I saw a video recently of a woman referring to her post-breastfeeding boobs as “French,” which I thought was, well, sort of a perfect rebrand. They’ve taken a permanent trip abroad. They’re no longer concerned with the values of the American people. They’re too busy sipping le café, dragging le cigarette and watching their marinière-clad children run around one of those dusty little parks scattered across Paris. Perhaps there’s an antique merry-go-round involved. I don’t know. They’re too busy to concern themselves with superficial things like gravity. Which feels almost radical in our current era of very visible maintenance. In a culture where cosmetic work now parades itself in front of the rear-facing camera and evolves, in real time, before an audience, the getting of the work has become something of a status symbol in itself. I mean, have you seen how much a facelift costs? Hell yes, Kris Jenner, good on ya girl. And listen, I’m a girl’s girl. I grew up with three brothers, so I had to earn my way into the female trust circle. It is sacred and not to be fucked with. No gatekeeping. No competition. We support one another. Share secrets. Share tips. Hold a hand out on our way to the top. I give transparency and, perhaps unrealistically, I desire transparency in return. Communal shit. Witch shit. Sisters-I-never-had shit. Come on people, this is psych 101.

Now, I’m not saying you need to announce your maintenance package on a billboard, I’m simply saying, at least share with your own class. They’re the ones who will keep you from going too far off the aesthetic deep end. It’s a win, win. My personal cosmetic goal of late is to look as though I’ve slept incredibly well through the entirety of my first two years of motherhood. I don’t know how she does it! Is that so much to ask?! As though our jawlines just naturally slimmed with age. Our eye bags disappeared because we drank a ton of water and perhaps spent a tasteful weekend taking in ocean breezes on the vineyard. A time-honoured tradition among beautiful women. However, this is a new generation. As any of my close friends will tell you, I will happily disclose visceral, gory details of the Portuguese facial witch I entrust solely to clean my pores, the best person I’ve ever had smooth my tired forehead, my anesthetic-free experience having salmon sperms siphoned into my face in an attempt to regain my glow postpartum to my most trusted. Lest we not pretend everyone isn’t in on the secret. At least among the women folk. I don’t support the dumbing down. The avoidance. It’s insulting, frankly, not subtle. Downright anti-feminist.

Perhaps it’s my non-Americanness or, more likely, my love of clothes and sensitivity to the way they drape, but I’ve always preferred my own bosom on the smaller, more natural side. I grew up in a rock ’n’ roll circus, leading my references to always be a bit more Birkin than Baywatch. These days, after breastfeeding two babies, they’re finally small enough to go confidently braless. I must confess, I don’t dislike it. Now, this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been an occasional bra wearer and staunchly anti-underwire guy for much of my life. You know those tissue-thin 1930s dresses the chic, sceney English fashion girls like Camille Charrière and Tish Weinstock traipse around in at Vogue parties lately? I have been collecting and wearing those since college. No joke. 2006, when my most fun girlfriend Sara and I started a glorious tradition called See Through Saturday. Neither of us was the thinnest nor prettiest girl in the young downtown New York roundup of models, Gossip Girl cast members and Olsen twins, so we understood fairly quickly that confidence and style were going to have to do the trick. Fake it till you make it stuff, at least. There was a photograph of Pamela Des Barres in I’m With the Band, standing beside Frank Zappa’s pool in a pale floral 1930s dress with perfect loose curls and nothing but cotton bikini briefs underneath. I stared at that image for months. It scratched some deep itch in my younger self, finding a niche—and eventually a career—through my relationship with nostalgia, daydreaming about my own move to Laurel Canyon that would naturally follow those college and early fashion career years in New York. Pamela, a famous 70s -era groupie whose tell-all discloses juicy, vivid details of sleeping with Jimmy Page, Waylon Jennings, et al, became the patron saint of See Through Saturday.

In those days, extreme thinness felt less like a body type than a prerequisite for admission. A measurement for your own value as a woman. It was the ultimate accessory and, despite some fairly grim attempts on my part in younger years, it was never really going to be mine. I liked food. I still like food. I was delighted, newly living alone at seventeen years old, to discover that nobody could stop me buying those burnt brown loaves of Balthazar sourdough from the grocery on St Marks and eating buttered, salted toast for dinner every night on my fire escape followed by six or seven Marlboro lights. Revolutionary. Joy at its finest. Like so many women of my generation, I’m only now in these past few years beginning to truly understand how much brain space I’ve given body image. Becoming a mother has helped, partly because I simply have less time to give a flying fuck, and partly because children listen to everything. They are sponges. And I will be damned if I pass that poison along. When my daughter was born, I would kiss the tiny rolls spilling over the top of her diaper approximately one thousand times a day. Then I’d stand in front of the mirror, days postpartum, looking at the body that had literally given her life, wondering why I couldn’t summon remotely the same tenderness for my own little overhang. Sick in the head, no? We’ve been handed a fairly heavy brief in the body department, ladies.

In those years, the 1930s dress—braless, black bikini briefs underneath—became something of a uniform. It just did something for me. Still does, honestly. Against the metropolitan backdrop of Manhattan, it created the romantic timelessness I was desperately seeking in an era of ripped tights and Venti Starbucks cups. Standing out felt good. Feeling like some delicate romantic flower wandering through a sea of shredded denim and combat boots felt even better. Now, two breastfed babies later, I still feel strangely like my best self going au natch, when it feels appropriate, of course. I asked my boyfriend—who, having been raised in Orange County, has never entirely shaken his affinity for that bigger-is-better aesthetic—whether I was too old to go braless. “No way. Definitely not”, he assured me. I’m certain the blade being held to his throat had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Which brings us to last week. I was getting dressed, craving a favourite white ribbed tank from summers past, when I found myself facing the crucial question: To bra or not to bra? Yes, I know about boob tape. Stick-on bras. Nipple covers. Breast-lifting nipple covers. Those little silicone flower thingies. I work in fashion. I know all the tricks. Hell, I’m old enough to remember buying an actual strapless bra. From a store. Without adhesive. Can you imagine? A relic! If last week’s pathetic virginity-bra anecdote didn’t tip you off, I am a lingerie lover. And because I tend to favour flow and drape—and, particularly in my countryside life, a baggier fit—there’s something extra delicious about having a sexy little secret underneath it all. You know the old saying: if a woman takes you home and she’s wearing matching lingerie, it wasn’t you who decided to go home with her. That preparedness for anything really does it for me.

Lingerie, like jewelry, just adds a little extra something. It makes the picture prettier, deeper, more interesting. Give me Jane Fonda or Sienna Miller in a men’s button-down with something tiny and lacy underneath any day. The secret makes the sexiness. But there is a time and place for everything. Black slip dress, bright yellow bra straps deliberately peeking out? She’s here for a good time. She cares about support and fun. She’ll make out with you outside the restaurant and cheekily suggest private karaoke afterwards. She understands how to flirt with cheapness without ever actually looking cheap. Black slip dress, no visible straps? Entirely different woman. She’s Carolyn Bessette. Christy Turlington. She’s ’90s Calvin Klein. Subtle. Sexy. Expensive. She doesn’t need you to tell her she looks good. She smokes Vogues. Wears rollnecks. You know? Two entirely different characters. Two entirely different messages being broadcast to the world. Choose your fighter wisely.

And listen, I’m no stranger to needing a little lift from time to time. Despite my fondness for a natural look, sometimes it simply looks better to hike those puppies up. Your waist? Teensy. Your back? Ballerina. The female form, in all its magnificent, spellbinding glory, requires absolutely no improvement—but occasionally an outfit benefits from a bit of engineering. In that case, I turn to this boob tape. Nipple covers give me a weird shape. Too smooth. Too round. There’s a silicone perfection to removing the nipple from the equation that I personally do not care for. Weddings, proper events, impossible dresses, days when you simply want an extra little hug of support: tape is your friend. But as I’ve hammered into your gorgeous heads approximately one thousand times since starting this newsletter: try some shit for yourself.

