Forget everything that you have ever been told about “developing your personal style.” It is bullshit. Personal style does not exist, unless you are truly doing something unique that no one has ever done before, and in that case, you probably are dressing like a freak in the vain of early Project Runway seasons.

What people usually mean when they discuss “developing personal style” is actually a shopping list disguised as something more thoughtful than what it actually is. To look like “you,” the way you want to look, is often a painstaking process full of poorly-fitted garments for the sake of experimentation, risks that may have been better left untaken, and an utter disregard for this thing we’ve started calling “color seasons.” What we think of as “personal style” is usually much messier, more embarrassing, more acquisitive, more contradictory, and more dependent on time and adjusting for lifestyle nuances. You’re not going to watch one TikTok and immediately know how to dress yourself. You’re going to spend a lot of money on dumb shit that you hate before you figure out what you actually like.

This is a good thing.

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Advice like “find three style words,” “determine your season,” “make a Pinterest board,” can help you understand your aesthetic preferences but they cannot generate taste, a unique taste or otherwise. When someone looks really great in something and it suits her, there’s a certain aura about it that can’t be faked. (Hello, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction essay for foids.) It usually comes down to a flattering fit (a woman who knows her body), a confident tension between excess and restraint (a woman who knows what she likes and how she lives), and a certain kind of ease (a woman who knows herself). But really, you must ask yourself: do I like my clothes? Or do I want other people to like my clothes?

Taste is something that I guess I would describe as “pre-rational.” We can’t explain why we like the things we like, and of course we can’t dismiss the psychic significance of memetic desire and overexposure to certain aesthetics and trinkets (or else trends wouldn’t be a thing), but it’s important to separate what we like because we innately enjoy it and what we can borrow from the zeitgeist when it suits us. Personally, I’m drawn to the emotions of clothing, the movement of it, and the romance of it. This is why Bardot will always be one of my style icons. Her clothes, particularly in film, are simple and beautiful, but more than anything else, they suit the way she moves through the scenes. High slits allow her to bike barefoot through Saint-Tropez, her messy updos scream “I might have just gotten fucked. I might be on my way to get fucked. I might be both.” Her personality oozes sensuality and a certain precariousness and her clothes are an outward signifier of that. She isn’t a sex symbol because she dresses the way she does, she dresses the way she does because she is a sex symbol.

I, on the other hand, am a mom. I am a fractional marketing executive. I am happily married. I live in an old Craftsman house in the middle of a small former coal settlement surrounded by charming rednecks who think that I am weird. I can borrow from Bardot, but I will never be her. While I would probably be right at home at La Madrague, that is simply not my reality. I have no plans of abandoning my child to be carefree and sexy all day and I will never be French. I borrow the silhouettes, the fabrics, the high slits, but I must make them my own.

This, I think, is where the “personal” part actually enters personal style. We don’t invent something no one has ever worn before, but we use our intuition to decide which of our references to borrow from, what to leave behind, and what must be altered to make it through the day with our outfits more or less intact. I bought a beautiful white cotton babydoll dress from DÔEN which I wore with suede knee-high boots and my hair up in a Pamela Anderson-inspired updo. It was simple and unfussy, however, it immediately attracted every bit of chaos from my toddler and within 30 minutes of putting it on, had become the landing point for a chocolate milk spill which I fought tooth and nail to get rid of. After multiple stain treatments and washes, I placed the dress toward the back of my wardrobe rack for a “girls night out” or an “afternoon writing in the coffee shop by myself.” Now, I opt for the same feeling, but decidedly more toddler-proof. Not entirely, because that is so not me, but at least a little less precious.

I like the idea of there being a tension between something elegant and something undone. It turns out that this look suits my lifestyle quite well. A button-down with the sleeves pushed up and only one or two buttons done. A skirt that is slightly wrinkled with a nice pair of shoes. A casual black tank top partially tucked into tailored linen blend slacks. This is when, like Bardot on the screen, I feel most uninhibited to live my life. A little bit of polish makes the disorder seem like a style choice instead of something unintentional. Sometimes it is. You’ll never know. The highest compliment I can give an outfit is that once I am wearing it, I stop thinking about it, worrying about it, fussing with it.

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I love silk and lace but if I wear them together or on their own, they make me look like a hotel hooker because my boobs are just too big and my shape too “naturally-charged” to look cute and effortless. I downplay this with woven leather, with suede, with other natural textures. I like very feminine silhouettes but I mix them with boxy blazers, loafers, or thick knits to make them less “I am sexy” and more “I might be sexy.” Part of this could be a holdover from my homeschool days wherein modesty was a way of life, some of it could be insecurities about my body. It’s become “my look” though, so I’m going to embrace it. It’s almost like adding one complementary element protects me from the implication of the other. Clothes are signs, whether we want them to be or not, and the body wearing them changes their meaning. Roland Barthes would probably have something more elegant to say about this, but clothes are signs and unfortunately my tits are part of the syntax.

Hair becomes important here.

Carrie Bradshaw’s style in Sex and the City is often questionable and too much “of its time” but her best looks are a masterclass in incongruity. Personally, I do not like the “beautiful dress with a weird belt,” or “otherwise normal outfit with a huge stupid necklace or kind of insane hat that no one has ever worn before.” I do, however, love that her hair is her signature accessory. Her styling is a refusal to make every element belong to precisely the same aesthetic universe, which adds texture and personality. In the summer, I embrace my natural curls because the last thing I want to do is slave away under the heat of my Dyson Air Wrap when I could be outside enjoying the sunshine. I think, like Carrie Bradshaw, this helps to bring in an element of undone playfulness. Rather than my white dress from The Row looking too much like “Marnie form GIRLS business casual,” it looks like “I just put this on and I feel good.”

Not to put too neat a bow on this, but I think we should reconsider the idea of “personal style” to something closer to “lived-in style” than a set of aesthetic decrees and commandments. Pinterest and Instagram can show you what will look good on someone else, but they can’t tell you what’ll make you feel your best. So maybe there are “rules” but they’re less about some didactic from an influencer or celebrity who wants to sell you something and more about just figuring it out for yourself. Consider this post your permission to buy something ridiculous just because you like it. I’m sure you can find something in your closet to go along with it and you will look great. And if not, you can always sell it on Depop and try again.

xo, e.m.

Though midday is still hot and sticky here in Southern West Virginia, early mornings have revealed an almost imperceptible shift. While the sun is still low, the air is cool and devoid of humidity. By the afternoon, there are more bees than usual in the garden, collecting their pollen in preparation for the seasons to change once again. I watch them float through the clover and over to the tomatoes, too many to count, about to burst at the seams if not picked by the evening. The bees neither plot nor plan, they just know when change is coming, and so do I.

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I saw two of God’s creatures maimed this week, and neither particularly moved me, though I feel like they should have. I was driving home from Twin Falls with the baby on the two-lane. I saw a car swerve, a plume of red dirt from the road stirred in the sudden movement, and a dog limp away. I thought he was okay, until I saw him lying stiff and motionless on the opposite side of the highway about a mile down the road the next day. This was the third dead dog I’ve seen in as many months here. My husband once told me that rednecks have little regard for animal life. He and I were taking our daughter, now two years old, out for dessert after her birthday dinner. We saw a group of teens driving around in the movie theater parking lot: speeding, swerving, young girls hanging out of windows and sunroofs, making poor decisions as teens do in the final days of summer. One girl opened the passenger side door of a moving vehicle and her friend fell out, smashing her head on the asphalt. A mother and her daughter approached, walking toward the nail salon next door, and asked, “what happened to her?” as a dozen teens ran over to see if she was alright. “She fell out,” was all I could say. “I’m calling the cops,” the woman responded. I wondered if the disregard for animal life extended to humans as well as I heard a boy jump out of his lifted pickup truck and say, “I told her to stop being such a retarded bitch.”

I looked at my daughter, melted strawberry frozen yogurt dripping from her perfect, round chin. I considered the woman calling the cops and her daughter next to her, appearing to be the same age as the girl who fell out of the car. I thought about how if she had only been going to the nail salon with her mom as well, instead of trying to impress boys in the movie theater parking lot, her life wouldn’t have been so violently and unexpectedly altered that night. I felt more steward than matron, that my duty was larger than the container that could hold it and realized that all I could do was be present here, in this moment, and in every moment, with my small child, though the tenderness of it all is often so unbearable.

I cannot think of her as anything other than what she is now. I can’t fathom her as the same tiny newborn that was removed from my womb a few days before she was due. She no longer cries the same, moves the same, even looks the same. I can’t imagine her as a little girl, a preteen, a teen, an adult, an old woman. My brain simply will not let me. Although I know she is not going to be a carefree and funny little toddler with soft curls, a round tummy, full rosy cheeks, and a laugh that could cure any illness or disease forever, I want to think of her as only ever being what she currently is.

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Motherhood is easy in some ways and agonizing in others. With every small change—every new word my daughter learns, every new skill she masters, every new freckle on her perfect skin—I am reminded of how relentless the passing of time is, and how it has seemed to accelerate beyond my comprehension, beyond my comfort, and continues to do so. It’s not the responsibility that frightens me but the sheer multitude of everything that is so out of my control. I used to pray every day and dedicate my sweet child to God, until it seemed too fraught with peril to do so. I trust Him, I know how utterly powerless I am, but still, surrender seems irresponsible. Ultimately, I know that what will be will be, but I want to hold on and keep her safe from even the things that are bigger than me, as numerous and unwieldy as they may be.

There is a storm rolling in, flooding overtaking so much of our home state. Our holler has become darkened by clouds and as I write this, claps of thunder are shaking the house, lightning illuminating the sky in a way that is both terrifying and resplendent, sheets of rain angrily descending from heaven. The windows are rattling in their frames and the lights are flicking on and off. I can hear water coming into the basement, which is not uncommon in our 115-year-old home, but I still wonder if we’re going to be swept away. In the horror of it all, I am glued to the baby monitor, where my sweet girl is sleeping through it all.

Later this evening, or maybe tomorrow if the storms keep up, we will go outside and we will play in the clover. She’ll watch the bees, fascinated, because she has not yet been stung. And I’ll watch her, fascinated.

xo, e.m.

