as equally real. It takes her some time to make peace with it, but eventually she fully accepts the truth of determinism. She understands that life is full of tragedy, including that her daughter will die young, but life is full of beauty too. With both regret and awe, she sets forth on the path that she was destined to take.

This is compatibilism from the inside. In both stories, the characters discover they cannot change what will happen, but this knowledge transforms how they experience what must happen: with forgiveness, acceptance, and even joy.

As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse. In Lifecycle of Software Objects, the “we are the parents of our mind-children” metaphor for building sentient AI systems becomes quite literal.

by Linch, The Linchpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Ted Chiang is truly one of the best science fiction writers out there today, and a great essayist too  (I'm also a Neal Stephenson fan). Check out this MetaFilter site: The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang, which includes most of his stories in full (but please buy his books; you'll look smart and discerning to your friends!). A couple favorites that left a lasting impression on me: Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Understand.]

Bad Lunch

April 1999, one o’clock in the afternoon. I was cooking on the 150-foot motor yacht The Rental Cow when Megan, our chief stewardess, swooped into the galley to tell me our guests were displeased with their lunch.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. A petite, blond Australian who often made bawdy jokes, she didn’t wear her usual smile. Instead she looked slightly frightened, which told me this was no ordinary complaint. Our two guests were paying $30,000 a day to sit on the top decks and take in the Mediterranean views. Like every set of guests on board that yacht, this couple needed the food to be perfectly suited to their tastes, which caused me hours of nail-biting anxiety as I sent up plate after plate, taking note of what they devoured or ignored.

It was the midpoint of their sixteen-day trip. Ten of their friends had departed that morning, and we expected ten more to arrive in a few hours.

“Should I go up?” I asked.

Megan nodded, and I threw off my apron and scaled the stairs two at a time. We were tied to a dock in Saint-Tropez, a coastal city in the south of France known for its beaches and fancy nightclubs frequented by celebrities.

Our guests, Mr. and Mrs. J., were seated on the upper aft deck, murmuring to one another over untouched plates of sweet potato gnocchi. Mrs. J. was statuesque, with pale skin and red-orange hair that fell like a cape over her shoulders. She looked like a hippie version of Nicole Kidman. Mr. J. was a silver-haired music-industry executive who exuded wealthy chic with his funky sunglasses and pastel, high-water slacks.

Mrs. J. smiled at me: a cold curl of the lips. Then she launched in, explaining she was disappointed—not just in her lunch but in me.

“We’re paying a lot of money to rent this yacht,” she said, enunciating like royalty with a Los Angeles accent. “We’ve had a terrific go of it until now, don’t you think? All week long your food has been exquisite. This should have been the easiest lunch, not the most disgusting. Why didn’t you just come talk to us?”

By now I had my hands behind my back, my body bent toward her in a gesture of contrition. Thankfully she kept talking, so I didn’t have to speak. At one point Mr. J. held his hand out flat in the air as though pushing Mrs. J.’s argument down—a gesture she appeared familiar with, as she cinched her lips.

“Let’s do a reset,” Mr. J. said. “How about you clear these plates? My wife mentioned she’d be happy with a simple green salad: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots—”

“GREEN ONION,” she interjected.

Mr. J. ignored her. “I’ll have a plate of prosciutto and some of your homemade baguette. And a small dish of your mustard dressing. Do you think you can handle that?”

It was not a question. He’d spoken breezily, but there was enough of an edge in his voice to serve as a warning. Despite all the special handling I’d provided that week—ninety hours of catering to their every culinary need—I was not forgiven. 

Once upon a time, in another life, I had sat on a green shag carpet as close as possible to the television to watch The Love Boat, a show about crew members on a cruise ship with a revolving roster of celebrity guest stars. I especially loved the unflappably cheerful cruise director, Julie McCoy. Another show I watched religiously growing up was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, hosted by nasal-voiced Brit Robin Leach, who escorted viewers through the properties of the extravagantly wealthy.

At the time, my family lived in rural Washington State, in a double-wide trailer on a crabgrass lot. We’d never been flush with money, but after my parents’ divorce, my mother would agonize each month about where to spend her meager funds: on gas and electric bills or groceries? She hunched over her checkbook, lips puckered with worry. We lived in a perpetual state of panic over having zero dollars. The fear had a metallic scent that lingered in my nose long after I climbed into bed. For a while we had food stamps in the drawer, but my mother was too ashamed to use them. That she could choose not to indicates a certain degree of financial stability, but a child doesn’t distinguish between being cash poor and being unable to pay the rent. And even with grandparents volunteering to purchase school clothes, I marinated like a pickle in that atmosphere of scarcity, walking a thin line between my hunger to consume and my management of that hunger, always thinking of the costs.

My mother didn’t like to cook, so I learned my way around the kitchen. As a kid who did not have enough healthy food to eat, I literally dreamed of shopping trips like the ones I took to buy food for the yacht, filling multiple carts with expensive items and paying for it all with my employers’ gold credit card.

I’d become a ship’s cook almost by accident. On a break from college in my early twenties, I was traveling in France and took a job as a deckhand on a 128-year-old Spanish brigantine that made trips back and forth across the English Channel. I endured a lot of teasing from the mostly British sailors—working-class Brits really know how to twist the knife—but my tears gave way to laughter as I developed a thick skin to go with my sea legs.

The food on board was standard English fare: hunks of roasted meat and potatoes served with reconstituted gravy granules. I thought constantly about improvements I could make. Though I had no formal training, I had little doubt I could produce nourishing and delicious meals—part bravado and part the result of a lifelong curiosity about food that had compelled me to experiment with recipes growing up. I volunteered to help in the galley, peeling potatoes or scrubbing pans. Before dinner one night I asked the cook if she would mind if I deglazed the roasting pans with sherry to bring flavor to the gravy. “Knock yourself out,” she said. I added salt to the stockpot of boiling potatoes. When the captain noticed a small improvement in the food, the cook said, “Don’t look at me, it’s her,” and the captain suggested I report for galley duty. The cook much preferred working on the decks anyway. Before long I was providing meals for a dozen or more people a day.

I became romantically entangled with a sailor aboard that ship, and we soon left to try to find work as a team: He would captain commercial sailing yachts, and I would be his cook and sidekick. The romance ultimately fizzled, but it served as a springboard into a previously unimaginable career. As the ships grew fancier and the guests more demanding, cooking interesting and creative meals day after day required an engagement akin to a spiritual practice. The repetitive motion of knife through vegetables soothed me. I wrote lists of ingredients for wine-braised chicken legs or chocolate crinkle cookies. When we moored in a harbor, I would talk my way into commercial kitchens, explaining I was a self-taught cook who worked aboard a yacht, and could I ask the chef about his favorite dishes? They always allowed me in for a few hours.