Pop into your local wardrobe-supply shop—or hell, that funny back aisle of CVS behind the hair clips—and stock on up. Pour yourself a splash of natty wine. Stand in front of the mirror. Take yourself in. You beautiful drink of water. Decide who you feel like being tonight. Bra. No bra. Lace. Tape. French breastesses hanging somewhere around Marseille. There is no wrong answer. Or you can always take a page from my book and spend forty-five minutes engineering some elaborate supportive contraption, arrive at the party, cheers your martini, scratch your ribcage exactly once then immediately retreat to the bathroom to chuck said bra/nipple petal/tape/lifty guy into your handbag, and go native. You think the first sip of a frosty cold martini tastes good once you’ve landed your ideal seat at the bar? Try it sans bra. A tiny heaven you didn’t know existed. And so, without further ado: our weekly roundup of sourced treasures and special discoveries, with a little poem and a song thrown in for good measure. Bra optional. As the English say: tits up. Until next time xx

Dolly forever

There are two camps of people: those who grow into adults, accepting January as the start of the new year, and those willing to admit that some part of us never quite matures past school and September is, in fact, the real deal. The emotional new year, if you will. Perhaps it’s the years-long recurring anxiety dreams I have about being sent back to high school, where I inevitably haven’t done the assignment and am somehow still expected to graduate. Perhaps it’s the desire to teach that’s bubbled up in me these past few years. Perhaps I just like a good pleated skirt. Or maybe enough time has finally passed that I can look back on my school years with something resembling fondness rather than the mind-numbing discomfort they actually inhabited. Whatever it is, that first chilly morning of late summer always carries an unmistakable back-to-school feeling: new shoes, a slightly dodgy stomach, the hope that this could be the year you finally become the person you mean to be. And boyyy, could we use a new year.

Between the influx of Netflix shows celebrating Northern Ontario lake culture and a video I saw the other day about the bump, my brain has been harking back to the Septembers of my own youth an awful lot. If you don’t know what the bump is, you must not have come of age in the early 2000s. Quite literally the only hairstyle that mattered. Objectively, it was completely idiotic: a section of hair aggressively backcombed into a small architectural…feature, at the crown of one’s head. And yet the cool girls made it look so cool. You know those girls in a ’90s romantic comedy who are somehow gorgeous in high school? Never had an awkward phase, always had a boyfriend, seemingly emerged from the womb knowing exactly how far to roll up a dowdy school skirt to make it look cute? The blessed ones. I was, as it turns out, staunchly not one of them. And for some years now I’ve wondered if that wasn’t the greatest gift I could have received.

An awkward phase is, I think, rather crucial to one’s survival. It is incredibly useful to discover early on that looks make for unreliable currency. If you’ve got a mouthful of braces, Groucho Marx eyebrows, a head full of bad pixie cut grow-out, headgear—or, in my case, a charming combination of all—feeling pretty tends to take an marked hiatus during those formative years. And when being pretty isn’t the thing making you feel special, you’re forced to go looking for something else. You become funny, well-read, well-listened. You develop peculiar little obsessions and strong-ass opinions. You get curious. You cultivate taste, then in turn, identity. You build a universe inside yourself because, for a while at least, the outside one isn’t delivering quite what you’d hoped.

The silver lining of an awkward phase is the learning to invest in selfhood. The bits that take longer to build but, inconveniently for the beauty industry, only tend to appreciate with age. You learn that the uncomfortable feeling in your stomach cannot, in fact, kill you. It can only make you more interesting. If there are corners of the world that never mature past school, social media is certainly one of them. And with that, Instagram is undoubtedly high school. Popularity contest deliberately included. There are an awful lot of people on the internet, with its one-dimensional projections, whose entire personality seems to be designed around being pretty. Around looks. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever, but I can’t help wondering what happens when the currency changes. What a character-building experience that can be. What an interesting societal experiment.

I recall, in high school, while busily honing my own 1970s-does-1930s aesthetic, trying to convince my mum to abandon her faithful straight-leg jeans and embrace flares. “You only want to live through a trend once,” she told me. “Trust me. I already did bell-bottoms.” I dismissed this immediately. Clearly she had no idea what she was talking about. (Mind you, this is a woman who owns nearly every piece from Dolce Gabbana’s first runway collection. I was just fifteen.) She was too deep in her own lane to realize how genuinely cool she could look. What I didn’t understand was that she already did. Because the coolest thing in the world is being exactly that: genuine. Watching the trends of my own school years come roaring back has finally given me some understanding of how she must have felt. Because the seventies are, well, the seventies. There’s a timelessness, an organic energy, a romanticism to them that Y2K fashion, bless her, does not possess. And believe me, I was there. Life-size poster of Britney Spears and her abdominal muscles hanging above my bed, making me loathe my uncomfortable, Frappuccino-fueled pubescent body and all.

Being unpretty (shout out TLC) during those years, I had to find something else that made me feel special. For me, it was—and has always been—taste. Books, music, clothing, films. The unique little clubhouse you construct for yourself when the more obvious forms of social currency aren’t immediately available. At the time, obviously, I would have traded all this for waxed eyebrows, a thinner body and a real boyfriend without a second thought. But with the benefit of twenty-odd years and significantly deeper self-knowledge, I’m actually grateful I didn’t get the easy version. Being looked at only gets your foot in the door. Put your energy elsewhere and you learn things. You form perspectives. You discover what makes your stomach turn and what bores you senseless. Eventually, you become someone you enjoy spending time with. Even now, I find a well-supported opinion, curiosity for the world and a willingness to get far too deep about things—Scorpio vibes—multitudes more valuable, more attractive, than looking any which way. Particularly when beauty itself is increasingly available for purchase. When thinness can be ordered for next-day delivery on Prime, what does beauty even mean as currency anymore? And listen, I am as guilty as anyone. I am not devoid of vanity. Obviously. I’ve built a fairly significant portion of my life around beautiful things. But beauty should be an addition, a flourish, the cherry on the banana split of personhood—not the entire bloody Sundae.

The truth is, the awkward phase comes for us all eventually. Maybe yours happens at eleven and stretches, ohhh, into your early twenties, like your girl over here. Maybe you sail through high school looking like Athena herself only to be flattened by a surprise divorce at thirty-two. Maybe you change careers, gain twenty pounds, wake up one morning and realize the version of yourself you’ve been selling to the world no longer feels remotely authentic. Maybe you have a baby…

Three months after having my first child, I went to my first proper fashion dinner postpartum. I’d spent the previous ninety days almost exclusively speaking to a newborn which, whilst deeply rewarding, is not particularly useful preparation for cocktail conversation. I arrived desperate to talk about what had just happened to me: the complete psychic rearrangement of becoming a mother. The terror, the love, the identity crisis, the feeling that someone had taken my entire person apart in the night and wonkily reunited approximately eighty-seven per cent of the pieces. Instead, I sat there surrounded by enviable fashion mothers with absolutely no interest in doing the deep dive, unable to contribute meaningfully to the small talk and feeling as though I’d just returned from war. So I did what any emotionally evolved woman would do: spent the first thirty minutes hiding in the bathroom drinking white wine until my social skills resurfaced.