Every so often, I allow myself to fall for the “feel-good” propaganda decorating my Instagram Explore page between schizo posts from Middle America and editorial images of beautiful but wildly impractical shoes that I would like to purchase. It’s usually something clearly fake but heartwarming nonetheless, like “blind puppy and deaf toddler become best friends.” Every so often, a piece by a German photographer named Katja Kemnitz makes the rounds and I scroll through the images while crying just a little bit. The project features before and after images of stuffed animals. On one side, sitting pretty: new, pristine, and perfectly fluffy. On the other, transformed into something tattered and mangled and nightmare-like. She calls the project “Too Much Love,” and of it, she’s said:

“I show old, much-loved teddies and dolls and compare them with as good as new doppelgangers. I think the broken stuffed animals have a lot of soul. The project is inspired by my older daughter, who took her plush dog everywhere when she was little. One day I found this dog again without button eye and torn seams in the store and bought it. She did not like him. The old one was better and could not be replaced.”

I could say the same thing about my naturally curly hair, which I have blown out almost religiously since sometime in late 2022, when my husband and I started dating. This is not because he dislikes it curly. In fact, it is the opposite: he perhaps likes it this way a little too much. After about thirty minutes of television with him, there is bound to be a section of hair, once bouncy and fluffy, now flat and frizzy at the same time. He twists strands around his fingers, runs his hand along them, contorts and turns and combs with his fingernails until my hair looks less the way I want it to and more like the “after” image in one of Katja’s photographs.

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If you don’t have curly hair, here is a small primer on what it’s like to style it: you wash it well, condition it twice, comb the conditioner through. You towel-dry slightly and apply your ideal combination of mousses, creams, pomades, and serums (a combination you’ve painstakingly ascertained after spending thousands of dollars and countless hours experimenting), say a prayer, do a little scrunch, and hope it dries looking “good enough.” These rules are, in general, mutable and vary from person to person. There is one unbreakable commandment though, which is this: once your work is done, you do not touch the curls. Ever. For any reason. They should be treated like a museum piece: something you may admire, but only from a slight distance. My husband’s most obvious love language is physical touch, which means that his appreciation must be tactile. And the thing is, I love when he plays with my hair. It’s all any woman wants from her man to be honest, so rather than asking him to refrain, something that would harm us both, I spend the hour or so required to just blow it out. Somewhere along the way, without discussion or decree, I began presenting myself in the form best equipped to survive his affection.

I’ve learned that this is the difference between being admired and being loved. Admiration leaves its objects intact. It stands at the appropriate distance, as if behind glass. It observes the rules, remains aloof, and leaves everything more or less as it found it. Love is reckless. Love picks you up and holds you to its chest, love pulls you to its side of the bed in the middle of the night, sometimes calmly and carefully, sometimes writhing in sticky, sweaty passion. Love holds you by the ear and drags you anywhere it so desires, it wears you down from force and friction. It breaks you, over and over again, even when you believe that you cannot be broken once more. And then, it makes you whole again.

We had to put our daughter’s beloved Moustillon through the wash because she threw up on him after enjoying her dinner perhaps a little too much for her own good and the size of her tiny toddler stomach. Moustillon lost some of his fuzziness in the washing machine and is now marred by stains, but so loved nonetheless. Moustillon is on his way to becoming something else: not merely an older version of the toy we bought, but an entirely unique creature, the thin fur on his soft body worn thinner in the precise places where my child’s hands have returned to it again and again. A new Moustillon might be more perfect. He would also be less correct.

There is a Bibio song called “Curls,” a painfully beautiful vignette of memories (which also kind of sounds like it could be a Christmas song and I’m not sure why?), that has caused me to feel dimly bereaved for years and yet, I cannot stop listening to it. In it, the singer recalls how a woman’s curls and scent summon the most powerful kind of nostalgia. It’s not as pained as it is resolute, but not without a fair dose of longing. “Who’d have thought that we’d break the things we like?” he asks. I had always considered this as a lamentation of past carelessness or avoidance. Now, though, I think this is the natural outcome of loving something—really, truly loving something—not calmly or faintly, not from a distance, but deafeningly and from painfully close. This, coincidentally, is the only kind of love that I believe is worth the inevitable downsides.

Moustillon cannot remember what he was when my husband purchased him from Walmart as I waited in the car with our screaming newborn. I can remember the person I was before that moment though. And the moments before I was sliced open and that baby was removed from my womb. And before my husband and I said “I love you” for the first time. And before I made him ghormeh sabzi and we watched The Witch on Halloween for our first date. And before our eyes locked onto each other from across a crowd at an art gallery opening, the only art gallery in our part of the state, a few months earlier. I was wearing my hair curly that night. I was freshly-heartbroken and I quickly became too shy to continue holding his gaze. Instead, I assumed he had a crush on the friend I was with, and resented him for it. Love conjures all sorts of fears in you that cause you to rethink your entire raison d’être, if you’re doing it correctly.

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I often think back to the woman I was at that gallery opening: blonde, tentative, not yet scarred across the belly from being surgically opened. My curls were untouched and unflattened and my life belonged exclusively to me, a truth that, at the time, devastated me, as I was still trying to outrun the notion that I the person I was convinced I’d build a life with didn’t want it. I was something far beyond heartbroken, I was so committed to the possibility of being overlooked that I transformed a man’s obvious interest into a minor betrayal before he even had a chance to speak to me. I remember this version of me fondly, but I do not necessarily want to become her again.

Sharing a life with my husband has made me smoother around some edges and more jagged in others. He has rearranged the way I sleep and the amount of time I am capable of remaining angry. My daughter has left my body softer, permanently marked, and for a while, more useful to someone other than me. There are toys in every room that was once meticulously staged, tiny fingerprints on surfaces I’ve all but given up on cleaning, and at least one person touching me during nearly every hour I spend at home. I once thought domestic love would make me feel secure. I had not anticipated how physically disheveled the security of it all would be, or just how deep what it would ask of me would go. I wake up and go to sleep feeling like Katja’s eldest daughter’s dog plush: ugly but held so closely.

I spent the last week back in Philadelphia visiting my family, going to dinner with my best friend, and reuniting with my extended family down the shore. I wore my hair curly because it was easier, and not one person touched it because my husband stayed back home in West Virginia. I sent him a photo and he told me how much he liked it. I imagined him spinning strands of it around his fingers and wondered whether, if I coated his hands in Gisou honey oil, my hair might look better than it had before after thirty minutes on the sofa. In the grand scheme of it all, though, it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes love breaks the things it likes. Sometimes it transforms them into something frizzy. And to me, every single time, being transformed is always so much better than simply remaining untouched.

xo, e.m.

Last month, as I stood in the middle of my closet room, set on purging at least 50% of it, I thought about something that my dear friend Mallory had said about the one and only Chet Hanks. Of his Patois accent, she noted that he is “a museum of every person he has ever loved.” As I mucked my way through the mire of nearly two decades of accumulated apparel, I felt exactly the same.

I ran my fingers along a chiffon dress I’d bought with a specific man in mind and never had a chance to wear for him and thusly hadn’t worn at all (tags are still attached), a band shirt I bought to impress my then-boyfriend (later actually dated a guy in the band from the shirt), and a big comfy hoodie that I stole from my husband and I hope he isn’t reading this because I like to wear it around the house when he’s at work and pretend that it’s his arms wrapped around me. Atop my dresser sit several half-finished bottles of perfume. There was CHANCE by Chanel, still the same bottle I bought when I was 21 because my then-boyfriend smelled it at the mall and said he’d liked it. There’s the much more elusive Burning Barbershop by DS&DURGA, from my New York era and subsequent reinvention to seem more cool and composed for the guy I wanted to “win back” after he dumped me.

Everywhere I look, there is evidence of the men I’ve adored, respected, or at least liked a whole lot. They’ve scattered themselves across my preferences and tastes, from music I never would have listened to without their influence but still enjoy, to opinions I’ve formed in either steadfast agreement with or stalwart disagreement against their civic perspectives (depending on how well they lived their politics). One recommended a book, The Gift of Fear, which I never quite finished, though its whole thesis has somehow become a load-bearing part of my everyday worldview nonetheless. I have hip-hop songs I produced with another that lie collecting virtual dust in a God-forsaken corner of a Dropbox account I may or may not even have the password to anymore. I might not be able to access them, but I still listen to the albums that inspired them: J Dilla’s Donuts and Mos Def’s The Ecstatic, specifically. Though all of these influences are now embedded as a part of my interior world as if they were always present, if I think about them just a moment too long, I can draw a straight line between the sentiment and the man who inspired it. There is no question in my mind as to when I decided that The Ecstatic is one of the best hip-hop albums of all time, how I know what is the best vegan ice cream in Philadelphia, and what distinguishes a real Rolex from a fake one (it’s so much more than just the movement, by the way). Each came from a man I once thought the world of, who thought enough of me to share some piece of himself. Long after he was gone, it remained.

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Though it would make for a much cleaner narrative, not every inheritance is so courteous as to arrive with its provenance intact. I know why I immediately set the thermostat as cold as it will go and turn on Forensic Files when I get into a new hotel room and I know why I have strong opinions on the Calgary Hitmen logo. Other preferences, however, have been absorbed into my bloodstream so completely that the citation has since become obscured. At this point in my life, with the better part of two decades of limerence and heartbreak behind me, outside of the surface-level preferences, I often cannot tell what is a natural proclivity of my own, what is a learned behavior from a man I loved, and if the latter, who it was that left it with me. I feel more LLM than museum for this reason: as an adoring observer, I have consumed an impossible volume of other people’s language. I’ve absorbed their patterns, and produced an output that feels fluent, authoritative, and sometimes even intimate. My psyche is a compelling fabrication assembled from associations whose origins the model cannot retrieve. AI hallucinates, and I’m beginning to think that I do too. It’s as if it meant to be this way, because I am so hard-wired for a kind of devotion that is totalizing.