About four years into my maritime career, I took six months off to attend a French-themed culinary school, hoping the expected salary increase would be enough to recoup the money I’d spent on tuition. Everyone in the marine industry said that charter yachts rented by the super-wealthy were where the crews made the biggest money.

I’d been aboard The Rental Cow for three months by the time Mr. and Mrs. J. arrived. It wasn’t the most beautiful in the fleet of charters available on the Mediterranean that summer. Though at first glance she looked like the other boats, with her high bow and sleek lines, a second look revealed cracks in the paint and chips in the varnish. Our economy-minded boss outfitted the decks with Pottery Barn furnishings, while the more state-of-the-art yachts we moored beside displayed Balinese wicker. Some of the biggest vessels had Ming dynasty rugs and helicopter pads and charged upwards of $500,000 a week. Our main draw was our relative affordability. Depending on which week of summer it was, we charged between $25,000 and $35,000 a day. The rental contract recommended guests leave a minimum 8 percent gratuity for the crew. Some left far more, and the crew celebrated wildly. Others stiffed us.

Our captain, Brian, was a mild-mannered, mostly ineffectual leader. Lance, our first mate, picked up the slack with his endless enthusiasm and charm. He understood the importance of the food to our guests’ experience and checked in with me frequently to see if I needed anything. Lance’s wife, a therapist, served a dual role as both deckhand and empathetic listener for other crew members. The other deckhand was an Italian with prior experience as a restaurateur, and after finishing his other duties, he donned dress whites and served meals or even stepped into the galley to help with my endless prep.

I’d come to think of being a chef on a yacht as a kind of psycho-spiritual quest, like Homer’s Odyssey, only instead of tumultuous seas and six-headed monsters, our challenges were wealthy clients who arrived by private jet with Louis Vuitton purses on their arms. True to form, I strove to please them all. People with money intimidated me, so when guests were arrogant or snobby, I pictured them as patients in a hospital and myself as the doctor assigned to their care. This imaginative leap inoculated me against the class differences and boosted my confidence that I could diagnose their needs. [...]

One afternoon Lena, our second stewardess, spied Mrs. J. at the back of the main saloon, making small dots on the window with a tube of lipstick. Lena went around the yacht studying the mirrors and windows and finding similar marks. Apparently Mrs. J. was testing the proficiency of the housekeeping staff as well.

“She’s smart,” Lena said, in her French accent. “Some of the marks are hard to find.” To make one, she said, Mrs. J. must have climbed up on the counter in the master cabin.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I replied.

“They’re all the same,” Lena said, placing her hands on her small hips. “Trying to get their money’s worth.”

by Mishele Maron, The Sun |  Read more:
Image: © Dominique Philippe Bonnet

Kimono Chaos

Traditionally speaking, there are many rules to follow in the wearing of kimono. To learn them, one needs to be taught, either over time by their elders, or at kimono school, such as the one I went to for several years. Rules implies rigidity, but it’s not like there are fashion police out there. More simply, it’s a form of etiquette. Even in the modern era, when kimono culture is on the wane, knowing which kimono styles and patterns are most appropriate for a given situation is still seen as a social grace.

But there is one place in Japan where all the rules go out the window. Ironically, it’s also where you can see more people in kimono than almost anywhere else in public. It is Asakusa. I know this from personal experience, for dressing up in a kimono and going to this most traditional of Tokyo neighborhoods is one of my favorite pastimes.

Asakusa, and more specifically the Senso-ji temple area, is brimming with inbaundo, “inbounds,” as the government calls tourists here. And I have seen some really wild kimono styles there. This doesn’t bother me – far from it. While I prefer to follow traditional etiquette, it’s a free country, as Americans say. In fact I am starting to believe that inbound tourists are creating a totally new form of kimono culture without even realizing it. [...]

As I said, we have many customs when it comes to kimono. One of the most important is matching the season. Kimono have beautiful patterns, most of which have symbolic meanings. Some are obvious, like snow patterns for winter, or sakura cherries for spring. Others are pegged to more specific times: hina-doll patterns are worn in the days leading up to Girls Day on March 3. Rose patterns are only worn when roses bloom, which is May.

It is also customary to match the formality of the occasion. Events like weddings, funerals, or the annual coming-of-age day for the latest crop of twenty year olds all expect very specific types of kimono, traditionally speaking. And when you think about it this makes sense. You aren’t going to wear something bright and chipper to a funeral. Nor would you want something dour for a celebration.

There are further divisions within these events. It probably won’t surprise you to hear a bride wears a very specific form of kimono. What about guests? Well, are you a family member or an invitee? If you’re a close relative, you’re traditionally going to want to wear what is known as a kuro-tomesode. If you’re attending as a friend, a plain pattern is the safest choice. And how old are you? Should you be in your twenties, a colorful furisode would be a wonderful choice. Furisode feature long sleeves and bold, bright patterns, which really pop out and attract attention. They’re considered the privilege of young women. But if you are married – even as a twentysomething – they’re out. Then you’re (traditionally) obligated to wear a more formal kimono with short sleeves.

One of the most fundamental things that can throw outsiders for a loop is that, in the traditional kimono worldview, you aren’t wearing the kimono for yourself. Kimono are fashion, but we wear them to show respect for someone or something. This means you’d never wear anything that might shift the center of attention away from the occasion. Weddings? No-brainer. But it’s true for all events, really.

For instance, if you were attending a graduation ceremony, even as a parent, you wouldn’t want to overshadow those getting the spotlight by wearing something super flashy or opulent. And the center of attention isn’t necessarily a person. In spring, it is customary to avoid wearing kimono with cherry blossom patterns to hamami flower-viewing parties. Why? Because the center of attention for cherry blossom parties are the cherry blossoms themselves! Now, it isn’t like anyone is going to yell at you if you happen to wear a sakura pattern to a hanami. But to those in the know, you might seem like, well, a bumpkin.

So those are just a few examples. There are many others. As I often say, Japan is really flexible when it comes to spirituality, but it’s really rigid when it comes to society. You can roll with this or not. I chose to – that’s why I took kimono classes!