Eventually, they did. And you know what? I was stronger. Funnier, even. More focused, more sure of myself. Because parenthood simply doesn’t leave enough hours in the day to sweat the small stuff. That loss of excess time has been a surprising gift. There isn’t enough space to wonder endlessly whether people will like what you’re doing. You just have time to do. Postpartum, I’ve come to realize, is a kind of second puberty. Your body is unfamiliar, hormones are deranged, clothes don’t fit properly, you barely recognize the person in the mirror—that is, if you can find time to look in one. It is, to put it plainly, awkward as hell. But eventually you come to meet yourself again. You figure out what still fits—not only the jeans, although heaven knows that’s part of it—and what gets left behind. You rebuild your poise rather than simply returning to it. You become less precious, more resilient and, from what I’ve seen, considerably more clever. I’ve watched more than one beautiful woman encounter some version of this second puberty later in life, when gravity begins not so gracefully submitting its invoices. Perhaps an awkward phase isn’t a failure at all. Perhaps it’s simply a turn. Maybe the lucky ones aren’t the people who manage to avoid one, but the ones who learn what to do with it. Who stop swimming upstream and learn, eventually, to float with the current.

Now listen, you may never see me in a ruffled mini skirt again as long as I live, and I firmly believe a hair clip belongs exclusively at the back of one’s head, but I do support youth as a time for discovery, experimentation and eventually, looking a little ridiculous. Looking a bit absurd is probably the point. We play it so safe in life. Take the damn risk. I am, after all, an aunt to teenage nieces, witnessing this firsthand. And because, thank God, Substack remains the one social media platform fourteen-year-olds have absolutely no investment in, I can say plainly: they look dumb as hell. But you know what, we looked dumb as hell too. You’re supposed to. You are meant to wear the wrong jeans, fancy the lame boy, cut your own fringe after your first taste of vodka, discover an unfortunate relationship with streaky bronzer and eventually emerge with some vague idea of who you are. Youth without aesthetic mistakes, frankly, feels like cheating.

With September barreling towards us, the back-to-school looks will soon be running rampant through the city. So let’s cut to the brass tacks: Your thong strings belong inside your trousers. The “MY BOYFRIEND IS OUT OF TOWN” T-shirt lived and died with that paparazzi photograph of a bleached-out, Charlie’s Angels-era Drew Barrymore. And if you’re over thirty, I would personally, like the rise of your jeans to exceed four inches.

That said, while my soul may belong somewhere around 1968, this physical body was alive, kicking and living through the rhinestone bedazzled glory of the early 2000s, so naturally there are a few relics I can get behind. Free City sweatpants, in all their campy Fred Segal glory, remain the softest money can buy. Those knee high Minnetonka moccasin boots, I will always support. My best friend and I, on a teenage trip to England, purchased matching John Galliano bralettes from the clearance bin at Harrods and christened them our “virginity bras.” If that doesn’t adequately communicate what a sexless teenager I truly was, not sure what will. At the time, this felt like evidence of some great personal failing. Now I think it may have been where I became myself. Discovering Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, clipping every Chloe dress out of my mums recycled Vogue issues, getting gussied up to not be invited, well…anywhere, honestly. Developing taste before we understood what it was that was happening. Perhaps that’s what we actually remain nostalgic for. Certainly not being thirteen; you could not pay me enough. But that period, when everything was still being formed, the play of trying on clothes, identities, slowly working out which bits belonged to you. That’s what these uncomfortable phases of growth offer us plain and simple: yet another chance to edit, to hone.

While the return of ultra-low rise jeans gives me a form of PTSD I can only describe as visceral, I will cling to the Nicolas Ghesquière-era cord cargo trousers I sourced on eBay in high school for $100 until the day I die. So let’s look in the rear view a bit. Dig into those bins at the back of your wardrobe. Climb up into the attic. Call your mother. Ask her how she is while you’re at it, wont you? Nostalgia isn’t about wanting all of it back—God knows there are more looks that should remain on the cutting room floor than not—it's value lies in having enough distance to decide what was worth keeping. The clothes, sure, but more importantly the viewpoint you developed wearing them. The parts of yourself worth hanging onto. The books you were forced to read and surprisingly saw your own character in. The daydreams you formed. The bizarro syntax you and your best friend acquired while the cool girls were chatting shit, kissing boys, and not welcoming you to the party. The person you built when you felt invisible and the person you learn to rebuild every time life, inevitably, makes things weird again.

And if, like me, you burned approximately 99 per cent of the physical evidence of the person you were before twenty-two, let us take a moment to thank the holy baby Jesus for The RealReal, eBay, Etsy and Poshmark. Because if there’s one thing we love more than nostalgia, it’s the hunt.

Jury’s still out on that McQueen skull scarf, though.

Love you, mean it.

On repeat during my high school years

The older I get, the more I learn to look at life as an overstuffed photo album, full of disorganized snapshots. Remember physical photo albums?! I have come to realize that there is something about these messier moments of life that, if you (I) can learn to relinquish control, tend to be impossible to beat. Breathtakingly beautiful in their mayhem, made even more so by their humanity; the tiny details so minuscule you could miss them entirely if you blink too long, that make up a cacophony of experiences worth remembering. Worth noticing. And the noticing, as we have discussed at length in this tiny, wonderful corner of the world where we meet each week, is really what it’s all about. It is what makes great art, better fashion—and truthfully, a pretty nice life, imho.

The truth is that I can be irritatingly perfectionist. The rose-tinted curse of the artist brain involves a desire to make everything beautiful. Everything aesthetic. Before you get ahead of yourself, let me assure you, this has absolutely nothing to do with the internet’s influence. Baby, I was born this way and have the shaved-headed, nose-pierced, kohl-eyeliner-wearing American Girl dolls in my parent’s barn to prove it. Ordered from the catalogue, no less! Aging myself there, but the real ones will remember. I would argue that a penchant for making things more beautiful, more romantic, more considered—physically, spiritually, visually—is about as close to my life’s mission as can be articulated. Through many mediums, across freelance jobs and companies and journeys and reinventions, that goal has always remained steadfast. If only LVMH would take notice.

During my college years studying Native poetry, I came across the Navajo/Diné concept of “walking in beauty.” It embedded itself so naturally into the marrow of my bones it felt as though it had always been there. As though I’d lived the film but had somehow been missing its title. My understanding of it then was imperfect and undoubtedly remains more so now, but it gave language to something I had always felt instinctively: broadly, to purposefully notice the magnificence of the universe; to respect the living world around you and move through it with care, with an intention of harmony. I came to understand it as a kind of custodianship: Seek out beauty, protect what you find, make more where you can. That, to me, is the lot of the artist. Or at least should be. And if beauty isn’t always achievable, at least, let there be truth. Let there be authenticity.

Of course, beauty itself is a slippery concept. Its definition is subjective and changes with age, with experience. What I’m beginning to realize—today particularly with a napping baby, a toddler out with his dad, a house freshly emptied of guests after days of entertaining and every fibre of my being begging me to abandon this laptop, put on rubber gloves and clean something—is that perhaps part of beauty is knowing when to leave some bloody thing alone. To eventually put down the pen. To pick your battles rather than aiming to tackle it all. To release the image of perfection. To surrender to the haphazard humanness of life. There is a particular tyranny to wanting everything just so. I remain haunted by it to this day, frankly. The cushions plumped, the beds made, the kitchen counters clear of the strange sediment of family life: half a baby-gummed peach, three broken crayons, a tiny sock, somebody’s abandoned cup of earl grey. It is lovely, of course, when everything is lovely. It is also, I have learned in my extensive efforts, rather exhausting. Because as anyone with children, pets, a messy partner or an overflowing existence understands, you cannot truly enjoy a house party whilst holding a bottle of kitchen cleaner in one hand and a dish towel in the other. Believe me, I’ve tried. After all, where would you put your wine?