The hallucination is not found in what can be easily traced: vegan ice cream, J Dilla, Rolex, the Calgary Hitmen, but in what presents itself as an immutable truth beyond simple interests and tastes. Where did I get the idea that I look best in stark black when my color season says otherwise? When did I decide that any man worthy of my adoration must wear glasses and play guitar? How did the idea that I am not at all easy to love stop being the opinion of one particular person and become a defining characteristic of my personality? Why do I now feel the need to be unaffected by a specific kind of ambiguity that feels fatal to me in order to make myself palatable? These men and their various incapacities had become the bedrock of my theory of romance. Somewhere along the way, I recognized the patterns and, for the most part, stopped remembering who had made me feel which particular way and instead saw the paradigm as diagnostic first, incriminating set of evidence against myself and my desires second. Even more confusing is that these patterns expand and contract based on the women these men loved before me, and especially the ones they chose after me. It’s a complicated algorithm we’re all working against here.

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Ever since I was about nineteen years old, I had been waiting for the moment that my life would change in an unforgettable and undeniable way. I imagined it as a handsome stranger on the subway platform, a brush of tweed against my shoulder, a fated smile, and that I would, of course, be ruined forever. I have never known how to love anyone casually. I could never keep one eye trained on the nearest exit and the most essential parts of myself held safely in reserve. I could force myself to become taciturn in order to preserve a certain mystique, but for those I’ve truly loved, I could not remain that way for long. To adore someone is, for me, to study him intently: to understand his personal lexicon, to know what he loves about his favorite songs and commit them to memory, to partake in the small rituals by which he makes an unfamiliar place a home. It is to notice which stories he repeats and which parts of those stories seem to bring him the most joy, eyes wide and expectant. It’s to commit to memory which words he mispronounces and to find them all so charming. It’s knowing which opinions he holds with suspicious intensity, which silences mean he is tired and which mean that he’s about to pull the plug to “work on himself.” (Based on conversations I’ve had with various girlfriends over the last decade or so, that last one happens quite a bit.)

This kind of attention is not passive; it is transformative. One cannot spend months or years devotedly learning another human by heart without occasionally mistaking some of his essence for her own. At least, I cannot. Devotion like this makes an archivist of us all, and to those who are as committed to devotion as I am, it becomes a fabric that covers everything we know. Sometimes light and breathable, sometimes shroud-like and suffocating. It causes tenderness to turn into pattern recognition, and curiosity becomes instinct. Eventually, the model no longer recalls that it was even being trained. It just always was like this. I do not consider this to be an act of counterfeiting the self, but merely being shaped by love. In Cocteau’s Orpheus, Orphée says, “What does marble think when it’s being sculpted? It thinks, ‘I am struck, insulted, ruined, lost.’ Life is sculpting me. Let it finish its work.” This is not passive either, because submission to the sculptor requires some amount of faith in the hands holding the chisel and the hammer.

I often wonder if the men we love are conscious sculptors, or simply doing what they must to hold onto our devotion. Things like music and clothes are easy to explain, we’re either putting on something to become impressive, or we’re sharing something that brings us genuine joy. Affections, frustrations, and limits are different though. I don’t believe any of these men planned on their temperaments or desires becoming so revelatory to me, and yet, they have. Over time, I learned that a lingering look could be interpreted as some kind of wordless instruction. “Wear that more,” “do that again,” “it turns me on when you use that voice.” Eventually, passing compliments became a doctrine of their own when I figured out that they are so much more meaningful than any grand gesture. “Wear that black dress to our next date, too.” Somewhere along the way, maybe a little too late, I learned how to read hesitation as a verdict: the classic “he’s just not that into you.” Or sometimes, he is. Men are fickle and complicated beings. Most of the men I’ve loved were probably no more aware that they were sculpting me than I was aware, in the moment, that I was being sculpted.

I’m not sure if these men knew that they were influencing the way I dress with those compounded “lingering looks,” altering my sense of humor with some hearty laughs, or crystallizing a habit to romanticize tragedy by simply taking a few hours too long to respond to a text after it had already been read. None of them had to sit me down and prepare a formal dossier; my outsized devotion assigned extraordinary weight to even the smallest inputs they provided.

This is the thrilling privilege and dreadful hazard of loving anyone so closely: we are always feeding ourselves into one another, rarely knowing which scraps will be retained and which will disappear into the ether. The men I loved may have no memory of the comments that became liturgies to me, the songs that became sacred spaces I inhabit when I need to be captured by nostalgia, or the habits I adopted so precisely that I eventually forgot I started doing them to begin with. They might be surprised to learn how fluently I can still generate pieces of them from seemingly nowhere at all. And I have to assume that somewhere, in someone else’s inner world, there are opinions, gestures, malapropisms, and odd little rituals that began with me.

If anyone is interested in purchasing a REISS lace-trimmed floral chiffon dress with tags still attached, it will soon be finding its way to a Goodwill somewhere in Beckley, West Virginia. I still carry the neuroses from that particular man, and that is enough.

xo, e.m.

Last week, I watched both Pam & Tommy and Et Dieu… créa la femme (again, I know) because I needed to spend some time with my muses. I think there is something so powerful about being a woman who is affected but unmoved by the world around you. To be a hot blonde with a tight body and natural proclivity for a bit of hedonism, but also intellectual and dark and wanting to be seen as more than just a pretty face? I can’t entirely relate but I can get there in spirit. I often recall in vivid detail nervously wringing a copy of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians in my hands as the plane I was traveling on to Phoenix in an attempt to rekindle a romance approached Sky Harbor. It was at the height of my blonde delusion. I was wearing black jeans, black ballet flats, and a black top. My golden hair flowed down to the waistband of my jeans. I was precisely the opposite of the woman I wanted to be: I was disaffected and I was very moved.

I reject any and all “can’t wait for fall so I can really start dressing” rhetoric because, for a hapless romantic like me, summertime really is peak. I spent winter and early spring getting rid of 50% of my clothes and trolling vintage stores and TheRealReal for linen and silk pieces that could get me through the rest of my thirties. (And beyond.) I must say, I think I may have perfected the art of dressing myself in a repeatable and formulaic way. I believe that motherhood ushered me into a new era of slovenly athleisure and accidentally-on-purpose messy hair and I’m now trying to split the difference. It takes a lot of planning to be a low-maintenance work-from-home mother. Even more so when you’re still longing for moments of cinematic excellence. These cannot be planned for, so readiness to live in their momentary bliss is critical.

I know that it’s trite, but I feel like in a lot of ways, I am slowly re-emerging into the world at large after almost two years of postpartum disarray. With change comes reinvention, with guardrails like motherhood and work and being a good wife comes innovation. The women I aspire to be, real or fictional, possess a porousness and sensuality that exists independently of, or maybe even despite, the judgmental gaze of others. I, on the other hand, have found myself frequently performing detachment while being privately devastated. I’ve costumed myself in many different ways, and I think, more than anything else, the rigidity of motherhood has forced me to just be me. There’s no room for acting when you’re tired as hell at the end of every day. There’s no room for putting on clothes that don’t feel right when you wake up still exhausted and have a day of chasing a toddler around the house ahead of you. It’s a beautiful thing, actually.

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For a while, my ideas of reinvention existed in other places, in other states of being. I moved to New York to “find myself,” and then I moved to West Virginia to “find myself” again. I went from black hair to blonde hair in an attempt to become the woman who could be carefree and fun and keep a man around. Not a single one of these things fulfilled their intended purpose, by the way. So this month, I realized it’s one thing to play a saccharine sadgirl while wandering Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, and an entirely different thing to live the part at home in West Virginia. In the cities, I love being able to blend into a crowd. At home, I hate that I stick out like a sore thumb, mostly because to do so marks me as an outsider, which I’ve learned is one of the worst things to be. All I will say to that is that I haven’t learned my lesson and I do believe that the grass is probably greener on the side I came from before I came to the conclusion that the grass might have been a little greener over here.

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xo, e.m.

There’s a playlist to go along with this article, feel free to listen while you read. It’s also great for driving around in the car with the windows down and sunroof open.

Somewhere, either lost to the ravages of time or deep inside a dresser at my grandparents’ house, there is a photo from the 1990s of me and my cousins in matching American flag rompers, sitting on a sand dune, and waving flags on the Fourth of July. We are a very much Italian-American family, visible WOPs in almost every sense, but for one day in the summer, we would drop the ethnic pretense and would just be “American.” We ate Bomb Pops after polishing off paper plates of linguine vongole and garlic crabs, rode in my grandfather’s Lincoln Town Car to watch fireworks on the beach, and listened to Springsteen in between Dean Martin and Mina.

We were always the loudest family wherever we were, and even in our head-to-toe Old Navy patriotism, we stood out. I felt this again a few weeks ago when I was in Ralph Lauren with my sister and my toddler. I needed a dress for a work dinner and saw a sleek black linen one displayed on a mannequin in the window. A few rare moments of peace alone in the fitting room, halfway through sending a photo to a friend to see if the dress made me look like the Bond girl vacationing on the Cape that I’d hoped it would, were interrupted by the sound of my child running around the store and pulling down displays as my sister watched helplessly. The illusion was shattered, but I bought the dress so that I could keep pretending. Something about this made me feel like a little dago girl with her sparkler and popsicle in that American flag romper again.

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I’ve only been alive for a small fraction of it, but to think of the United States as turning 250 years old this year seems a bit weird. Compared to other countries, we’re probably just entering our angsty teen phase, but at the same time, everything feels so old. I remember growing up in and around Philadelphia, which I suppose could be considered the birthplace of America. For some reason, most of the jobs I held as a young adult were all in Old City, a neighborhood by the Delaware River full of historic sights like The Betsy Ross House, Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed, Elfreth’s Alley (the oldest continuously residential street in the US), and Benjamin Franklin’s toilet, which I passed every day on my way to work at the TV station on 4th and Market. Philadelphia offered a beautiful cross-section of humanity, both terrifying and inspirational, and it’s where I learned that while we all have different heritages, upbringings, worldviews, skin colors, and religions, we all more or less want the same thing: to be happy, to have enough money to have fun. What makes us American though is that we’re all animated by the vague notion that we should feel bad for wanting these things.

America, for all its fantasies of reinvention, has always been pure grit under the glamour. Our history is too physical for it to not be. Whether through labor or through violence, we are a hardy people who work ourselves to the bone in order to actualize an ideal. We are a country of contradictions: there is wealth but there is also poverty. There are beaches with wild horses, there are snow-capped mountains, and there are families in monogrammed cardigans with immaculately kept lawns and loosely-hidden drinking problems. There are also decaying highways that carry us from one wonder to the next, crumbling city centers we’re not supposed to talk about, and toothless hillbillies in mobile homes who would love to shoot me for making a wrong turn down their narrow wooded street in my German car, though they would also give me the shirt off of their back if I needed it. Each and every one of these things is uniquely American in how one could not exist without the other. This tension is what makes us great, and also what makes us all hate each other.