Which brings us back to Asakusa. I usually go alone, strolling the shopping arcades, paying my respects at the temples, and maybe stopping at a cafe to write and sip some coffee. These are considered casual occasions, kimono-wise. So I always pick a casual one: tsumugi, for example, which is considered the all-purpose wear of the kimono world, kind of like how the West sees jeans. I tend to go for more colorful patterns, and because Asakusa is such a culturally historic place, I often choose antique kimono for a retro feel. I like to go for a Taisho-era or early Showa vibe. Asakusa’s that kind of place.

It was in fact at a cafe that I started to notice more tourists in kimono. I opened the door and saw the room completely packed with Asian women, all dressed in ultramodern kimono. Really ultramodern, like something out of a Harajuku boutique, with laces and ruffles, the fabric beaded with faux pearls. This really shocked me. Were kimono making a comeback? It wasn’t until I was finally seated that I realized: everyone was speaking Chinese. Aha. These were tourists.

by Hiroko Yoda, Japan Happiness | Read more:
Images: uncredited

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul; Fifty People Control the Culture

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll never buy a book that looks like this, no matter what the reviews say. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with it, let alone display it on my bookshelf. See also: Fifty People Control the Culture (HB).]

How “Cozy Lit” Became the Latest Form of Digital Escapism

Think cats. Tea. Rain. The seaside. More cats.

After reading that Selena Gomez looked ethereal in a custom Ralph Lauren wedding dress, that the Vitamix 5200 is a legend for a reason, and that scientists made a yogurt using ants, I feel sufficiently bad about myself because of how much time I have spent staring at inconsequential words and meaningless images on my little screen that I transition to the big screen that is my laptop. There, I read that the heart of United States president Donald Trump’s wealth is a rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire, and my friend is selling two tickets to Yung Lean. I grow weary. I pick up my phone again.

This summary of a recent Sunday afternoon is a diary of addiction. I’m not alone in feeling like I am tethered to a glowing appendage that contains the secrets to the world. The average Canadian spends about seventy days per year on their smartphone in aggregate.

I am not always like this; I love books in basically the same way that I have since I was a child under the covers, where I certainly spent more than seventy days reading a stockpile of young adult novels. But it is so easy to slip out of the habit of reading before bed after a few nights of phone time instead.

In recent years, a literary genre emerged and exploded in popularity, seemingly in direct response to our slovenly leisure culture that fetishizes appearing literary just as it slashes resources and opportunities to bolster the literary arts. Enter cozy lit, an import from Japan and Korea that prioritizes feeling over meaning, setting over structure, and texture over depth. The stories are gentle and warm, temporarily eliminating the friction of contemporary life. I’m not convinced they’re antidotes to the internet so much as replication of its hypnotic passivity. They are more akin to digital content than we know.

Cozy lit has its tropes. There should be cats. There should be books in the book. Tea. Rain. The seaside. More cats. There are actually so many cats. Reading this, you might be picturing a woman alone, swaddled in fleece blankets, her own cat on her lap. Indeed, cozy lit is feminized. And more than that, its absorption by Western publishing is the new frontier of chick lit.

The foreign markets for Japanese and Korean literature are booming writ large. They’re shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and hitting the New York Times bestseller list. The Eastern approach to literature—often prioritizing worldbuilding over action enfolding—comes from a different storytelling tradition than our own. But the cozy approach is something specific, and it’s been co-opted as a way to say nothing.

As someone fighting to wrest my attention back from algorithmic overstimulation, I dove into cozies this fall to test the restorative powers BookTok assured me I would unlock. The typical format is a linked story collection; people and places reappear but the (understated) drama changes up. The place is often a business of some kind—a cafe or a convenience store, which, in Japan, means something more sacred than a shitty Circle K—and the people are its customers. At Tenderness, a store anthropomorphized by Sonoko Machida’s The Convenience Store by the Sea, published in English this July, the automatic doors play a “gentle music-box melody,” and the night-shift clerk “can’t tell you how happy and grateful” it makes her that locals choose to patronize this location.

There’s The Blanket Cats, about a feline rental service, but often, the cats function simply as bait, gracing a cover in an attempt to ape the aesthetic package of a pre-eminent cozy book: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. First published in Japan in 2015, it came to North American readers in fall 2020, right around when many of us had accepted a fate of perpetual hermitdom during the pandemic. Now a series that has sold a reported 8 million copies worldwide, Before the Coffee Gets Cold also fits the paradigm of the adjacent sub-genre: healing fiction. Customers of Funiculi Funicula sit at a particular table and travel back in time to repair relationships and reverse their life’s regrets—as long as they return before, you guessed it, the steam has left their cup. These, too, are braided short stories anchored by a commercial site or a labourer—here it’s the enigmatic barista Kazu—a proxy therapist for our ambient melancholy.

One more: Menu of Happiness by Hisashi Kashiwai, published in October by an imprint of Penguin Random House, is the third in a popular series in which a quirky foodie family is tasked with hunting down and exactly replicating the dishes that haunt their customers. When they taste the omelette over fried rice, or the kake soba topped with fish marinated in sake lees, they are transported, often to a childhood memory. They finish and pay and gratefully pet the restaurant cat Drowsy on their way out.

I know this all seems innocent, but reading Menu of Happiness is basically like consuming pornography. (“Food porn,” the millennial influencer would call it.) A sensory encounter meant to make us salivate. Much of the book is dialogue, and Chef Nagare describes his creations at extreme length:

The fish on the left of the large Tachikui dish is soy-simmered nodoguro. Next to that is duck grilled with rock salt—a cross of wild and domestic breeds. And then Seko crabmeat served in its shell, with a bonito-infused tosazu vinegar dressing. Below those you have the deep-fried tilefish, with a yuzu and chili pepper paste. I fried the scales separately, for extra crunch. Next to that, in the small Imari bowl, is a selection of steamed winter vegetables: Kintoki carrot, Shogoin and Sugukina turnips, and red negi onion. Nice with a dab of mustard—a bit like when you have them in oden stew.

This is vibes-based prose, meant to wash over you—a gentle titillation or linguistic ASMR, not because the prose is magnificent but rather it’s lulling, the literary equivalent of watching someone slice butter on TikTok. Episodic, formulaic, reliably satisfying.

by Greta Rainbow, Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Julieta Caballero

The High-Romantic Nightmare That Wasn’t

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story. It has next to nothing in common with the spirit of Shelley’s High-Romantic nightmare, and far more to do with del Toro’s own interests, especially his perennially unilluminating and often ponderous dedication to the tone of fable and fairy tale.