And so, Saturday afternoon, I found myself sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for freshly washed sheets to come out of the dryer so I could makeshift the breakfast nook into yet another guest bed for friends who decided to crash last minute. My mum beside me, whipping cream for my son’s Curious George-inspired birthday banana cream pie, while outside a backyard full of children danced through the wet grass after a rainstorm. There I was, laundering the evidence of a good time, while missing it entirely. Perhaps the bigger picture isn’t always the point. Perhaps a picture isn’t even the point at all. Sometimes the glory is in the tiny moments. The presence. The funny imperfections. The little wet footprints scattered across a floor you’ve just cleaned. The surprising way late-afternoon light falls across the face of someone you love, catching you mid sentence. The way something felt. The way someone made you feel. Moments which are almost aggressively ordinary until, years later, you would give anything to stand inside them again. And because my love language is apparently finding a way to equate all of this rambling prose back to fashion, self-definition and the Livestock mission to express our innermost workings in an outermost way, we must, naturally, talk about clothes.

So, here’s the thing: jeans and a T-shirt make a great freaking outfit. Classic for a reason. You can get away with a LOT using very, very little. This coming from someone whose country closet is chock-full of $40 antique French white nighties and vintage Levi’s. What I’ve learned in my nearly twenty—puke—years working in and around fashion is how little you actually need to make a look feel truly special. Keep the pavement clear and suddenly you notice the magnificent flower growing through its crack. Leave a little blank canvas and the universe tends to accessorize. A tiny emerald pinky ring flashing in the sunlight resting on a Havaiana-clad foot can somehow feel like couture. Not because it is impressive, but because it is specific. And specificity, I increasingly think, is the whole game.

As a staunch vintage girly, for me the romance is—and will always be—in the story. The tiny antique beaded bag from a flea market whose thread is hanging on by a, um…thread. The floral ribbon from your kid’s birthday present tied around the ends of your braids on a Monday morning. The beat-up leather belt from your dad’s first job at nineteen, excavated from the back of his closet. The ring an old lover ever gave you that you can’t seem to part with. These are the things that make a wardrobe truly yours and, therefore, truly spectacular. They carry the residue of a life around with them. Evidence that somebody lives here. If, as Shakespeare famously said, the clothes make the man, then let us allow the life lived in them to make the clothes. Because luxury isn’t necessarily born of expense. It’s born of poise. Assertion. That delicious certainty of knowing exactly who you are. We all know the phenomenon: one woman can be wearing head-to-toe designer and somehow look perfectly ordinary; another is wearing seven dollars of thrifted magic and you find her image cemented in your mind for the rest of the week.

Once you’re self-possessed enough to find that precise meeting point between what looks good on you and what makes you feel comfortable, confident and, most crucially, like yourself, you really don’t need that much. By the way, this does not come naturally to everyone, and that is okay. Nobody expects you to emerge from the womb knowing which trousers go with your ribbed tank or precisely how to cuff a white button-down just so. That is what we are here to learn. Use your resources. We’ve somehow decided everyone should innately understand how to dress themselves beautifully when we apply that logic to almost no other specialized skill.

There used to be an entire infrastructure devoted to helping us figure it out: editors, magazines, shop girls with impeccable taste, designers focused on actual points of view in stead of Shopify stats. Magazine articles with actual words, not just quippy little captions. People whose job was not simply to tell us what to buy, but how to develop an eye. With the seemingly imminent (and terrifying) death of print, it feels more important than ever to cultivate your own little world outside of the algorithm. Lest we risk becoming one enormous army of neutral coloured carbon copies marching around the internet in embarrassingly overpriced designer flip-flops, looking like every beige hued influencer out there. And listen, if that genuinely feels authentic, all the power to you. But we often see, on the interwebs, those so concerned with “good taste” that unique perspective gets cut out of the equation entirely. There is such a thing as being a little too well edited. An overcorrection, if you will. Perhaps that’s where the beauty lies anyway—not in getting the whole thing right, but in the tiny details that make it unmistakably yours.

The truth is, you can get away with a hell of a lot if you just have great accessories. Pick up a pin from your favourite local bookshop for your tote. Find a Romanian Etsy witch to crochet you something special. Good Lord, the things you can do with a silk scarf! I could write essays. Antique jewelry is your honest-to-goodness best friend. Carry a book. Just hold a book in your hand. (Extra points if you’ve read it on the off chance a sexy stranger starts asking questions.) I swear, you’ll look ten times chicer. Don’t be afraid to play.

Perhaps childhood feels particularly pertinent because of where I’m at in my own life, but I can’t shake the image of a costume trunk in a kid’s playroom from my mind. Nobody notices the diaper or cotton pyjamas underneath. It’s the ruffled clown collar. The shimmering gold king’s crown sitting crookedly atop their mussed up hair. The completely nonsensical combination of it all. Children are very good at this. They don’t question for a second whether the crown goes with the pyjamas. They put the crown on, with abandon. Without insecurity. Somewhere along the way we become terribly sensible. This is one of adulthood’s quieter tragedies: not that we stop playing altogether, but that we begin requiring a reason to.

Fashion, at its very best, gives us one. Maybe part of the job—for artists, tastemakers, curious people, hell, just people—is to maintain the magic. To fight tooth and nail for the survival of alchemy in this world because heaven knows it needs as many troops as it can get. To stay in close enough relationship with the muse that we become masters of noticing the truly special moments while they are happening, not afterwards. To witness our memories in real time. That is why I love the writing of Dolly Alderton. She possesses that rare and enviable ability to write about modern life as though it is already history—to catch a moment while she is still standing inside it. Now that is juice worth squeezing. Not this perfectionist bullshit. Not spending your child’s birthday party inside making beds for guests. But being there. Sitting on the countertop while your mum slices bananas for your baby’s second birthday, in the kitchen you once thought would never actually be finished, in a moment you never imagined you’d make it to. And when said baby announces that he doesn’t like the pie he has spent every day of the last month demanding to eat because his favourite mischievous monkey does, you learn to laugh at the humour of the universe rather than cry. Because of course he doesn’t like the pie. The pie was never really the point though, was it?!

So today: let’s focus on the details. Simple, beautiful outfits with some exceptional conversation pieces. Clothes that look as though a life is being lived in them, rather than arranged around being photographed in them, as we so often see. Because if you’re anything like me and are attempting to really live your life this summer (after three summers spent pregnant, sober and/or freshly postpartum, I have earned this one, thank you very much) with only a month left, perhaps it’s time to zoom in. To cut the noise on the internet. To mute that influencer who makes you feel lesser than. Wear the old necklace. Tie the ribbon in your hair. Pick a flower from the side of the road and stick that in there too, while you’re at it.

There is a lovely sort of freedom that comes when you stop trying to get everything quite so right and let something more authentic take over. Getting dressed no longer feels like an exercise in becoming and starts feeling like an expression of who you already are. Self-expression with self-possession. Like driving down a country road with the windows open, nowhere particularly important to be—hair whipping around, your hand out the window, fingertips rising and falling along the current of warm summer air. A flow. So dig out Dad’s old belt. Tilt the crown. Find yourself a really, really fantastic headscarf. Let the hems of your jeans dampen in the dewy morning grass. Notice your little life while you’re actually living. Never mind the wet ankles. Turns out, it’s all rather beautiful. Isn’t it?