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I keep returning to Ralph Lauren because I do think he understands this tension better than any designer has. He bridges the gap between two disparate USAs quite masterfully, considering the mythology and the material realities of America and making clothes for both. He is particularly brilliant at capturing the essence of the ideal American woman: she balances feminine sensuality with a desire for adventure, and a tasteful amount of boyish playfulness. He has historically made clothes specifically for her. For the old money woman who wants to eat oysters and drink champagne on the bay, the adventurer who wants to explore the Southwest alongside her man, the hard-working woman who does not want to hide her feminine shape and power in a simple pantsuit. There is a romance to all of this, and the romance is, as well, uniquely American. We have been taught that we can have it all, and even if we can’t, we like to dress the part from time to time. If we do this enough, we may eventually start to believe it.

The appeal, and the “Ralph Lauren Nationalism” of it all, go far deeper than clothes that are just beautiful. (Though we can all admit that they are quite beautiful.) Lauren’s designs appeal to an idea of America that is more coherent than it is in practice. Some may say that America is greater than the sum of its parts, some may say that it’s worse. I’m not sure where I stand, and my answer may change from day to day. I do know that the American spirit: inheritance, reinvention, fantasy, and a little bit of resentment, is worth celebrating, for better or for worse. For all of our differences, we share a massive symbolic lexicon. Lauren understands this, which is how he can dress a First Lady, a rapper, a ranch wife, a prep-school boy, Team USA, and a woman at a work dinner who wants to look like a Bond girl vacationing on the Cape, all both sincerely and grandiosely.

I know that it’s incredibly gauche to be proud to be from this country, but I’ve found it impossible not to have at least a little bit of gratitude for it. I’ve found this driving through the Sonoran Desert in a big orange Jeep on the way to the Grand Canyon, drinking a beer by the oceanside cliffs of Narragansett, and braving the hillbilly-filled hollers of West Virginia to stand beside the New River Gorge Bridge at sunrise, hazy wisps of white vapor swelling up from pockets of forest along its mountains. These are the moments when America, if it were my boyfriend, asks if I’d like to stop for a little sweet treat after we’ve been bickering on a long road trip.

This is not forgiveness, exactly. It is more humiliating than that. It is the experience of being moved by something you wanted so badly to dismiss as unremarkable or fundamentally fucked-up in some roundabout way simply because you are mad at it. They’re the moments when reality briefly arranges itself into something bearable, or even something pleasurable. The argument does not end, but you forget, even if just for a moment, why you were so committed to winning it in the first place. Such is romance, and to strip America of its romance is to deprive yourself of these pleasures. To not mention Lana Del Rey at this point would be wrong, so if Ralph Lauren is able to synthesize the mythos and the materiality of America into beautiful clothes, Lana is the one who takes the most haunted pieces of Americana and causes you to fall deeply, madly, irresponsibly in love with them.

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In my ideal America, I would be laid out on the floral sheets of a desert motel by a man in a Double RL twill workshirt. I would be wearing a white silk slip dress from the Ralph Lauren Spring/Summer 2003 collection, and the only light in the room would be from the neon lights of a haunted gas station across the street. “Henry, come on” followed by The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin album would be playing softly from the imperfect speakers of my iPhone, and after we’d ruined each other to the point of exhaustion, we would walk—me barefoot, of course, his Pendleton Lambswool sweater hanging loose around me—to the diner attached to the haunted gas station. We would drink shitty black coffee and watch the sunrise.

This is, of course, an insane thing to want. It is not, however, all that far from the center of gravity we call the American Dream. Mine is perhaps highly specific, and might even appear to be some sort of sponsored content fever dream (it’s not, by the way, I just have a lot of brand loyalty, even in my fantasies), but it makes romance out of decidedly unromantic things: a motel I’d pass if I were alone because I would be afraid to be murdered in it, gas stations full of townies, greasy spoon diners, dirty work shirts, bad coffee, flickering neon signs full of chemicals, very normal men in denim, the promise that sunrise always comes along to make the sins of the night seem so much less tantalizing in the light of day.

The fantasy, in this way, is not about the motel, the man, or even the absolutely perfect dress. (Though the entire collection really is perfect.) It is in the uniquely American way of making the low, cheap, dangerous, and ordinary feel extraordinary and fated. I love Ralph Lauren for giving America the wardrobe it deserves. I adore Lana Del Rey for letting us all indulge our ruinous romantic side by making us believe that a questionable decision made at midnight can still look good in the morning light. Both understand that America is not romantic because it is pure, it is romantic because it keeps insisting on beauty in places where beauty has no business being. It can be found in the tumbleweed dancing along a decrepit highway, an old tree resolutely growing in the worst neighborhood you’ve ever been to, and even somewhere in the holler with the toothless hillbillies when the trees start to turn from green to orange, yellow, and red.

The Fourth of July, for all its obvious silliness, will always be our most honest holiday. It is far from subtle and the opposite of tasteful. It is all smoke, booze, noise, sweat, carcinogenic meats, cheap paper plates, folding chairs, flags on things that do not need flags on them, and children dressed like tiny fascists. It is equal parts Ralph Lauren Nationalism and Lana Del Rey Nationalism: pageant and fever dream, lawn game and questionable idea, national costume and the chance to explore some ill-advised romance after dark. It doesn’t require us to put to bed any national disagreements or disavow past violence, it only asks us to pull up a chair, have a beer, and enjoy the fireworks.

The little dago girl on the sand dune in her American flag romper didn’t understand any of this. She knew not of colonial violence or civil war, she was not yet humiliated by opening her mouth to speak in a foreign country and being judged by the locals for the ineptitude of her elected leaders. She knew only the celebration and the spectacle, and that she ought to thank her ancestors for bringing her to the only place she ever knew as “home.” Now, almost thirty years later, she will wear a black linen Ralph Lauren dress and listen to Chemtrails Over The Country Club while getting absolutely blasted on limoncello martinis to celebrate America’s 250th birthday with the people she loves most. And, once she’s done writing this essay, she will go on the Double RL website to find a twill workshirt for her husband.

xo, e.m.

If you’re interested in reading more about my obsession with Ralph Lauren Nationalism, continue here:

White-wine tipsy and flushed from walking six or so blocks in the Boston humidity, I removed my shoes in the lobby of my hotel before getting into the elevator. A family of four stepped on immediately after me, and I asked which floor they were staying on so I could press the button for them. They were friendly enough, though the teenage son would not take his eyes off my feet. Not the silk dress hugging every curve, not my “two and a half glasses of wine and a few bites of clams and linguine” gaze, but my feet, and occasionally the pair of sandals dangling from my hand. I was a little horrified to realize I may have awoken something in him, but the entire ordeal confirmed my suspicions: we’re showing feet now.

A few months ago, the beautiful Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu posted a photo to Instagram of her wearing a long coat and walking down the street barefoot. I quickly reposted it, adding the words, “bullish on bare feet for summer.” I was met with many different responses from many different kinds of people. I had some men saying, “FINALLY,” as well as one or two adding, “can I see yours?” Many women were outraged, saying, “just one more thing to be sexualized about.” Some called me a pervert. Some said, “I really hope not.” Love them or hate them, feet provoke an immediate reaction, one which I believe must be explored.

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I’m not a foot scholar, even less so a foot fetish scholar, but I do find it odd that our feet are something that most of us have but many of us feel the need to guard with our lives. Watching old movies, the foot was once so much more casual than it is now. The beach, the garden, in every room of the house, they made an appearance with taste and refinement. To be barefoot was to hold to an elegant sort of laissez-faire attitude without performance. Americans barely even remove their shoes when entering a home these days. We have a recurring discourse about whether it’s appropriate for a host to “force” a guest to show their feet by removing their shoes. (It’s entirely appropriate by the way.) While I’m unsure about where some of the other foot-related neuroses originated, I can take a pretty good guess about why the self-fulfilling prophecy about feet as erotic object continues to be perpetuated: it’s not so much about being sexualized, it’s about the idea of accidentally giving something away for free. Or, specifically through the lens of our social media culture and our beloved panopticon of perverts, the fear that someone, somewhere, might enjoy us without paying, praising, permissioning, or “perfectly perceiving” the experience.

The modern woman is plagued by the need—established over years of programming and propaganda—to manage every inch of herself according to potential interpretation. Capitalism has rotted our brains and sunk down into our psyches, causing us to view every single interaction as an opportunity for transaction. It extends beyond the OnlyFansification of the content world and into the more ordinary corners of female experience. A first date becomes a credit check disguised as a compatibility check, a birthday becomes a reason to solicit cash via the Venmo app, and you must pay a toll to send a DM to a pretty girl.

Some of this is feminine instinct badly translated by a vulgarity that has become commonplace in the post-sexual-revolution. Women have always wanted proof of effort, seriousness, desire, investment. The perfect storm is that, because our culture can only understand value as money, the desire to be cherished has been converted into the desire to be compensated. Women are responding, by and large, to a system that has taught them everything they reveal, offer, or experience should have market value. It is the same reason care work, such as being a stay-at-home mother, is villainized. What is our worth, after all, if we are not contributing to GDP?

Under these conditions, the foot becomes suspicious. It’s not inherently obscene, but it represents an unpriced intimacy, or for the sake of this article, a commodity with a variable cost. The cost may be dignity, attention, control, or money, but the rule remains the same: do not show it accidentally, do not show it casually, do not let someone enjoy what has not been properly priced. It’s odd to me that there has been no “free the foot” movement in the same way we’ve been so desperate to free the nipple.

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Something is shifting though. We reached peak fatigue in terms of optimization and those of us who cannot handle it anymore are giving up on it all. It takes six different $45 products to make my thirty-something skin look effortlessly dewy. A slick, combed-back ponytail gives me a headache. I reject the “clean girl” thing and say, fuck it. I’m walking around with my frizzy “face-framing pieces” curling in every odd direction and carrying my sandals in my hand because they hurt my feet. I don’t give a damn about how I’m being perceived. My feet hurt, so I’m taking off my shoes. I don’t think of this as being sloppy, though it might be a little “messy,” it’s more establishing a baseline of glamour and then refusing to manage beyond it.