It’s no accident that the only great Frankenstein films — James Whale’s two immortal Universal classics, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — didn’t even worry about the scaffolding. They are of course the bases for the Frankenstein of modern popular culture, films which jettisoned all but a few garbled scenarios from the book and erected the rest from a pure Hollywood riff on a century of other vague Gothic imagery and literature. Two of the funniest movies ever made — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) — are themselves riffs on the Universal films, and only those films. And while there have been a few attempts to stage the proper Shelley version, nearly all of them, such as Kenneth Branagh’s awful and characteristically self-important 1994 film, have seen fit to mangle whole sections of Shelley’s work, and invent others from whole cloth.

So now we get the long-awaited version from the man who would seem the most obvious choice to make it — and yet, once again, here is a Frankenstein that finds nothing worth saving from the original besides that basic scenario. In the first, authoritative 1818 version of the text, Victor Frankenstein was a man from a happy family, betrothed to his cousin Elizabeth, who finds himself reading the works of alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus while getting caught up in the fervor of late 18th-century Enlightenment science. This precise setting and period are key to the original story’s brilliance: Shelley evokes an almost beatific time in her own recent history where faith in medical, technological, and social progress was just beginning to achieve its modern velocity — a time in which the center of scientific study was shifting from physics to chemistry and biology.

English Romanticism was the great inheritor of this new concern for biological science, and thrived on metaphors of botany and organicism, just as it fed itself on the new psychology of the German philosophers. Frankenstein gets its power from this — and from its mordant, haunting sense of the old fairy tales furiously spinning into new, wretched life at the birth of the industrial world. In a way, to read Frankenstein is to read what the Romantics thought of the Enlightenment — and their thought was, in brief, that the new scientists had better read Paradise Lost. In fact, one could sum up the ambiguity of the original Shelley novel simply by saying that, in her Frankenstein, it is the Monster himself who reads and understands Milton, not his creator.

Del Toro, as expected, avoids almost all of Shelley’s original material. His primal obsession has always been the feeling of fairy tale itself, united with the trappings and settings of old Hollywood horror films. Even the subtler, Promethean horrors of the original are absent. Instead, he grafts all the whizbang technologic set-dressing of the old Universal films onto an even more overtly-Romantic, maximalist vision of the Shelley story; updating its setting to the mid-19th century — presumably to get in a few dull stereotypes of Victorian squalor and a tinge of punk Darwinism in the reanimation presentation to the Edinburgh Dons, who revoke Frankenstein’s qualifications in horror.

Victor Frankenstein himself (Oscar Isaac, in an uncharacteristically hammy and misjudged performance) becomes, to all effects, like a grown-up Lord Bullingdon from Barry Lyndon: he’s a sour brooder with a tyrannical father (Charles Dance, in a Charles-Dance-type role) and a doomed pregnant mother (Mia Goth, who also pulls Oedipal double-duty as Elizabeth). The nature of Frankenstein’s work is changed from accidental discovery to lifelong attempt at making up for the loss of his dead mother. Cousin Elizabeth is no longer the saintly pen pal and future wife, but a foil and an object of envy destined to marry Frankenstein’s brother (and, in a peculiar turn, a sort of angel for the Monster). She’s also the niece of the man who wants to bankroll Frankenstein’s experiment (Christoph Waltz). The private, tortured space of Frankenstein’s chambers in the book is transplanted to a huge, vertiginous castle on the edge of a sea — if we had any doubts before about just what height of Gothicism del Toro is going for.

The point of all this, of course, is not only to amp up the opera, but to give del Toro a chance to dream up a thousand gnarly details for the making of the Monster. Shelley herself barely spared a moment to describe the actual process of making the creature. But for del Toro, that’s the whole point. He delights in playing yet another turgid, whimsical Alexandre Desplat waltz while he lingers over Frankenstein’s vivisections, and makes sure to show us all the minute aspects of the building of the electrical apparatus, as well as the construction of the attic and underbelly of the tower. This sequence of the film is entertaining, even if his incessantly roaming, unfixed camera quickly grows exhausting. When it comes to the camera, del Toro is no great director: his Frankenstein has moments of beauty, but even the most arresting images are frequently undercut by the film’s waxy, shadowless look and by awkward framing that makes every other shot feel as if it’s coming from the corner of a too-wide room. (...)

In the end, there’s one main reason to see Del Toro’s Frankenstein and that is Jacob Elordi, who here proves himself to be what was mostly hidden underneath the pure exploitation schlock of Saltburn or Euphoria, and could be briefly glimpsed in his Elvis from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla: that is, a great physical actor trapped in the body of a beautiful man. Has any contemporary heartthrob so totally embraced such a complete privation of his trademark physique? There’s no room for vanity within the Monster. Elordi surely saw his chance to free himself of the burden of his looks — and yet what he chooses to do is pretty magnificent. His elegantly awkward, Butoh-inspired performance is the real glory of a film that would be a rather hollow experience otherwise. After its overheated Freudian first half, the film finally comes alive when it leaves behind Frankenstein the man and follows the Monster — a section which comes closest to following the finest section of Shelley’s story. The middle of the film, wherein the Monster leaves to hide and watch the family of an old blind man, is also the finest part of the film. And, thank god, this time the movie Monster actually does read Paradise Lost.

As the film goes on, and the Monster returns to wreak havoc, del Toro’s Frankenstein almost comes close to the heights of a tragic fairy tale. Though the contrivances del Toro takes to get himself there are ridiculous, the pietà of Elizabeth’s death in the Monster’s arms is lovely (so sincere that there were snickers in my theater when I saw it), as is the Monster’s return to the ruins of the tower to discover the site of his creation. Even at the ending, when the Monster and Frankenstein have met out on the ice and come together in the cabins of the Scandinavian ship — the resolution of this particular father-son/God-Adam story is moving. Still, del Toro doesn’t quite earn the weight of the climax he worked so ponderously toward. It rests entirely on Jacob Elordi’s broad shoulders, and he does his best. Yet where Shelley’s Monster chooses to burn his creator and end his own life — del Toro, big earnest softy that he is, can’t help but let his Monster stare off into the sunset, ponder his apparent immortality, and conquer his desire to die.

by Sam Jennings, Metropolitan Review |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein about a year or so ago, and it's true, much of the power and nuance (and tenderness) of that book is lost in this film. That said, it's still the best adaptation that I've seen to date. Did you know that her monster developed a deep literary and philosophical intelligence (from reading so many books in isolation), and that his main objective in pursuing and tormenting his creator was simply to have him create a female companion to share his life (which the doctor initially promised to do, then refused after having second thoughts)? Great book that really should be read to get a full appreciation of all its many themes (including technological hubris). See also: Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Literary Theory and Criticism):]

***

The work and its monster-hero became such a popular subject for film and stage, in serious, comedic, and parodic productions, that many acquaint themselves with Victor Frankenstein’s monster long before encountering it in Shelley’s book. Many first-time readers discover with a shock that the monster remains unnamed, with his creator bearing the Frankenstein moniker. A second, stronger shock may occur when readers realize that the monster, in great contrast to the bumbling, murderous, wild-eyed, grunting, crazy-stitched object of film, proves the most rational and also the most eloquent of any of the novel’s characters. (...)