Until next time my lovelies x

A little upstate treat from me to you

There’s a strange dance women have to perform when stepping into their own power. Too much confidence and you’re a snob. Too little and you’re forgettable. We learn to soften our certainty, wrap our brilliance in self-deprecation and apologize before we’ve even finished the sentence. We could spend hours discussing why those rules rarely seem to apply to men, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. If you’ve been here a while—or if you’re new (hello, little angel, I’m so happy you found us)—I’m going to make the wildly optimistic assumption that we’re all intelligent and self-aware enough to skip the introductory debate. I’m not about to spend your precious time convincing you that women deserve equality. Frankly, if we’re still arguing that in 2026 we’re all wasting perfectly good daylight. What interests me far more is something considerably less practical. Magic. Not literal magic, although after growing two children I’m increasingly unwilling to rule anything out. I’m talking about the people who refuse to let the world become ordinary. The ones who buy beautiful stationery. The couple who somehow make a cozy Tuesday dinner feel like the social event of the season. The person who insists on writing notes only by hand. The grandmother who irons linen napkins for absolutely no reason. The people who quietly insist that life should feel just a little more beautiful than it has to.

Last week I shared my favourite poem in the world—an Inuit story about a time when words were so powerful that speaking something aloud made it true. You wanted to become an animal? You simply said so. Imagine believing in language to that degree. As someone who sits here every week doing my small part to keep the written word alive, I find that idea almost painfully beautiful. I wish language still carried that sort of weight. These days we seem to drown in words, while believing almost none of them.

When I talk about magic, what I really mean is romance. Not the drug store paperback variety. I mean the romance of everyday life. The sepia filter that lives entirely inside your own head. The dog-eared novel rattling around in your handbag for the last six months. Red toenails hidden beneath battered old sandals. The chemist bouquet you insist on arranging as though it came from your own cutting garden. Four uninterrupted hours with one of your oldest girlfriends over cold white wine and completely unnecessary gossip. (Or, in my case this week, lemon drops and béarnaise-dipped chips in the back booth at Balthazar, which filled my heart cup for the better part of seven days.)

One of my oldest friends in the world, who I grew up on tour with, celebrated her fortieth birthday this week with a full-blown A Midsummer Night’s Dream dance party. There was an ivy-covered ceiling, far too many cigarettes, a dramatic thunderstorm that arrived almost theatrically on cue and an honestly irresponsible number of fairy wings considering the size of the venue. Now, if you’ve spent more than thirty seconds looking at me on the internet or otherwise, you’ll know that a Shakespeare-inspired woodland party is hardly a costume for me. It’s barely a departure from my everyday wardrobe.

I’ve always loved old clothes because I’ve always loved stories. Every faded cotton dress, every mended seam, every scrap of velvet pinned on a collar feels as though it’s lived several lives before arriving at mine. That’s the part I love. Not dressing up for the sake of it, but sewing a little more romance into ordinary life. Stitch by stitch. Drying the flowers from your child’s bedroom instead of throwing them away. Tying the ribbon from a birthday present around a pair of battered old Capezio ballet slippers. Creating an inner world that’s just a little richer than the one you’ve been handed. This isn’t Renaissance Faire. It certainly isn’t cosplay. It’s simply choosing to live in harmony with your artist.

About an hour before said fairy party, my boyfriend—who is about as golden a human being as I’ve ever met—wandered into the room and asked me what he should wear. One hour. before. a. costume. party. “I’m just not really a costume guy,” he shrugged. Can you imagine how catastrophically dull the world would be if there weren’t exactly the sorts of women carrying a spare pair of elf ears around in their handbag knowing precisely this was coming? Someone has to keep the magic alive. I think that’s why I’ve found myself craving the countryside more lately. Romance requires a little breathing room. More space means more room to dream, to wonder what could be, to fill that space with another shaggy dog, an unruly vegetable garden or whatever gloriously impractical project has taken hold of your imagination that week. My current hyper fixation is building a secret tea party deep in the woods for my children to stumble across one afternoon, as though woodland creatures assembled it while they slept. I am always, always one minor inconvenience away from adopting a donkey. The only thing standing between me and this deeply sensible life decision is my partner, who’s made it abundantly clear he’ll divorce my zany arse if I arrive home with another animal or child. Justice for the donkey, frankly.

For all the very real evils of social media—and there are plenty—I actually think it’s done something rather lovely when it comes to teaching us to notice our lives. Not perform them. Notice them. Last night we took our son Blondie to the sweetest little children’s evening J.Crew had put together at the Natural History Museum, after hours. Watching this small boy sit cross-legged beneath the T. rex skeleton, examining the wooly mammoth teeth, completely spellbound by the size of dinosaur bones in a museum emptied of almost everyone else, was about as close to pure, unbridled joy as I’ve witnessed in quite some time. No romanticizing required.

Moments like that are exactly why I understand the impulse to take photographs. People love to say we’re documenting our lives instead of living them, and sometimes that’s true, perhaps. But human beings have always collected souvenirs. Social media simply changed the format. Obviously there’s a line. If you’re dangling off the edge of a roof trying to find your best angle, we’ve perhaps lost the plot. Quietly collecting little fragments of a beautiful life? I can’t bring myself to be cynical about that. The performance isn’t the point. The noticing is. My partner often teases me because I rarely listen to music, particularly whilst in the early stages of writing a new record or EP, as I am now. The truth is, the world already has a soundtrack. It’s the hiss of the espresso machine. Someone catching up with their mum three tables over. Crickets beginning their shift just after sunset. The wind through long grass you forgot to mow. A dripping tap you’ve been meaning to fix for six months. Life is astonishingly noisy if you stop trying to drown it out. Not every moment needs 35mm and Jackson Browne softly warbling in the background. Although, admittedly, it certainly doesn’t hurt. Don’t get me wrong—I adore a grainy film photograph as much as the next sentimental woman with entirely too large of a vintage collection. I’m as guilty of romanticizing my own life as anyone could possibly be. But somewhere along the way I realized the romance doesn’t live inside the photograph. The photograph is simply proof that you noticed. The light was beautiful before you reached for your camera. It wasn’t the filter. It wasn’t the song. And it certainly wasn’t the boy standing next to you.

The most important realization of my life arrived in my mid-twenties, on the heels of a great big, messy heartbreak. The sort that moves into your bones, unpacks its bags and survives quite comfortably on the repeated affirmation that you were not, and never would be, enough. For months I did what most normal people do. Cried into wine glasses. Slept in my best friends’ beds. Kissed strangers I hoped might distract me for an evening, despite knowing perfectly well they wouldn’t. What eventually pulled me out wasn’t another man, or some grand revelation. It was something much quieter. The realization that I’d given away authorship of my own story. Some pretty-faced (& voiced) barfly whose great achievement was making me temporarily doubt myself was never going to be responsible for my downfall. Certainly not after I’d spent my whole life fighting to develop a voice of my own in a house full of noisy boys. It struck me one morning, with remarkable clarity, that the light I’d been mourning hadn’t belonged to him at all. It had belonged to me.

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Greetings from rainy, rainy upstate New York. Otherwise known as: finding indoor activities for babies in our childcare-free corner of the world while conducting the entirety of my adult conversations here with you. Speaking of which, we’re still early days over here, but I’ve finally created a chat for this Substack. Questions, comments, concerns, book recommendations, outfit dilemmas, existential crises—I want all of it. If you’re here, we’re friends, and I am at your disposal. As any of my real life friends will tell you: the fit-check texts are endless, the late night soul dives go deep, and somebody’s always cackling over something inappropriate. Fancy joining us?!