To my delight, Rouje released a piece in their ten-year capsule collection that was clearly an homage to Brigitte Bardot’s Juliette in Et Dieu… créa la femme, complete with photographs of models—as well as Jeanne Damas herself—dancing on tables, desks, or even on the top of a car, dress unbuttoned all the way to the navel, revealing a bodysuit underneath. There is movement and appetite, but more than anything else, an unbothered lust for life. The Mambo Dress, as it’s called, sold out almost immediately. The dress, much like Bardot’s Juliette, is sexy because it’s undone without being uncaring. There is something so alluring about a woman who moves, who pouts, who dances, who has her tits and feet out like the world is her St. Tropez beach and doesn’t care about who’s looking. In fact, that woman says, “let them look.”

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In feet, and in life, this is the difference between exhibition and ease. Exhibition requires a viewer and invites one. Ease permits one. The barefoot woman is aware that she will be seen and possibly sexualized, but she’s not putting on a show. She is not offering herself up to be purchased, evaluated, categorized, or correctly or incorrectly perceived but rather refusing to let the possibility of someone else’s gaze become the organizing principle of her body. To pretend that no one is watching is impossible and often dishonest. The point is not to escape being seen but to remain oneself even under observation.

I am still bullish on bare feet for this summer, and hopefully far beyond that. Not for fetish reasons, bait purposes, or even as a new compulsory experience, but because I think we need to just start enjoying ourselves again. No more censoring our feet like money-hungry little citizens of the panopticon. We’re not treating every exposed inch of the body as either a liability or a revenue stream anymore. The shoes hurt, the night is warm, and we are going to have fun again.

xo, e.m.

As I began to see the light at the end of the Holland Tunnel, I removed the 2mg nicotine pouch from my mouth and tucked a 30mg troche of oral ketamine between my eye tooth and lip on the opposite side. I skipped ahead to the next song in my playlist: Sharon Van Etten’s “Jupiter 4.” The song’s titular synth swelled to a familiar crescendo.

how'd it take a long, long time
to be here?

At the fork in the road, I instinctively turned the wrong way. Sun, wind, and the disgusting scent of cannabis streamed in through my open panoramic sunroof. For a moment, I was 27 again, only this time, I knew what I was doing.

As I drove to my destination, block by block, places that bore an uncanny resemblance to things I once knew well shifted shape and became unrecognizable. In my era of new motherhood, a period of tenderness and solitude, the world had continued spinning. Everything kept changing. Everyone I knew reached for the next rung. Little, if anything, waited for me to make my triumphant return. I changed, too. I can no longer hold the spaces I used to, I am bound by duty now, I am wider in the hips and shallow beneath the eyes. Silver-grey streaks start at my temples and fade into the rest of my dark, reddish-brown hair, and yet, underneath it all, I am still the same. I am witty, breathless, idealistic, terrified, darkly humorous, observant. New York, a city entirely aloof to my existence, seems less like a destination than the conjuring part of a séance each and every time I come back. This time, I wasn’t sure who I was “supposed to be,” only, “who I am.”

Chicago had the same wary indifference to me earlier this month. For the first time in a few years, I got drunk at a work event and became the affable brunette that I’m often expected to be, despite my melancholic demeanor. The tipsy walk up the stairs and out of the restaurant, and then to meet my Uber two blocks away because I’d written the address incorrectly, felt liberating at first, then deafeningly silent. To not be needed after a long time of being only needed is a hell of a sobering realization. It became yet another question of, “who am I?” I kept wanting the answer to be a definitive one, which was, of course, the first mistake.

Drunk in Chicago or enthusiastically dissociating in New York, I felt woefully unprepared for life alongside the rest of everybody else. Less socialization than rewilding, I believed I had to access a feral part of myself to survive even small gatherings, or fake it all. A prolonged time of tenderness and quiet slipped through my unwilling fingers much too soon, and I was suddenly thrust back into a world that now looks entirely different. For so long, my life had been organized around the family unit: the baby, the bedtime, the night wakes, the phoned-in crock pot meals, the daily domestic negotiations, the sacred and maddening intimacy of being known primarily by the people who need you most. Then, all at once, there were friends again. Texts, parties, company offsites, two glasses of rosé waiting for me because I was 35 minutes late to meet a friend and she wanted to make sure that we had a few drinks before happy hour was over. People no longer needing me, or maybe not even wanting me, just graciously accepting my presence. I felt that I’d missed out on years that everyone I knew had been practicing being a person in public while I had been at home becoming indispensable in private. I ask, once again, “who the hell am I?”

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In my time of baby-led solitude, I began to consider the difference between believing that pleasure is wrong and believing that suffering is good, figuring that like most things, the correct path is somewhere down the middle. This might be some mature compromise between appetite and restraint, somewhere between indulgence and martyrdom. For me, it might look like a tasteful little moral capsule wardrobe. But the middle was never the point. Pleasure and suffering are neither mistakes nor virtues in themselves, but they have often led me to the same place: suspicious of my own delight, vain about my own ability to endure, and privately convinced that desiring too much reveals something ugly. Re-integrating with the outside world caused all three to converge, and in my desperation to appear to be more than just “someone’s mom,” I reckoned with the two parts of myself that are most at war with each other: my suffering making me disciplined, and my pleasure making me fun. Tolkien’s Frodo Baggins (a Catholic invention, the idea of “suffering is good” personified) and Lewis’s Edmund Pevensie (an incarnate presentation of the Protestant idea that pleasure is bad) are both heroes in their own right. But what about me, with my vanity and judgment, feeling more exposed now than ever before? Does my pleasure make me shallow? Does my suffering make me good?

Either way, it doesn’t matter: I’d been wearing both as costumes. Pleasure made me effervescent, available, and proof that I had not been entirely domesticated by duty. Suffering made me serious, disciplined, morally upright, and served as proof that I had earned whatever delight I allowed myself to keep. I could be fun or I could be good, but I was never quite whole. In the middle of my bargaining, a friend caused me to recall the Underground Man’s insistence upon doing for doing’s sake—how sometimes, we do the irrational, inconvenient, world-ending, self-destroying thing simply to prove that we are free. This is called neither pleasure nor suffering, but some secret third thing.

Re-entering the world, no longer tied to the mast of my compulsion to remain in character—as either “good” or “fun”—I was able to receive the very wonderful and very human signs of care and affection that happen much more often than I’d even realized.

A dear friend entrusted me with an overheard gem: “An artist is someone who takes a part of life and looks at it through the virginal gaze of God,” knowing that I would appreciate how uniquely unbearable the sentiment truly is. More than the sentence itself, I loved the impulse to immediately give it to me because of all the people in the world, I was the one who would know what to do with it. I was the one who would understand why it was so perfect. It is intimate to be accurately implicated. I came back into my body for just a moment.

Later, during what I can best describe as “an atmospheric disturbance” at a party —the kind of thing that would have meant nothing to anyone who did not know where to look—I was comforted by a small chorus of genuine friends as I tried, with the strained decorum of a woman who had absolutely no dignity left to spare, to appear unaffected. They rushed in with the excessive tenderness of people who knew they were probably laying it on too thick and decided to lay it on thicker anyway. I was touched, if not a little embarrassed, and I came back into my body yet again.

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These moments were pleasure and suffering, while also being neither. I made the mistake of assuming that in returning to the world at large, I would be largely alone and left to figure it out by myself, because that’s just how it had always been for me. Motherhood has softened me, though, and I realized that I only chose it to be that way. People who care about me can see the mother, the messy bitch who loves a little bit of ketamine and having a beer, the woman trying to appear unaffected, the person still vain enough to want to be interesting, and the confidant who would know what to do with an unbearable sentence about the “virginal gaze of God.” I wrongly assumed that to be known would mean that I would be reduced, flattened, or otherwise misrepresented. I realize now that it was me, myself, who was doing the flattening. I had been asking other people to misread me because I had not yet learned how to offer myself to them in any meaningful way, and performance is much easier than rejection.

As I continue making my way back into the old world while still carrying my new world around with me, I am more willing than ever to embrace the messy middle. I, too, can be the friend ordering several glasses of wine before happy hour is over, the chorus rushing to comfort and maybe doing a bit too much, the person indulging someone else’s love language by handing them the niche cringe sentiment I obtained through eavesdropping. I can recognize and appreciate contradiction, since it is in so many ways my modus operandi. I can be changed and admit that change does not mean diminishment. In fact, it can reveal the strange mercy of realizing the best has not already happened.

This is my secret third thing.

xo, e.m.

“Nipples” is probably one of my least favorite words. It’s upsetting to say, upsetting to see, upsetting to type, and yet, nipples are a topic so important that I will work through my disgust and talk about them. (I’m also aware that this is the second breast-related article in a row that I’ve shared.) Breasts: we all love them, and yet, they have the uncanny ability to unnerve and enrage us at the same time.

When Kim Kardashian “broke the internet” yet again a couple of years ago with her SKIMS nipple bra, many a Sex and the City devotee such as myself had the same thought: Samantha Jones already did that. But after this year’s Met Gala, where the Kardashian-Jenners appeared to turn the faux nipple into a family affair, the fake nipple thing went from “clever marketing scheme” to “thesis about sexuality for the modern woman.” Of course, Ms. Jones did not concoct the faux nipple any more than Ms. Kardashian did. Fashion has been manipulating the breast for as long as the breast has been one of the more contested objects in public life. In the postwar era, bosoms became architectural fixtures with the bullet bra. Gaultier’s cone bra took this silhouette and made it campy about thirty years later. Within a decade, Jennifer Aniston made the visible nipple look accidental, casual, democratic, as though the most erotic thing a woman could do was simply forget to wear a bra in a room that was, perhaps, a few degrees too cold. (They really needed to get the male viewership up for Friends I guess?)

SKIMS’ mass-produced foam nips arrive from this lineage, but feel distinctly less artful, accidental, or—dare I say—sexually-charged. Anyone still contributing to the dating pool will lament how bleak it all is, how irreversibly skewed (and continuously getting worse) the sexual marketplace has become, and how the competition is barely even worth it anymore. In this way, mass-marketing trinkets to feign sexual arousal seems like a corrective response to market forces, and purchasing them more of a pickup strategy than an act of provocation.