The monster was not “born” hating others; his hate was taught him by people who refused to see beyond his external appearance to the brilliant warm nature existing just below its surface. While science might be expected to lack compassion, the same could not be said of religion, which should have prepared the public to be more accepting. That the monster possesses a quick intellect and a natural warmth and goodness that is corrupted only by his exposure to humans remains an indictment of shallow social values and a rigid class structure.

My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.

Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.

When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.

I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.

Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”

Before the night could get too sentimental, Spinal Tap—who claimed that Dad had been the first person in the music business to ask them, Do you have to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Big Bottom.” I’m told I fell asleep sometime before the Byrds reunited.

After the concert, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “responsible for a night of music history,” even though his name “might not mean much, if anything at all, to music fans.” But my father has been there since the 1960s—doing his work so that some of America’s greatest artists can do theirs. (...)

In one of my favorite photographs of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and about a dozen guitars hang on the wall behind him, and the counter and cabinets overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he is now the king of cool. And then there is his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He looks at whoever is on the other side of the counter as though they are the center of his world.

“People would come in and it was boom, that floodgate of stories would open,” Christopher Guest told me. Maybe Dad would launch into the one where he found himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and women he took for “ladies of the night,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, along with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s road crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer called the next day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove home afterward, he couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get to his house, a few neighborhoods over. Then he saw the sign: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would follow customers to their car, just to finish a story.

My father was a competent musician, though never thought about doing it professionally. He learned some songs, including Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he could show customers different aspects of a guitar’s tone. “He always really liked to show me that he could play it, which I felt very honored by, you know?” Browne said. “And that goes right along with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I have to show you something. Check this out.’ And he would show you what invariably would be a phenomenal guitar.”

Check this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)

Guest does an imitation of my father rummaging around in his shop for the item he needs you to see. Wait, what’s this thing? he’ll say, as he unearths some treasure. My dad has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was just over here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Maybe it’s under [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I think it’s just [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, here! The joy for my father is in watching other people check this out. This is why when he looks at me with pure excitement and asks me to try the soup he has made from three different types of Progresso, I accept the spoon from him.(...)

Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”

When Joe Walsh brought in his Gibson J-200 to sell, Dad called up Emmylou Harris right away. “You need to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that warm country sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s just like, pwah! ” Harris told me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I sort of became the unofficial Gibson Girl.”

Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.

Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”

None of this could happen now. Today’s musicians don’t need Fred Walecki to call them up about a J-200 or broker a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like professional athletes, they have sponsorship deals and can get their equipment for free. But Dad “made it his business to know the latest on every single improvement of every keyboard, every amp, and every guitar,” Raitt said. “It’s not something I take for granted. We were all incredibly lucky to have someone on our side that had so much integrity.”

Dad never forgot having to chase down the man he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; once the store was his, he kept prices reasonable—if anything, he charged too little. Warren Zevon once saw an antique harmonium in Westwood Music and asked Dad how much he wanted for it. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “Or nothing! Take your pick!” Zevon used to call them “Freddie’s Zen Prices.”

My father became an angel investor of sorts. When the future Eagle Don Felder first came to L.A., he needed to learn mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father told him to take it “if you have a chance for a job,” and wished him luck. He got the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour before they had the money to buy all the necessary equipment. Dad gave them a charge account. (...)

This was an analog world, a world in which serendipity was still possible. “Sometimes you’d go in and you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these different people that were hanging out there, and suddenly it would turn into half a day, and you’d go in the back room and you could just sort of sit and jam together,” Leland Sklar, a bass player who has backed artists including Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, told me. Artists would catch up, talk about what they were working on, and then head off to their respective recording sessions, maybe at the Complex or Village Recorders nearby. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would bring a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Young, known as something of a hermit, stopped in. (...)

As his friends’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk inventory—ceding the folkies to a music store he’d been competing with nearby. Not long after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones called and asked Dad if he could come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, where they were recording. Keith Richards wanted a guitar with a B-string bender—a device that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal steel. Dad’s car was in the shop, so he hopped in his mother’s station wagon. When he got there, he mentioned that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove, and asked if the Stones wanted to come. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. When they walked into the club, Dad saw that the other music store had set up a kiosk inside. “And here I come with the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face. (...)

Dad was never one to say no to an adventure. Over the years, he went skiing with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doors. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to join my father on his frequent trips to Mexico, because, “it being your dad, jaunts would turn into escapades would turn into incidents.”

It was on one such trip that he met my mother, who was sitting at the next table at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the nearest gas station. He was a very loud man wearing a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.

Fred Walecki “incidents” were not necessarily fueled by drugs or debauchery. (Dad told me he smoked weed only between 1977 and 1979. He got it for free from Crosby’s dealer.) Instead, his adventures were inspired by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s policy: “If it seemed to me that a nice person wouldn’t hold it against me, I would do it.

Jimmy Buffett once called and said he’d been offered a last-minute stadium gig. He asked if Dad could replicate his band’s entire stage setup—including the congas—in record time. Buffett’s box truck couldn’t fit all the equipment, so they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused long enough to paint Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the side.

People turn to folklore to describe my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen all over the place, and all kinds of things happen.”

by Nancy Walecki, The Atlantic | Read more:

Images: Peyton Fulford, Sydney Morning Herald, Nancy Walecki

The Man in the Midnight-Blue Six-Ply Italian-Milled Wool Suit

The Dream

A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes.

A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A suit that would see me through the immigration checkpoints of difficult countries. A suit that would convince readers that the man in the author photo has a sense of taste beyond the Brooklyn consensus of plaid shirt and pouf of graying hair.