I’ve been doing what I always do when presented with long stretches of unscheduled summer: tinkering. My boyfriend calls it “busy hands.” He swears it’s a Scorpio thing, citing his dearly departed mother as Exhibit A and me as Exhibit B. I maintain there’s method to the madness. I’m reorganizing tiny socks, collections of paintings, old books. Cleaning out the fridge for sport. Wiping down countertops that were already clean. Playing nothing melodies on the piano while the children nap, chasing chickens when they don’t, negotiating daily with a nearly two-year-old who already seems emotionally prepared to move out. The days begin early and almost always require a tactical afternoon nap if my boyfriend and I have any hope of remembering why we fancy each other once the small people fall asleep. We’ve been drinking slightly too much chilled red wine and playing marathon games of Rummy 500 that always stretch to 750. On difficult days, we graduate to something he and his friends have ingeniously named “Stump Game.” The premise is simple: lightly hammer a nail into the top of a tree stump, then take turns trying to drive your opponent’s nail flush with the wood before they manage yours. It requires considerably more skill than you’d expect, becomes medically inadvisable after the second bottle, and is my highest recommendation for anyone carrying around grief, rage or the sort of existential frustration that no vacuum can pull from the dust in your bones.

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In my twenties, when I was touring playing music, I would go through what I can only describe as phases of data collection. Gathering stories, discovering characters, sharing experiences with friends, going on weird dates, wandering into places I’d never been before simply because I’d never been there. This isn’t about noticing beauty, as we’ve discussed, this is about chasing the thrill. When you’re young, said thrill often comes packaged in chaos. Starting fights with your significant other out of boredom. A questionable 2 a.m tattoo. A bit of harmless gossip. A romantic disaster. The sort of thing that feels wildly important until you're thirty-two and realize what you once considered passion was often just anxiety with excellent lighting. Eventually, you become old enough to know better. Once you’ve experienced actual consequences, doing stupid things loses a bit of its sparkle. Once you’ve hurt people, been hurt yourself, and discovered that actions don’t simply evaporate into the ether, recklessness starts to feel less romantic and more administratively exhausting. The thrill doesn’t disappear. It simply relocates.

The artist’s relationship with suffering is about as close to karmic as I can think of. There’s a push and pull to it, a sort of dance with temptation. The siren’s song of doing something slightly naughty, slightly dangerous, slightly unwise. Whether we’re trying to become better or simply dive deeper into ourselves, we spend our lives courting the temptress. And ageing, inconveniently, gets in the way of that. I’ve thought about this for years, written about this for years. If you look at the list of songs James Taylor wrote before the age of twenty-one that set him up for a lifetime of success, you’d feel a little sick to your stomach. Perhaps what we’re really mourning as we age isn’t recklessness at all. Perhaps it’s the intensity. Living with your palm on the flame. The lack of certainty. The belief that everything matters desperately. The feeling of being in love, heartbroken, excited or terrified with the force of a thousand experiences. God, I was always so afraid. It was thrilling.

The first time I french kissed a boy—a floppy-haired hippie kid in a tie dye t-shirt who lived around the corner—I trembled so violently out of fear I convinced myself I was coming down with a cold and didn’t get out of bed for two days. What a thing it is to be young. To feel every first as though it might alter the trajectory of your life forever. The things that scare us to our core—risk-taking, creativity, art, performance, love, hell, motherhood(!)—are often the very things that make us feel most alive. The most worthwhile doing. Never do I feel more like a superhero than after I’ve played a show or released new works. Never does life look more technicolour than after we’ve done something that terrified the ever-loving hell out of us.

I’ve spent the last few days with my thirteen-year-old niece. We’ve always been kindred spirits, but perhaps never more than now. Postpartum—particularly the second time around—often feels to me like puberty’s strange sequel. Puberty, with receipts. Which has me thinking a lot about the seasons of becoming. Adolescence has an excellent publicist. Entire libraries, films and albums are devoted to the agony and ecstasy of being young. The firsts. The drama. The self-discovery. The glorious self-importance of it all. Matrescence deserves better branding. Particularly with a second child, I’m much more attuned to the temporary nature of everything. But watching someone I’ve known since birth navigate her own becoming has been fascinating.

Oh, the angst. The discomfort. The desperate longing to be older. The starving for independence. She has incredible taste in music & told me about feeling low after a frightening experience and how listening to sad music somehow made it feel more beautiful. Girl after my own heart. Last night I dragged her to a brand event with me. We ate pink tiramisu, tried on every eyelet dress in sight and giggled at the folks taking it all far too seriously. If you ever need reminding how wonderful adulthood can be, spend a day with a teenager. The grass truly is always greener. I remember manipulating my father into buying me a pair of black burnout velvet heels so inappropriately high I could scarcely walk two steps in them. Getting my ears pierced was a similar operation, masterminded largely by my grandmother. The sneakiness. The scheming. The innocent pursuit of autonomy. That is the stuff of life. As we age, however, the stakes rise. Consequences become heavier. We adapt.

Now listen. I am a writer, an artist and, notably, a Scorpio. All that to say, I am a feeler. Good lord, am I a feeler. But thanks to several terrible relationships (shout out to the drummer of many an indie band), years of self-exploration, a few mistakes I could not undo & these days, a very low-dose & game changing SSRI, I’ve found a bit more balance. Because once you’ve had to look someone in the eye and realize your personal growth project accidentally steamrolled their feelings, the thrill loses its shine. All that temptation fades once you’ve met the consequence face to face.

And so we daydream. Because daydreaming, increasingly, feels crucial to our emotional survival. There’s a Joan Didion quote I’ve been returning to lately. When asked why she used her good china every day, she simply replied, “Every day is all there is.” Honestly, file under things that alter your brain chemistry for life. Don’t get me wrong. I am as emotionally attached to my ratty white cotton nighties as any person could reasonably be, but in the midst of complete global chaos, life feels marginally lighter when you look bloody fabulous. Crying objectively feels better in an antique feather trimmed robe. Sulking in satin just gives you that extra oomph. A minor existential crisis benefits enormously from Simon & Garfunkel playing in the background. If the artist’s job is to elevate the experience of being human, fashion deserves a major seat at the table. And if your news cycle resembles anything close to mine, bad news appears to be arriving via industrial pipeline these days. Frankly, given the current state of the world, we could always use a bit more beauty to wallow through. Couture needs to step up its game.

In the last week alone, every member of my immediate family has been dealing with some entirely separate tragedy. To spare you the gory details, I’ll simply say this: whoever placed a curse on us, your work here is complete. Could you kindly remove the pin from the voodoo doll now? Mercy!! In the meantime, while my girlfriends and I aggressively exchange astrological Instagram posts, assuring one another the end of this particular hellscape is imminent, I will share a small suggestion.

Look fabulous in your worry. Put on your best dress and buy yourself soft serve cone from an old fashioned truck. Sit on a bench in your favourite park wearing ladylike ballerinas. Wear fantastically large sunglasses. Let the ice cream drip down your fingers. Suddenly you’re Jane Fonda. You’re Charlotte Rampling. You’re the chicest, most mysterious person in the world. Wear that one of a kind antique piece usually reserved for special occasions simply to go and buy a coffee. And while you’re sitting there, take a moment to remember that sometimes—just sometimes—the grass is green because you’re already standing on it. Because every day is all there is.

Until next time.x

if its good enough for Fonda

Yesterday, I thought of a silly joke that I knew my boyfriend would appreciate. By the time we found a spare moment to speak uninterrupted—a luxury now roughly equivalent to securing a table at Minetta for a Thursday night date—the joke had vanished completely. Not the punchline. The entire bloody thing. All that remained was the vague memory that it had been inappropriate enough to make him laugh. This morning, driving back into the city with two small children hollering from the backseat and the exact amount of post–long-weekend anxiety you’d expect circulating through the car, I remembered it. Naturally, after building it up for twelve hours, it landed with all the force of a damp cocktail napkin. He smirked politely. We moved on. If that isn’t baby brain, I don’t know what is.