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Despite what both militant conservatives and radical feminists would like to think, not all sexual markers are signals of a willing-and-able eroticism. Somewhere between the sexual revolution and now, these two ideas have been uncoupled in a way that does a grave disservice to both, and there is a still-widening chasm between the two. A visible nipple, real or otherwise, is something that is sexually legible on a biological level. In the visual language of the male gaze, trained or otherwise, a nice, hard nipple suggests arousal, exposure, and receptivity, even if the reality is as simple as a cold room or a thin shirt. It is flattering because it is necessarily involuntary. It appears desirous, and intensely so, because it is difficult to fake and impossible to perform on command. (Unless someone knows something that I don’t—in that case, please do tell.) A faux nipple, however, preempts the very desire it wishes to communicate. It does not reveal the body’s response; it installs one. It offers the sign of arousal without the arousal itself, the evidence of exposure without exposure, the erotic cue without the erotic event. This is why it felt so upsettingly inevitable to watch the Kardashian-Jenners arrive at the Met Gala with not exposed nipples, but exquisitely fabricated ones. I think that if Baudrillard were alive to see it, he would have been shaking, crying, and throwing up over how well his notions have aged.

I was 15 or 16 before I developed my breasts, which means that I’d stuffed my bra a handful of times. (Not every day, just for special occasions like birthday parties or to youth group once or twice.) I wasn’t necessarily doing this to attract a mate, I was actually very much a virgin until my mid-twenties. For me, it didn’t really matter if an eager teen boy unhooked my bra after a trembling, anticipatory struggle only to be disappointed when small mounds of toilet paper fell out where a voluptuous bosom should have been. I never worried about this because it was never even within the realm of possibility for me. Do you know who wasn’t stuffing their bras though? My sexually-active peers. Girls who actually fuck know better than to stuff their bras.

It’s the same feeling I get when something from a sexually deviant Reddit community breaks containment and ends up in my corner of the internet: I’m shocked at how the myriad of lascivious details can read more like brochure checklists than scandalizing confessionals. It’s also similar to the feeling I get when I listen to Top 40 slop music that manages to name in grotesque detail every possible sex act or vivid descriptions of body parts while remaining palpably devoid of any meaningful horniness. (HOW is Guess ft. billie eilish Charli xcx’s most-streamed song on Spotify? It’s genuinely difficult to listen to, and I love Charli.) It seems that for all the talk about fucking, very few people actually are. The lack of true taboo has rendered sexuality toothless, meaningless, and sanitized. Things that could once titillate now bore, and less than a decade after we invented “free the nipple,” our celebrity frontrunners are wearing fake nipples to the one event in mainstream fashion where transgression is not just accepted, but also expected. We are spiritually stuffing our bras.

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The idea of stuffing one’s bra—spiritually or otherwise—is not so much about the deception as it is about the perception. The lie of it all is almost beside the point. A stuffed bra is not really meant to survive intimate scrutiny; it is designed to help you get to the next round before intimacy is ever on the table. It is a way of appearing as though something has already happened to you: puberty, desire, sexual gravitas, worldly ease. It’s a solution to a social predicament, not an erotic proposition.

The fake nipple is a similar kind of gesture. It is not designed for the one-on-one encounter so much as public awareness: the photo, the party, the date, the scroll, the fleeting eye contact from across the bar. It manufactures desire before the desire has had a chance to naturally form. It suggests a body that has already been wanted, warmed, startled, or aroused. It turns the evidence of an experience into an accessory, like a Juste en Clou bracelet (many are fake but say the same thing as the real ones do: “I like to fuck rich guys”) or a teeny tiny statement bag (“I am low maintenance and breezy”). Akin to the stuffed bra, it is not chiefly about fooling someone in the bedroom. It is about entering the marketplace with the optimal visual collateral.

This is why I regard the fake nipple as less “vulgar for vulgarity’s sake” and more “symptom of spiritual malady.” Women are not vain or self-aggrandizing for recognizing the terms of the market. If anything, women are often humiliatingly fluent in them, because even the most powerful illusions of the sexual revolution have not freed us from the consequences of being appraised. We learn early which signals read as desirable, expensive, effortless, fertile, fun, sexually generous, emotionally undemanding, and just damaged enough to be interesting. (Every guy I know has a “BPD art hoe” that he just cannot let go of.) We have learned through trial and error how to arrange ourselves into sultry, easy-going implication. When it comes to interacting with men, we are taught and conditioned to suggest appetite without hunger, availability without need, confidence without threat. The modern woman is expected to be sexy without seeming desperate, liberated without seeming wounded by liberation, and desirable without appearing to desire too much in return. I do not think any of this is good for the soul.

We have reached all-time highs in terms of sexual saturation and all-time lows in terms of actual eroticism. Sex is everywhere: sex in music, sex in marketing, sex in the algorithm, sex in memes, sex in identity discourse, sex in workout clothes, sex in the “get ready with me” TikToks, sex in the corporate-sponsored girlboss empowerment content that’s even leaked into my LinkedIn feed. And yet, for all this sexual omnipresence, the actual fuck rate, which I believe is the scientific term, appears to be in free fall. People are not pairing off, they’re not settling down, they’re miserable and swiping left and right while watching sex-filled but still somehow sexless tv shows that no one will think about five years from now. We are all fluent in the language of desire, but increasingly alienated from the conditions that make desire possible.

This is the paradox of hypersexuality: it does not necessarily produce more sex, more intimacy, or more pleasure. It produces precisely the opposite. When sex becomes primarily a performance for the social panopticon of “the other,” it stops being an encounter and becomes something closer to a CV. Wrapping oneself in the trappings of it—the aesthetics and the language—becomes another way to prove that one is desirable, liberated, undamaged, unbothered, appropriately perverse, to just the right amount of breezy. Sex becomes less something that happens between two people and more something one must know how to reference convincingly in public.

The fake nipple is not the cause of this, obviously, but it is one hell of a mascot. A culture that cannot stop talking about sex but seems increasingly bad at intimacy would naturally produce an accessory that simulates arousal without requiring desire, exposure without vulnerability, erotic evidence without an erotic event. It is sex reduced to proof-of-concept.

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The problem is not that sex escaped the bedroom. The problem is that, once sex became content, it became harder to return it to the realm of meaningful private encounter.

True “turns you on” eroticism requires some small zone of non-performance. Not secrecy, but privacy; not shame, but shelter. It needs a little space between what is shown and what is known, between the body as it appears to the public and the body as it is revealed to another person in a moment of unfettered desire. It needs the possibility of accident, awkwardness, timing, rejection, tenderness, and surprise. These are the things that make sex feel human, which is also to say, the things that make sex perfectly imperfect. It can be sordid because it is unplanned, unchoreographed, the one part of our American life in which we can simply dwell without needing to optimize.

The fake nipple is the antithesis of this. It is not mysterious, because it has already explained itself. It is not vulnerable, because nothing has actually been exposed. It is not erotic, because it has no relationship to desire except as an aesthetic reference. The fake nipple bothers me more than it scandalizes me. Not because it is too sexual, but because it is not sexual enough. It is the concoction of a culture that has become fluent in the public language of sex and increasingly inarticulate in the private language of desire. We freed the nipple, and then, almost immediately, replaced it with a product.

The real thing, regrettably named though it may be, remains undefeated. Just ask, well, pretty much anyone who has ever existed.

xo, e.m.

In mid-December 2023, I found myself five or so weeks pregnant and clutching a pitifully sweet glass of non-alcoholic red “wine” at a Christmas party I desperately did not want to attend. Arriving early to help prepare, I was handed the dispassionate task of of watching everyone around me go from “normal” to “very drunk” while I stayed stone cold sober—slightly too warm, quite hormonal, and growing more and more alienated as the night progressed.

“Wow, so interesting!” I’d quip between the tiniest sips of my decoy beverage as someone I’ve never met before (and haven’t seen since) regaled me with an uninteresting story shouted directly into my ear. I remember pulling out my phone at one point to Google if I could eat a certain kind of cheese without harming my poppy seed-sized baby. No go. As if things couldn’t get any worse, I joined a circle of girls just as one of them drunkenly let it slip that she thought my then-boyfriend’s (now husband) longtime partner before me was more fun, less complicated, and a more wanted member of the group than I would ever be. “No offense!” she added as the others laughed. It felt more validating and cathartic than anything else, but still a little too much for me in that state. I wandered to the bathroom, pouring my now-lukewarm fake wine down the drain and looking deeply into the mirror. I couldn’t cry. I spent too much time on my makeup to cry. I recognized the woman looking back at me—sultry, scared, and just a little bloated—from a former life. It was the best I’d looked in years.

This might be the last time for a long time, or maybe ever, that I look like this.

I pulled out my phone and took a photo to document this moment. Then, I opened my Instagram app and soft-blocked that girl. She’s recently re-followed me, a gesture that will remain un-reciprocated. (I’m a mother, not a saint.)

Since that moment and even until now, I’ve been acutely aware of the fact that my body, the only one I’ve ever known, is temporarily not “mine.” I carried my baby for a little under 40 weeks, I had seven layers of my abdomen sliced open by a person I would not be able to pick out of a lineup if you asked me, then nursed that baby for twenty-some months. I really hated pumping, so this meant that no matter what, I couldn’t be apart from my baby for more than a few hours at a time. (Even on business trips. Ask me about that at another time.) We’ve been slowly weaning—first dropping a feed a day, then another, then another, then the discretionary feeds, until now, where we’re only nursing just before bed.

For the first time since that Christmas party, I’ve been able to wear what I want without fear of smooshing my belly or not being able to desperately whip out a limp pregnancy-addled tit at any given moment.

I wore a vintage dress with a higher neckline out to dinner last week with the baby, my husband, and some friends. It was one I purchased because I was going through an “I want to be Monica Bellucci” phase. I’d ventured out of the house after not leaving for weeks, wore the baby into a vintage store in Fayetteville, WV, and purchased the dress without trying it on or even thinking twice about it. When I got home, I was surprised by how nicely it draped my postpartum body but then realized how aspirationally high the neckline was. I would not be able to do what I needed to do to calm down a hysterical infant in the way that only I could. My boobs would be stuck. I put the dress on one of my many wooden hangers and placed it towards the back section of my wardrobe rack. This was its new home: with the shapeless frocks I only wear to church and one hideous satin number I wore to a restaurant opening back when I used to be invited to those kinds of things, the kind of garment that holds only sentimental value for present-day me. In that moment, it felt like being able to wear this black floral Monica Bellucci-inspired vintage dress was light years away. Now, I’m thinking that I wish I’d had more time.