The suit would serve as the perfect carapace for a personality overly dependent on anxious humor and jaundiced wit, a personality that I have been trying to develop since I saw my lightly mustached punim in the mirror as a pubescent boy and thought, How will I ever find love? The suit would transcend my physicality and bond with my personality directly. It would accompany me through the world’s great salons, the occasional MSNBC appearance, and, most important, the well-compensated talks at far-flung universities. The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.” Finding this perfect suit, made by the most advanced tailor out of superlative fabric, would do nothing less than transform me.

The Body

Before there is a suit, there is a body, and the body is terrible.

First there is my shortness (5 foot 5 and a half, with that “half” doing a lot of work). Being short is fine, but those missing inches are wedded to a narrow-shouldered body of zero distinction. Although I am of Russian and Jewish extraction, the continent whose clothing stores make me feel most at ease is Asia. (I once bought an off-the-rack jacket in Bangkok after the clerk examined me for all of three seconds.) However, this is not exactly an Asian body either, especially when I contrast myself with the natural slimness of most of my Asian friends. Just before my bar mitzvah, I got a set of perfect B-cup knockers and had to squeeze into a “husky” suit to perform the ritual yodeling at the synagogue. But that’s not all. Some hideously mismanaged childhood vaccination in Leningrad created a thick keloid scar running the length of my right shoulder. The shame of having this strange pink welt define one side of me led to a slumped posture favoring my left shoulder. When I finally found people to have sex with me—I had to attend Oberlin to complete the task—my expression upon disrobing resembled that of a dog looking up at his mistress after a bowel movement of hazmat proportions.

Before the Suit

The clothes before the suit were as bad as the body.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1972 and was quickly dressed in a sailor’s outfit with white tights and sexy little shorts, then given a balalaika to play with for the camera. The fact that Russia now fields one of the world’s most homicidal armies can partially be explained by photos such as this. On other occasions I was forced to wear very tight jogging pants with a cartoon bunny on them, or a thick-striped shirt dripping with medals from battles I had never seen. These outfits did make me feel like I belonged to something—in this case, a failing dictatorship. I left the U.S.S.R. before I could join the Young Pioneers, which would have entailed wearing a red tie at a tender age, while prancing about and shouting exuberant slogans such as “I am always ready!” (...)

Growing Up Tasteless

High school found me trying to blend in with a suburban outlay of clothes that my now middle-class family could finally afford. These were surfer T-shirts from Ocean Pacific and other brands that suburbanites who survived the 1980s might remember: Generra, Aéropostale, Unionbay. Unfortunately, I did not go to high school in Benetton Bay, Long Island, but in Manhattan, where these shirts were immediately a joke. (This would become a pattern. By the time I figure something out fashion-wise, I’m already two steps behind.) At a high-school job, my boss bought me a set of colorful Miami Vice–style shirts and jackets. These proved ridiculous at Oberlin, where dressing in janitor uniforms from thrift shops was considered the height of style. (Ironically, I had worked as a janitor during the summer, at the same nuclear laboratory that employed my father.)

After college, I fell in with a crowd of artsy, ketamine-addicted hipsters, and together we managed to gentrify several Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late ’90s. One of my friends, who was especially fashion-conscious, began to dress me at the high-priced secondhand emporium Screaming Mimis. The clothes she told me to buy were very itchy, mostly Orlon and Dacron items from ’70s brands such as Triumph of California, but these tight uniforms, like their Soviet predecessors, made me feel like I was playing a part in a grander opera, while also serving as a form of punishment. On nervous dates, I would sometimes have to run to the bathroom to try to angle my acrylic armpits under the dryer.

Because I was a writer who worked in bed, I mostly did not need a suit, although when I got married, in 2012, I went down to Paul Smith to get a herringbone number that I thought was just fine, if not terribly exciting. I bought a J.Crew tuxedo for black-tie benefits. Once, I did a reading sponsored by Prada and was given a nice gray jacket, pants, and a pair of blue suede shoes as compensation. Come to think of it, there was also a scarf. As a final note, I will say that I am incredibly cheap and that shopping for clothes has always raised my blood pressure. Leaving Screaming Mimis after spending more than $500 would always end in me getting terribly drunk to punish myself for the money I had blown on such a frivolous pursuit.

The Dream Begins

When I reached the age of 50, mildly prosperous and with a small family, I met a man named Mark Cho. We discovered each other because of a mutual love of wristwatches (a costly middle-aged hobby I had recently acquired), and because I knew about his classic-menswear store, the Armoury, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. The Armoury has been called “a clubhouse for menswear nerds”; if you’re looking for, say, a cashmere waistcoat in “brown sugar,” you have found your home. I had even given one of the characters in my latest novel, a dandy from a prominent Korean chaebol family, an article of clothing from that store to wear.

We met for dinner at Union Square Cafe, and I liked him (and his clothes) immediately. Mark was almost always dressed in a jacket and tie, and would often sport a vest along with spectacles made of some improbable metal. What I loved about him was how comfortable he appeared in his medley of classical attire, and how, despite the fact that all of his garments had been chosen with precision, he gave the impression that he had spent very little time and thought on which breathable fabrics to settle over his trim body. He looked like he was, to use my initial formulation, at ease.

Later, I would learn that this whole look could be summarized by the Italian word sprezzatura, or “studied carelessness,” and later still I learned of something that the Japanese had discovered and refined: “Ivy style,” which is basically studied carelessness goes to Dartmouth. For the time being, I knew that I liked what I saw, that my inner lonely immigrant—the one who is always trying to find a uniform that will help me fit in—was intrigued. Mark once gave me an Armoury safari jacket, the very same one worn by the character in my novel, and its light, unflappable linen proved perfect for my summer readings around Germany and Switzerland that year. Everywhere from starchy Zurich to drunken Cologne to cool-as-fuck Berlin, the jacket would pop out of a suitcase and unwrinkle itself in seconds, yet it was also stylish and seemingly impervious to the odors of my non-Teutonic body. It was, to use Hemingway-esque prose, damn well perfect, and I immediately knew I wanted more.

I had lived in Italy in my 30s and met many aristocrats there. Those bastards had sprezzatura to burn, but when I asked them the make of their suits and jackets, they would smile and tell me it was the work of a single tailor down in Naples or up in Milan. Ah, I would say to myself, so that’s how it is. Given my outlook on life, owning a bespoke suit was not an outcome I was predestined for. The Prada jacket I had been given, which fit me well enough, was the most that my Calvinist God would ever grant me.