Now, about the long weekend itself. I enjoy a good time as much as the next person. These days I just require a bit of notice before switching from Mama Mode to Party Mode. The transition isn’t impossible—it simply requires a mental customs declaration. So being surprised with a slew of my rather American boyfriend’s college buddies over the weekend for an impromptu Fourth of July celebration didn’t exactly send me into full Frank the Tank, as you might expect. I don’t mean that motherhood has made me uptight. Quite the opposite. But somewhere in the back of my mind lives the loving yet unwavering judgment of my own darling mother. With that unshakeable fact, I’ve become fairly strict about drinking any more than a few sips around my children. Toit, as they say. And so, while explosives were being launched from my driveway and grown men were reliving their glory days, I gleefully tucked into bed, watching the countryside sunset and scrolling Substack.

Which brings me to the point. Lately I’ve found myself landing in a very particular corner of the internet. A quieter one. A slower one. A place where women seem less interested in building personal brands and more interested in building actual lives. Community, or something like it. Discovering women like Harling Ross and Sophia Roe, I keep finding myself stopping mid-sentence and thinking, shit, that’s me. Not because our lives are identical, but because they’re articulating something I think many women experience and struggle to name. The becoming. That strange migration of self that occurs when motherhood arrives. The tectonic plates that define your centre of gravity shifting beneath your feet while everyone else carries on as though nothing particularly notable has happened. One day you’re you. The next you’re you, but also someone’s mother. Lucy Jones writes beautifully about this in Matrescence, a book I have recommended so aggressively at this point that I deserve a commission. You’re not trying to hack your morning routine. You’re trying to sit on a porch somewhere and watch the world go by. You’re trying to find a sense of balance in all this unsteadiness before moving toward the next thing.

For all the discourse around disruption and visibility and “growing an audience,” what I keep finding here are women building something more authentic. Making thoughtful things. Women documenting the strange, beautiful, often exhausting business of becoming more themselves. In a world where everyone appears to be screaming for attention, there is something almost rebellious about simply making good work and allowing it to find its people.

The internet rewards spectacle. Fashion increasingly rewards attention over elegance. Politics has become so indistinguishable from reality television that half the time we can’t tell the difference. Everyone is shouting. Everyone is performing. Everyone is trying desperately to be the main character. And yet I wonder if the answer isn’t to shout louder. Maybe the revolution looks quieter than we imagined. Maybe authenticity survives not through domination, but through persistence. Maybe the very best thing we can do is just continue making beautiful things, in public. Maybe the antidote to all this noise isn’t more noise, but more depth. Soul. Taste. Craft. The slow accumulation of a life well lived.

Patti Smith says that artists create because they have to. Not in some quest for public success. Not because anyone is watching. Because the work itself is the point. She talks about building a good name, keeping your name clean, protecting your work. That the body of work becomes the trophy. Not the likes. Not the followers. Not the viral moments. The work itself.

And if I may be so presumptuous as to speak on behalf of this tiny corner of the internet, I think that’s what many women are doing here. Writing. Making. Thinking. Continuing. Building the body. One semi-coherent child-interrupted paragraph at a time. Frankly, maintaining a mildly functioning creative brain while a toddler is actively trying to ruin your white trousers is a remarkable achievement all by itself. So, if you’ve written a newsletter, started a business, launched a project, made a painting, planted a garden, raised a child, or simply managed to hold onto a thought long enough to finish it this week, pat yourself on the back, baby girl. You’re fighting the good fight.

Since shuttering my company six years ago and stepping into freelance life, I’ve released two full-length albums, two EPs, written a book of poems, consulted for fashion houses, renovated two homes, started a small but mighty headscarf brand, moved back forth across the country more times than I can count, grown two entire human beings (bones & all) from scratch inside of my body, and somehow maintained a loving relationship in the process. When I write it down, it sounds vaguely psychotic. And yet, like so many women I know, I still find myself feeling as though I’m somehow starting over. Like I haven’t cracked the surface of the things I want to accomplish. Like I haven’t done nearly enough.

Perhaps this isn’t even about motherhood. Perhaps it’s about womanhood. About living in a culture that consistently asks women to prove their value while simultaneously benefiting from it. Because here’s the thing: creative labour is labour. Taste is labour. Experience is labour. Aesthetic intelligence is labour. Emotional intelligence is labour. Just because those things are intangible doesn’t make them any less valuable. In fact, I’d argue the opposite.

We have become remarkably comfortable expecting women to give away their expertise for free. Their recommendations. Their creative direction. Their perspective. Yet perspective is accumulated, and accumulation takes time. If someone has spent twenty years developing taste, expertise, aesthetic discernment, industry knowledge, and creative instincts, why does that suddenly become less valuable because the product is intellectual rather than physical? If a woman had spent years building a successful brand, for example, would we question the value of the product she produced? So why do we question the value of the knowledge she acquired while doing it?

It’s time we stop treating female expertise as though it were an endlessly renewable natural resource. Our brains are valuable. Our experience is valuable. Our perspective is valuable. And if we spend years developing those things, refining them, sharpening them, why should we be embarrassed to ask for something in return? The older I get, the more convinced I become that our greatest currency isn’t productivity. It’s perspective.

Now, I could absolutely come into your closet toting two frosty skinny margs and tell you what to wear to a wedding, a blind date, or flower arranging workshop. I could tell you which films to watch, which records to listen to, which obscure references to casually drop at dinner parties to seem effortlessly cool. And honestly, we’d probably have a wonderful time doing it. But the truth is, the value was never the clothing. It was never the objects or the one liners. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been circling around all day. Not motherhood exactly. Not creativity per se. Not even ambition. It was always the eye.

The funny thing about taste is that people only really notice it when it’s good. Nobody asks where it came from. They simply assume it appeared fully formed one day, like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus carrying a perfectly edited wardrobe and an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure 1970s French films. Maybe she’s born with it. The reality is somewhat less glamorous. Taste is accumulated. It is years spent paying attention. Years spent getting things wrong. Years spent collecting references, instincts, observations, little scraps of beauty and absurdity that eventually assemble themselves into one unique perspective. And perspective, inconveniently, is not free. Nor should it be.

If there is a revolution coming, perhaps it doesn’t begin with shouting. Perhaps it begins with valuing ourselves correctly. After all, I am woman. I contain multitudes.

And so do you.

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I’ve been on board with the woo for a very long time. I believe in energy exchange and soul purposes and astrology and fate, to some degree. I believe certain things are meant to be. Not everything, necessarily—I’m not suggesting there’s a cosmic project manager assigning us parking spots and Craigslist missed connections (although wouldn’t it be sort of fab if there were?!)—but I do think there’s a current to life. A flow. A series of nudges that push us toward something greater. Because if I don’t believe that, then everything is random. And frankly, the randomness of the universe feels a little too…random for the type A hiding deep in me beneath the cloak of incense ash and hippie whatnot.

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Truthfully, trying to exercise my adult brain again has brought us together in a rather organic, lovely way and I’m running with it. Being able to speak in full sentences is officially on the horizon. In fact, I’m even going on my first child-free weekend away on Friday.

Look Ma, I’m human again. Wait, I am Ma. Look…me?

Did you see that video of Kate Moss twitching about at Paris fashion week? Now imagine that, minus supermodel looks, slew of photographers (& probable drug issue) and you’ll have a vague image of me in this moment. Currently unnervingly caffeinated, spracking about my local coffee shop, wearing a little more Havaiana than high heel but really, who’s counting?

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I just came off a 12-day childcare-free stint directly into a two-day shoot, directly into at least one and a half sick children and, potentially, an earache. Does anyone else begin exhibiting symptoms the second someone near them so much as clears their throat? Is my father’s Larry David-esque old Jewish man hypochondria finally revealing itself within me? Concerning? Yes. Inevitable? Also, yes.