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December 20th, 2023

No one tells you how ungraceful and how abashed you’ll feel in your own body, and it happens so quickly. Every move feels lumbering, every sentiment seems foreign. It’s uncomfortable and it’s uncanny but you quickly recognize why you’re feeling this way: your body is no longer your own. It has become a vessel for something wonderful. And if you can get past the “body horror” that the pervasive post-sexual-revolution rhetoric has knocked into our heads, it’s beautiful.

I wrote this in my journal (you can read more here) shortly after that Christmas party. Though my belly was still indistinguishable from its usual self right before my period or after slightly overdoing it with a heavy dinner, I felt different all over. My body was changing faster than my mind could keep up, let alone make sense of it all, and in lieu of experience, my mind filled in the various blanks with all sorts of horrible sentiments and scenarios. I’d always liked the way I looked while also having a complicated relationship with “my looks.” The thing was though, through the love/hate of it all, I always felt mostly in control. I know now that this is both a blessing and a curse.

When you’re young and beautiful, there are undoubtedly people who genuinely want to get close to you out of admiration or for no reason at all aside from curiosity or goodness, though most new relationships seem to be a dangerous game of roulette. At some point in my twenties, I learned to ask, “is this someone who will dedicate an inordinate amount of time to ‘humbling’ me?” Or, “is this a man who will covet and control me?” every time anyone was a little too interested in becoming my friend or romantic partner.

I grew up charmingly ugly, mostly friendless, relentlessly annoying, and perennially misunderstood. I stayed this way for a huge chunk of my life. For this reason, for a relatively pretty girl, I’m already humble enough. The aforementioned coveting and controlling helps with the humbling, too. Aging and going through new cycles of life introduces another element to this though. For many, I’m treated like a reminder of how quickly the joie de vivre can be sucked out from a warm body (and a pair of tits), like a mango bled of its juices, until only a stringy pit remains. These types slowly distance themselves. For others, they become a little more kind whereas they were once mostly resentful, as if grey around the temples, lines around the mouth, and baby on the hip are an equalizing force. I’m not the type to be jealous or spiteful over these sorts of things, but when I see a young beautiful woman with perky breasts and thin arms, I do think, “damn. I used to have it all.” So, in a way, I get it. (Sidebar: why does extended breastfeeding and weaning have to make your arms so damn fat?)

Two and a half years after truly losing control of my body for the first time, I am hesitant to welcome the freedom to look and dress the way I want back into the fold. I thrived in a different way under the constraints of early motherhood—the sleeplessness giving way to a new appreciation for rest, the sacrificial splendor of sharing my skin, my blood, and my breath with this perfect little human that I made, and the constant reminder that it’s actually a good thing that I can’t always get what I want—I don’t know if I want to give that up. I know that doing so is inevitable, but I want to relish my shared body little longer. It could be because I loved the sense of purpose and duty. It could also be vanity: if I’m not pregnant, newly postpartum, or nursing, then there is no excuse for the new areas of sagging skin and soft tissue where I was once sculpted and restrained. Everywhere I now ripple instead of snap, fatigue instead of train, it’s easier for me to tell myself “it must be this way” instead of “this is just how it is now.” I suspect that it’s a little bit of both. Weirdly enough, I can deal with the latter. It’s the former that’s really giving me a hard time.

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I could have never been prepared for the fact that every morning, I see my little baby transform a little bit more into my little kid. I don’t get nostalgic for pregnancy, but I miss the newborn days.

Bonded by the trauma of being awake when we both wanted to be asleep and thrown into a completely new situation, the baby and I spent hours trading oxytocin and eye contact. We had nothing else to do, nowhere else to be. Nursing for those first few months was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do: the physical exhaustion, the mental agony, the sore nipples and sleeplessness and requirement to be “on” at all times. Sometimes my bosom would be rock-hard, something we affectionately referred to as “going Dolly Parton mode.” Other times, I would leak. If my shirt hadn’t been soaked through, my hair would have some sort of spit up along the ends—usually both. I smelled like sweat and milk (something biological and evolutionary so babies know their mother is nearby), and rarely knew what time of day it was. The cluster feeds were endless, agonizing, spiritually taxing, until suddenly about four months in, they weren’t. I learned quickly that mother’s milk, a safe space to sleep, and a clean diaper is really all a newborn baby needs.

Feeding became more than nourishment—it was bonding, it was survival for both of us. It became a part of my day, maybe even, the most predictable part of my day. I would breathe a sigh of relief when my baby would latch and all was, once again, well with the world. I went back to work (from home) after eight weeks and rigged a king-sized-pillow-plus-Boppy situation so I could type and do Zoom meetings while baby slept on me. When we finally dared to venture out into the world, which was terrifying for us both, we were always able to find a moment to reconnect whether it was on a park bench, in a quiet corner of a coffee shop, or, if nowhere else, the backseat of my car. We used anything as a cover—an actual nursing cover, a big shirt, on several occasions, an Hermès scarf—until baby learned to take the cover off, at which point, it became a game and we ditched the covers altogether. Baby never took a pacifier because I was the pacifier. This, I’ve learned, is the highest honor for a mother.

Throughout this time, there was only one rule: separates only. Dresses if they have the kind of neckline that works with nursing. I learned to be creative with my clothes in a way I never had to be before.

Now, I can wear whatever I want again, and there is an immense grief that I can’t just ignore. We may have had our last contact nap without even realizing it, and baby doesn’t know that in a few nights, I’ll ceremoniously unclip my Momcozy nursing bra for the last time. Things are changing fast, too fast, but it seems wrong to complain about it all, because we’re still trading good for good, and in some ways even, good for better. There is so much joy and love and fun in our lives right now, it feels selfish to mourn the passing of a time that was only ever meant to be temporary.

My baby now cuddles just to cuddle. My baby says, “mama?” unprompted. My baby has started looking into the mirror, turning as if to inspect every inch the way I do. The last part is the threshold: my body is still no longer my own, but in a slightly different way now.

The scrutiny I have for myself, or the shrinking I’ve done to appease those who will always resent me, the love and hatred I have for my body and my looks—baby is taking notes.

When I put on the red floral Monica Bellucci-inspired dress last week, I wanted to take it off immediately. I didn’t like how wide I looked, how my arms were bare. Baby, sitting at my feet and rearranging my makeup bag, saw it differently though, nodding and saying “ooooh!” in approval. Instead of picking out another dress for myself, we went in baby’s room and picked out something cute and fun, together. Toddlers seem to always know what they want. Me, I’m not so sure.

xo, e.m.

Patricia* was a statuesque woman with the taut alabaster skin of a cold, hard bitch. Leave too much time between Botox appointments and her brow would begin to furrow into something resembling a graceful scowl, though with the small, tasteful injections, you’d never know. She usually seemed quite pleasant.

Patricia still permed her hair in 2008, the tight curls forming a saintly halo around her head. It suited her. The style had been fashionable twenty years earlier, when big hair and glossy red lips were the Jersey suburb “It Girl” signal. Though styles had changed, Patricia had not quite followed them, as if the perm itself were a small talisman against the passage of time. I wondered if her maiden name ended in a vowel like mine did, before she took her husband’s last name and assumed a more austere identity, which suited her.

Her kitchen suited her, too. Mahogany-stained wood, travertine, and speckled granite—the kind of upper-middle-class Jersey suburban kitchen with a built-in lattice for holding bottles of wine. The Wolf oven was used once a year, on Thanksgiving. More often, there was a crock pot bubbling inconspicuously on the counter, usually filled with something unmistakably American: cream cheese, shredded cheese, chicken breast, Wegmans brand organic salsa. She had a tea towel embroidered with the words, “I love cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food” on the caddy where she’d rest her lipstick-decorated glass of white wine.

She stood behind the island with a half-pout, her brow furrowing as though, this time, the Botox wasn’t quite enough. Though I was invited over, she seemed disappointed to see me again. Patricia, in her pristine McMansion, seemed to find my presence unnecessary.

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I was much more polite back then than I am now. Even though the other girls would call her “Patti,” or “Tricia,” I’d always refer to her as “Mrs. Last Name.” I took my shoes off and left them neatly at the door. I littered every sentence with “please” and “thank you” as if I’d been raised by a preacher in the south rather than in a house where everyone talked over each other and wildly gesticulated with both hands. Compared to my peers, I was actually kind of boring. I hadn’t had a drink (save for a sip of red wine with Sunday supper), I’d never taken my clothes off in front of a boy, I’d barely even kissed one at this point. I got good grades and worked after school. My parents knew where I was at all times, which was usually playing guitar in my room, watching a PG movie in some friend’s basement, or buying candy and iced tea at Wawa.

It’s not that Patricia’s general demeanor towards me was dripping with disdain, but there was unmistakable tension. Her words were formed from a place of distance, as if she’d carefully articulated a dossier on me in private and was simply going through the motions of bare-minimum cordiality. I remember sitting in that kitchen with my friend and Patricia greeting a contractor who came over to work on the pool with more warmth than she ever did to me. At the time I assumed this was simply Patricia’s personality. Some adults are warm with teenagers. I knew a few. Others behave as though every high school girl is a small but inevitable problem.

What I didn’t realize then was that Patricia was not the only mother who felt like this about me.

Over the years there were several of them, Patricia was merely the blueprint. Mothers who greeted my friends with enthusiasm but acknowledged me with the careful politeness one might reserve for a homeless man begging for change on the street, or the occasional Jehovah’s Witness at the door. They were never openly rude, they simply regarded me with a quiet suspicion. They seemed to assume that I was the sort of girl who might introduce an element of rebellion into an otherwise well-managed household, which was confusing, because at that point in my life, the most rebellious thing I had ever done was walk to Dunkin barefoot one time. When you consider a young “It Girl,” I know this is far from the image your mind conjures. One of them once asked me, very casually, what my father did, in a tone that suggested there was a correct answer. Honestly? I didn’t really know. My family didn’t talk about those things.