But over more martinis and onglets au poivre with Mark, I began to understand the parameters of a fine bespoke suit and its accessories: bespoke shirts and bespoke shoes. I also began to timidly ask questions of a financial nature and learned that the price of owning such a wardrobe approached and then exceeded $10,000. I did not want to pay this kind of entry fee. Given my own family’s experience in fleeing a declining superpower, I try to have money saved with which to escape across the border. Unlike watches, a suit could not be resold in Montreal or Melbourne.The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.”

A brief but generative conversation with my editors at this magazine soon paved the way for my dream to become possible. At a particularly unsober dinner with a visiting Japanese watchmaker, I whispered to Mark the extent of my desires. Yes, it would take a lot of work, a lot of research, and possibly travel to two other continents. But it could be done. At the right expense, with the most elegant and sturdy of Italian-milled fabrics, and with the greatest of Japanese tailors, a superior suit could be made for anyone, even for me. (...)

Yamamoto-San Arrives

On May 24 of the fateful year 2024, a plane from Tokyo landed in New York City, carrying one of the most meticulously attired men in existence. His name is Yuhei Yamamoto, and he is the preeminent representative of Ivy style, that mode of dress that Americans appreciate yet only the Japanese fully understand.

The British suit, in all its City of London severity, morphed into different shapes around the world. The Italians made particularly interesting work of it. The Milanese suit was the most British-like, but as you traveled farther down the boot to Florence, Rome, and Naples, the tailors became more freehanded; the colors and fit became jauntier and more Mediterranean, more appreciative of bodies defined by crooked lines and curves and exploded by carbohydrates. Meanwhile, in America, as always, we went to work. The suit became a uniform that stressed the commonality and goodness of Protestant labor and church attendance without any further embellishments. It came to be known as the “sack suit.” In the 1950s, Brooks Brothers furthered this concept with an almost subversively casual look: a jacket with natural-width shoulders that hung straight from the body, and plain-front trousers. This, along with other American touches, such as denim, became the basis for Ivy-style clothes that the Japanese of the ’60s made into a national obsession, and that culminated in a wholly different approach to workwear, office wear, and leisure wear. Today, you can’t go into a Uniqlo without seeing the aftereffects of Japanese experimentation with and perfection of our “Work hard, pray hard” wardrobe ethos.

I met Yamamoto-san at the Upper East Side branch of Mark Cho’s Armoury empire. The moment I first saw him, I was scared. No one could be this well-dressed. No one could be so secure in a tan three-piece seersucker suit that didn’t so much hang from his broad shoulders as hover around them in expectation. No one’s brown silk tie could so well match his brown polka-dot pocket square and the thick wedge of only slightly graying hair floating above his perfectly chiseled face. This man was going to make a suit for me? I was not worthy.

Yamamoto-san examined me briefly and said, “Sack suit.”

by Gary Shteyngart, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Leung Man Hei and Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl

One afternoon this spring, I went to the West Village to meet a West Village Girl.

When I arrived at the whitewashed wine bar she chose, just two blocks from the brownstone stoop Carrie Bradshaw made famous, Miranda McKeon was journaling in her notebook and sipping a cup of green tea. She wore crimson leggings, a stack of candy-colored beaded necklaces, and a black sweatshirt that read SELF-EMPLOYED because she is a full-time influencer — or “creator,” as it is more polite to say in this part of town.

Online, the blonde, rosy-cheeked 23-year-old from New Jersey has over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. She posts a lot, most often about her charmed life in the West Village: sweating it out at Pilates, treating herself to weeknight Froyo, drinking espresso martinis with her girlfriends. Over a photo of herself walking down the street, she wrote this past fall, “Life is too short. Wear the sparkly skirt!!!! Post the content!!!!! Text the boy!!!!! Leave your number on the table!!!!! Ask that girl to get coffee!!!! Wear cowboy boots year round if you love them!!!! Try! Fail! Love! Lose! Try again! Be embarrassing! Take a risk! Feel it alllllll while you’re here!!!!!”

McKeon knew she wanted to rent in the West Village long before she moved to New York. In college at the University of Southern California, she started hearing from high-school friends, girls who had migrated here before her, that it was the place to live — a cobblestoned paradise where a young woman like herself could live an entire life within a block. During her final semester, last year, McKeon started obsessively combing StreetEasy for the perfect postgrad apartment and, to prepare for the move, watched Sex and the City for the first time. (She identifies as a Carrie with some of Miranda’s “girlboss energy”; she majored in entrepreneurship.) Now eight months in, she likes that the neighborhood reminds her of being back on campus insofar as she is constantly running into people she knows, though instead of classmates, they are girls she follows or who follow her. “I feel like a freshman in New York,” she said.

In person, McKeon seems, just as she does online, to be a remarkably well-adjusted and unjaded New Yorker. On weekends, she likes going out for what she calls a “three-drinker” (a nice dinner with her girlfriends with a self-imposed three-cocktail minimum). She knows the names of the important restaurants (the Corner Store, American Bar, Dante), a couple of age-appropriate bars (Bandits, Bayard’s, the Spaniard), and even some of her neighbors. “I went out to dinner with two girls last night, both of whom live on my street,” she told me. “We met through social media. It’s nice.” (...)

“There’s a cult mentality” to the neighborhood, McKeon continued. It’s true that many of the young women passing by the bar looked like her clones. They move through the neighborhood in packs, wearing the local uniform: a white tank, light-wash jeans, and Sambas, an iced matcha latte in hand, and hair slicked back into a tight ponytail. It was chilly, so several of them, McKeon cheekily pointed out through the window, were also wearing Aritzia Super Puffs, as she was, in the color matte pearl. “I feel like everyone else here in some way,” McKeon told me. “That’s the point of it, I guess.”

The neighborhood has, in recent years, transformed into a fabulous theme park for young women of some privilege to live out their Sex and the City fantasies, posting and spending their mid-20s away. They all seem to keep impressive workout routines (“Hot this and hot that,” McKeon said), have no shortage of girlfriends, and juggle busy heterosexual dating schedules. (The boys they consort with tend to be of the fratty variety.) They work in finance, marketing, publicity, tech — often with active social-media accounts on the side. They have seemingly endless disposable income. They are, by all conventional standards, beautiful. Occasionally, they are brunettes. Whatever their political beliefs, their lives seem fairly apolitical; as one 27-year-old lawyer on a walk with her best friend, both wearing identical puffer jackets, succinctly put their collective interests to me one day in April, “Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.” (They may be more political than they appear: “You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights,” said one person who lives in the neighborhood.)