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There’s a funny nervous energy in the air. One of my best mates says it’s the Blue Moon. My mum and I have been sending increasingly unhinged horoscopes back and forth in our DMs, and another girlfriend couldn’t make it to lunch yesterday without a restorative glass of Chablis. Frankly, it’s a bizarre time to be a person. Hey, at least we’re all in it together?

Over here, postpartum round two has manifested as a charming influx of crippling social anxiety (you know that PMS phase where you’re convinced everyone is mad at you? Imagine that taking up a month-long residency in your brain). Pair that with the highly questionable 4 p.m. caffeine hit required to survive the mayhem-filled witching hour known as the solo double-baby bedtime routine & you have a lethal combination. The outcome? Me staying up considerably later than my usual 9pm bedtime, deep diving way into the night. (This is also how the beginning of many creative periods of my life have begun, fingers crossed that my braincells start getting to work soon after their extended mat-leave.) So, rather than fight it, I’m attempting to channel the madness into something semi-productive. Or, at the very least, share a few excellent discoveries from the approximately 198 tabs currently ricocheting between my phone and laptop. My descent into madness is your summer wardrobe. You’re welcome.

From the weather to the collective consciousness, everything feels wildly fickle at the moment. Cold one day, boiling the next. Theres a stop & go to it all. I can’t seem to get off the ground, or really even believe it’s June at all. While we haven’t quite reached full stoop-margarita season yet, I will say that the Sunday-night lineup outside Bar Pitti felt as definitive a sign of summer’s arrival as any groundhog could hope to provide. The sort of downtown Punxsutawney Phil, if you will. Because really, what says summer in New York better than an icy Diet Coke, a bowl of pasta hot enough to remove the roof of your mouth, and some really top-tier people-watching?

The first wedding I ever attended with my boyfriend, I spent much of it alone. I’ve always been suspiciously comfortable in my own company and would rather sit in a corner with a glass of wine observing humanity than attempt to infiltrate a friend group with two decades of shared lore. During what remains the best best-man speech I’ve ever heard, a story surfaced about a frat-boy ritual from the groom’s younger years involving a roommate streaking through the apartment, screaming, and launching himself, fully nude onto the other boy’s beds. They called it “Bonus Round.” The delivery was ridiculous, juvenile, and objectively hilarious.

Well, this is another kind of bonus round. Girl bonus round.

Less male genitalia. More beautiful clothing.

A themeless, gloriously unfocused, while equally as unhinged peek into my late-night scrolling habits; the images, objects, and rabbit holes currently providing tiny sparks of joy to my foggy postpartum brain. A guided tour through the tabs I cannot close. Joy for joy’s sake.

So many open windows. So little time.

Let’s get into it.

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Coffee and I have, at best, a complicated relationship. Well, rather, caffeine and I. Deny it as I may, I simply was not born with the genetic makeup for it. The jolt sends my anxious nervous system into a tailspin, and yet I have no interest in a life without the ritual. I love the romance of it all. The smell at dawn. The ceremony of pouring a cup (I take mine piping hot with a splash of raw cream) and slipping back into bed. The built-in excuse to step away when staring down a blank page, an untouched guitar, or an inbox that feels more than vaguely hostile, as they tend to so often these days. “Just grabbing a quick coffee” has rescued me more times than I care to admit.

In my twenties, those moments belonged to cigarettes, mainly. So. Many. Cigarettes. Good lord, how I miss smoking. Even years on. Funny enough, during both my pregnancies, I never missed the wine, didn’t daydream of martinis or even an epic Omakase. It was the waft of a lit Marlboro or American Spirit that could drag me directly to the edge of temptation. Thats nostalgia for you. I finally quit at 29, alongside my best girlfriend, when consequences begun to feel less like a suggestion and more like a certainty. When that time came, the most surprising thing wasn’t the absence of nicotine, but the sudden abundance of free time. These habits aren’t just indulgences; they’re infrastructure. They give shape to a day. Without them, I felt like I was left…lingering a bit.

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Happy New Year, babies! Apologies for skipping January altogether, but I’ve been deep in the throes of newborn-dom 2.0. While I’m able to access a lighter perspective than the first go-round, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t all-encompassing. The difference this time is my acute awareness of its impermanence—the only constant being all the change, how brief it all is. Schmaltzy, I know. But with that, I’m finding myself more present, more capable of meeting the difficult moments with fewer tears and the hard-headed-woman attitude I find myself most comfortable in.

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It’s only been a month since our last installment, which — from where I’m standing — feels like progress. (Pats self on back, stirs stew on the stove, cheers’ n/a cocktail dramatically)

I’ve reached that glorious part of pregnancy where I can no longer see below my belly button, I have to force my sweet boyfriend to shave my legs & I get genuinely winded walking around the block. Ah, the glamour, the good ol’ days. Delightful. Still, I have to say — this round has been oddly lovely. Harder to get dressed, perhaps, sure, but emotionally… cozier.

I have, for many years, had this completely unscientific theory that the human body thrives in the climate it was raised in — a kind of biological home turf advantage. When I lived full-time in California, I tried my might—& by golly, at times even succeeded—to truly embody a golden lady of the canyon. Yet no matter how many Gunne Saxe & Dôen dresses I frolicked in, how many tea leaves I planted in the little hillside garden, I always found my hair to be a bit more akin to straw & my skin a bit more ashen than the various Joni’s & Carly’s who came chasing down that dream before me. Blame the Canadian roots. Something about those long winters hardwires you for moisture retention & bottomless salted bathwater consumption. My hair behaves, my skin glows, every fabric feels kitten-soft on my well-oiled up skin, & no one blinks an eye when I drink eighteen cups of Earl Grey a day (except maybe the OB-GYN currently monitoring my caffeine intake—sorry, doc). Colder weather, in other words, is my natural habitat.

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Truth is, I needed a little hiatus to deal with some real life stuff: the kind that grabs you by the hair, the heart, & mainly the calendar. But we are so back. And the good news is, while I was busy tending to non-internet (ie: purely based in joy) related things like bills, baby bums & life logistics, summer quietly crept in on us. Okay, technically the solstice isn’t here yet. But I say semantics. I’m sitting in a Soho café double-fisting a cold iced tea & a fresh melon juice, with multicolour beaded necklaces & white linen pants on. The calendar can argue with my outfit & a joie de vivre I haven’t felt since September.

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We’re on day four of English-level rain, & I must admit I’m feeling… wilted, at best. My mood these days seems to have the fragility of a garden rose. At the end of a long spring, the absence of sunshine feels like the absence of joy. Cruising around the city in soggy jeans is simply not it. Not even the best cup of fresh mint tea in all of downtown can snap me out of it.

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Let me begin, in true Canadian fashion, with my most heartfelt I’m sorry for last week’s hiatus. I’ve just resurfaced from the metaphorical rabbit hole that has been a very full two weeks without childcare. As those of you who have been there will understand, my brain was in airplane mode last week. Frankly, I’m shocked I’m still stringing semi-sensical sentences together at this point. Coming out of my hovel —matted hair, baby puree splattered Adidas trackies, dignity slightly intact — to something miraculous: New York has thawed. Spring slipped in on us like a well-timed DM. The tulips uptown are in bloom & the memes about surviving another hellish winter about are bountiful. Vitamin D is once again coursing through the veins of every city dweller, & sexy season — praise be — has arrived. You know the drill. Time to unearth the epilator, exfoliate like your life depends on it, or toss the razor & let your body hair live its best, unbothered life. Sexy is subjective & I support you in all forms of it. Cheering you on from the sidelines as you own your truth. After months of being hidden behind heat-tech-clad bars, the heads, shoulders, knees, & toes of New Yorkers are finally coming out to play. Is it obvious I’ve scarcely spoken to another adult in two weeks? Missed you guys.

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