This isn’t the first time a generation of socially ambitious young women has descended on the West Village and, as one fashion executive explained to me with just a hint of an eye roll, “made the neighborhood their whole personality,” fundamentally changing it along the way. If Sex and the City washed out the last of the neighborhood’s bohemians two decades ago and turned the West Village into a celebrity playground where real adults with real incomes live, the pandemic turned it into something else entirely: a bustling sorority house. “Everyone has the same mind-set. We’re here, we’re young, we’re single. Let’s go out and have fun and be ourselves. Work hard. Play hard,” said a new arrival from Texas with blonde highlights while polishing off a bottle of rosé with her girlfriends one afternoon. They’re basic, they told me proudly. “Basic isn’t a bad thing,” a crew of Cosmo drinkers at Anton’s, just down the street, elaborated. “There’s a reason everyone wants to be like that.” (There’s a sense lately that the entire city, or at least much of downtown Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn, is going the way of the West Village. “They’re everywhere,” almost everyone I talked to for this story told me.) (...)

The young women who follow Kerrigan and Keenan — fellow New Yorkers and transplants alike — soon flooded the neighborhood. So many that it became a memeable stereotype: “the West Village Girl.” In a post last September, a TikToker named Kayla Trivieri summed up the type under the caption “POV: you’re on a date with a girl from the west village.” The monologue went like this: “So what are you into?” “Pilates, Cartier bracelets, Blank Street, Hugo spritzes, Reformation, and my dachshund …” “What kind of music do you like?” “Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, and Morgan Wallen once in a while.” When I asked Trivieri about the send-up recently, the native Canadian told me she became familiar with the type before she even moved to the States. “She was the cultural Zeitgeist on TikTok,” Trivieri said. “It became this almost idealized persona. I felt like people in Toronto were even dressing like that in head-to-toe Pilates gear.” (The influencer Tinx sells a $75 crewneck that reads RICH MOM WEST VILLAGE.) To put New York youth culture into high-school terms, Kerrigan said the West Village Girls are “the Plastics, the Mean Girls without the meanness.”

Now, years after she started posting from the neighborhood, Keenan said, she often has to wait on line to get coffee at her favorite shop, Fellini. “I’m thinking about how that’s kind of my fault,” she added. “I’ve recommended it a million times. But it’s a beautiful sharing of information, so I can’t be annoyed.” (The lines, she said, are a good place to meet friends.) Kerrigan said the West Village is now filled with “young powerhouse women with vision boards,” ambitious zoomers who idolize Alex Cooper and Carrie Bradshaw in equal measure. The appeal is “the main-character energy you get when you’re in the West Village,” which feels, she said, like a “movie set.” The irony, of course, is that when everyone’s a main character, is anyone? (...)

The original West Village Girls — those who have remained in the neighborhood and didn’t jet off to Greenwich or to a classic six uptown — aren’t entirely pleased with their new neighbors.

One Tuesday in April, I met Kim Vernon, a former Calvin Klein executive who bought a loft in the neighborhood in 1997. “I don’t want to be an old-lady bitch, but this is the pinnacle of what happened to this fucking neighborhood,” she said when we sat down at Bar Pisellino, which even at 2 p.m. was packed with young women ordering spritzes and pastries. “I see less gay men and, more than anything, groups of four or five girls,” she added. “They’re always talking at a high, high pitch. It is so intolerable. It’s so unpleasant.” Not to mention it’s impossible to get a table at I Sodi or Via Carota these days, two once-neighborly Italian restaurants that were tumbled through the TikTok recommendation machine and came out nearly unrecognizable with lines of day-trippers waiting down the block at all hours of the day. “I used to go to I Sodi when they had an answering machine. Someone would call you back. It wasn’t super-popular,” said Vernon. The last time she tried to have dinner with a friend, she was quoted a three-hour wait. (...)

The old bars and restaurants are also adjusting to the new whims and tastes. “I have regulars who come in all the time and say, ‘What happened?’ It’s just an army of Levi’s and white tank tops,” a bartender at Bayard’s, a newly popping but long-standing Irish pub on Hudson Street, told me. (Behind the bar, she showed me a box of lost phones and another box of abandoned clothes, which she lugs to Housing Works once a month.) In the fall of 2023, the restaurant and bar Cowgirl decided to convert one of its margarita machines into one for frozen espresso martinis, “the new cocaine,” the owner joked to me. “You can see the new group coming in. I don’t know where they’re getting their money from, but they have money,” she said. “Especially on the weekends, everyone’s 27. That magic number. We never had demand like this.” The Spaniard, a cocktail bar by day and a shockingly rowdy hookup spot by night, had to hire an entire security team after what one manager described as a “mass exodus” of the older, tamer clientele. (Its top-three sellers now are spicy margaritas, espresso martinis, and Aperol spritzes, which are pre-batched into kegs.) At L’Artusi, a high-end Italian restaurant, the owner, Kevin Garry, told me he’s selling less expensive wine post-pandemic. “Previously, the crowd was kind of that classic West Village type. Late 30s, early 40s, Masters of the Universe with good jobs and no kids,” he said. “A $150 bottle of wine doesn’t compare to a vodka-soda.” As a waitress at La Bonbonniere, an old-school diner that has been around since the 1930s, said bluntly, “The old people? They die. Now it’s young people with the social media. After corona, pew! The internet!”

Needless to say, no one would go on the record getting too snarky about any of this; it all makes for good business. And some former West Village Girls admitted eventually that in their descendants they could see their younger selves. “I think they’re probably doing what I did when I was 20. This is where they want to go around and get drinks and run into people and look cool,” said Hruska MacPherson. “It’s like Disneyland for them. Let’s let them be young and have fun, even if we cringe at it. Let’s let them have their Aperol spritzes. We were also discovering ourselves.” Annelise Peterson echoed this thought: “We were discovering ourselves. I stayed down there until my ex-husband told me it was time to move to the Upper East Side. Things change; things never stay the same. What the West Village will be in 20 years might be something very different. The influencer is fickle.”

It’s easy to get reflective after a few brunchtime cocktails. “Was I one of these little fuckers?” Savannah Engel wondered aloud to me one Sunday after Bloody Marys at Cafe Cluny. The question seemed to stump her. Two girls hauled yoga mats past us, and she said, “I like to kick them out of the way.”

by Brock Colyar, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Dina Litovsky
[ed. Living the dream. Trust funds, inheritances, nepo connections, rich partners. It's easy.]

As for the apartments the businesses were shipping to, the average one-bedroom in the neighborhood is now $5,995 a month, though apartments often cost much more. A dingy one-bedroom can easily go for $7,500 (expensive but doable on a finance salary or with help from parents).