Some of them monitored me carefully from across kitchen islands not unlike Patricia’s, as if I’d start freaking out like a guy in a Slipknot music video and knocking copper pots and pans off the wall, tipping over their Crockpots mid-simmer. Others spoke to me in the careful, slightly over-enunciated tone adults sometimes use when addressing an unknown mutt at the dog park. Even at the dog park, they’d have treats for these dogs but save the good ones for the purebreds. At the time, I assumed this was all simply a coincidence. I didn’t think much of it. Some mothers are warm. Some mothers are guarded. Some mothers, for reasons known only to themselves and perhaps God, develop a covert and inexplicable hostility toward one specific teenage girl.

It just happened that, in several households across the Jersey suburbs, that girl was me.

Years later, while enjoying an evening doomscroll, I came across a discussion about the peculiar phenomenon of the “enemy mother.” According to the theory, every teenage “It Girl” seems to acquire at least one friend’s mother who harbors a silent and inexplicable hostility toward her. My mind immediately went to Patricia. And then, to all the others.

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I never thought of myself as such. I was an awkward teen, bookish, in a band, and dressing myself in twee little dresses and romantic blouses because that’s what the women I aspired to be like did. I had bangs modeled after Alison Sudol and wore clothes with a slight edge, inspired by Karen O. I listened to The Shins and Circle Takes The Square and Jaco Pastorius. I wasn’t vying for social standing in the same way my peers were, I was filling my fat-cheeked head with ideas and creativity rather than prowling the mall looking for boys to kiss and ruched satin babydoll tops to wear. I still can’t quite understand why women like Patricia would dislike me for being hard-to-place, but going through a similar interpersonal upheaval almost 20 years later, I’ve come to understand that this may be my role in the social fabric.

Now that I’m older, I suspect that beyond the feigned youth of her aesthetic choices, Patricia was ripe and wise enough to recognize something about me long before I did. It wasn’t rebellion, though calling it that seems a lot cleaner. I wasn’t sneaking out or corrupting her daughter or introducing any meaningful degree of mutiny into her lovely home. But I also wasn’t easily legible. Not in the way they understood it, anyway. I never mapped neatly onto the existing categories: the church girl, the slut, the nerdy one, the quiet one, the fat one, the anorexic one, the obvious problem. I was, in a way that is difficult to explain and immediately recognizable, impossible to neatly categorize. Rumi might call it, “the entire ocean in a drop,” but to Patricia, it’s “get the hell out of my kitchen.”

Girls like me tend to move between cliques—in high school, of course, but long after high school as well, when the dynamics are still there but we’d all rather pretend they’re not. We’re usually invited to the party, but not fully claimed by any one social circle. We dress a little differently. We speak a little differently. We seem, to the adults in the room, to be operating according to some internal logic that has not been formally approved. We’re not inherently threatening, but we are difficult to manage. And mothers, perhaps more than anyone, are tasked with management.

I’m far from Patricia, but I do find myself brushing against the same forces that willed her one-sided beef with me into existence. I now own the kitchen island, cram my postpartum hips and ass into the same size Levis I wore 15 years ago, and even use a crockpot some nights. I can understand her distrust for someone implacable, as I feel the same duty to manage a fledgling household. At the same time though, I’m still me, and very much still moving from social group to social group, never quite finding my “place.” Which means there are still women who clock it: sometimes from behind their own kitchen islands, sometimes from their Instagram timelines, sometimes at the green space during a street festival in the nearest city.

I sometimes wonder if Patricia wasn’t reacting to me, but to whatever I represented to her. I like to think now that it was something that she recognized in me, something she may have once aspired to. Or more likely, given her halo of permed hair and unmovable forehead, something that she had since learned, meticulously and wholly, how not to be.

I didn’t understand it, but I do now. Patricia, you bitch—you’ll always be an It Girl to me.

*Name changed for privacy and out of respect.

xo, e.m.

For a while, I was surrounded by “West Elm girlies.” Those who would leave the office at promptly 5:30PM for Pilates: subtle lash lift, Oura ring pulsing, pristine Alo yoga pants, Bala bangles in nondescript tote bags, gracefully gliding onto the L. After their reformer pilates session, they’d wash themselves under the soft drip of their tasteful rainfall shower head before their 9PM reservations at Via Carota.

I was not this type of girl, but I admire the hell out of her. She’s not immune to the Shopify-direct-to-consumer-industrial-complex’s propaganda; she’s been known to sleep on a Casper mattress, wash her Sweetgreen salad down with a poppi, restlessly refresh the reservations page to snag a table at Carbone (even after it lost its star). She doesn’t care if you think her Vejas or her beachy blowout is corny. She’s not above it and she doesn’t pretend to be, which is precisely why I fuck with her.

At the same time, I was also surrounded by performative cigarette-smoking art school graduates halfway between “living in a punk house” and “reluctantly accepting a corporate job.” The girl who scoffs, “I guess we can go to Mansions” before taking a too-fast drag of a Marlboro Red, her forearm mermaid tattoo serving as an eternal voyeur.

I was never this type of girl either, and frankly I’m put off by the intellectual dishonesty of this kind of put-on “above it all” posture. These two women appear to be opposites. One is polished and optimized to a fault, the other intentionally disheveled in a radical act of willful anti-optimization. They both represent different sides of the same coin: modern identity as a curation project. Both are deeply aware of themselves, of how they appear, of the cultural signals they’re sending. As the zoomers like to say, “performative,” but in different ways.

This is, of course, natural. We know too much now, about the world, about ourselves, about the aesthetics and aspirations of other people’s lives. Every so often, a video of a high school in the 1990s goes viral for how hot, happy, and weightless everyone seems to be. The people in those videos don’t look extraordinary by modern standards. Their hair brittle from years of chunky highlights, their Bonnie Bell lip gloss chunky, and their white creamy eyeshadow uneven. Their bodies were less “sculpted” than “formed.” And yet, something about them feels unattainable and impossible to reproduce now, though it’s what we all seem to really want.

One thing that struck me about Paris fashion week last month is how even designers are yearning to bask in that happy-go-lucky, lackadaisical 90’s glow, using their fashion houses to recreate it to the delight of their patrons. In particular, Demna’s Gucci debut sometimes felt like it was reaching for that sticky, messy 1990s tabloid romance—the slick hair, the narrow silhouettes, the languid and heavy-lidded “maybe I’ll let you touch it” glamour of Tom Ford’s legacy—but it falls short. This is not because the clothes weren’t right, but because something about the runway was off-putting and uncanny. His styling was perfect, the reference points unmistakable, and yet the resemblance collapsed into some kind of body horror the moment you looked at the faces.

The problem isn’t that Demna—or any major designer—misunderstands the 90s, or why we’re all obsessed with it again. The problem is that, inside and out, the people wearing the clothes have changed.

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The women who animated Tom Ford’s runways and campaigns were not ingenues, but they weren’t harlots either. They were something stranger and much harder to manufacture: playful and accessible, but also deviously angelic. Their faces looked luminous and almost innocent, but not quite. “Come hither” eyebrows cocked, crooked little smiles, hair that suggested they had slept in it or run their fingers through it as a compulsive behavior rather than a grooming one. Their beauty didn’t read as effortful or optimized. It just… was?

There was a kind of unfussy decadence to the whole thing. The thinness of the era—haute cokehead—wasn’t sculpted in a pilates studio or achieved through cramming protein into places where protein does not belong. It was a little reckless, the physical manifestation of a life that was happening faster than the body could keep up with. Even if they were trying, these models didn’t look maintained. They looked lucky.

When compared with Demna’s homage, the difference becomes difficult to ignore. The silhouettes are identical: the same column silhouettes, the same glossy but undone hair, the same minimal styling that once made Tom Ford’s Gucci feel so dangerously decadent. But the faces belong to a different cultural moment entirely. Lips are fuller, cheekbones sharper, skin more polished, more controlled. The bodies look trained rather than incidental; everything appears meticulously maintained.

This is not a moral judgment. The modern face is beautiful and artful in its own way: symmetrical, luminous, scientifically precise. In this though, it reads differently. It doesn’t suggest the messy vitality of someone who has simply stumbled into beauty. It suggests someone who has worked, quite carefully, to achieve it. Pilates and buccal fat surgeries are probably less detrimental in the long-term than a habitual coke habit and old school anorexia, but don’t inspire the same kind of muse. It’s a difference that changes the entire mood of the clothes.

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“Accidental beauty” was the look of the nineties. It was a culture in which—not yet subject to the panopticon of constant connectivity—people had no impetus to treat their bodies, their faces, and their identities as ongoing aesthetic projects. Today, both the West Elm girl and the Cigarette girl understand themselves as something to be curated. One optimizes while the other performs anti-optimization. But both are, in their own way, managing the self. An aesthetic built on accidental beauty can’t exist in a culture where “the self” has become a project under constant renovation.

This might explain why fashion can’t seem to leave the 1990s alone. We keep circling the era like it’s the last cultural moment that still makes sense to us. Designers resurrect its silhouettes, its hair, its blasé indulgence. The internet devotionally reposts old runway clips and paparazzi photos. Everyone agrees something about that period looked better, sexier, more free, even if it’s not possible to articulate why.

Culture is stuck. Instead of creating new archetypes, we recycle old ones. Not in a fun or interesting way, either: in a way that’s derivative and uninspired for the most part. It’s easy to hold a nostalgic fondness for the nineties, it was the last chance to live freely before the internet replaced every facet of socialization and consumption. They sit right at the edge of the “terminally online” epoch: modern enough to feel familiar, but just far enough away from algorithmic self-consciousness. Fashion keeps trying to resurrect that moment, but resurrection is not the same thing as revival.

We can, and should, bring back the clothes. I love a slip dress, I’ve actually been looking for the perfect one. (If you have any recommendations, please let me know.) The slick hair is timeless in a very specific way, the narrow silhouettes always en vogue. You can recreate the choreography of decadence down to the last detail, and doing so is fun.

However, it will always look just a little “off” because the women who once made those clothes look inevitable belonged to a culture that no longer exists. The sparkly silver slip that Em Rata wore on Demna’s runway would look so good on both The West Elm girl and the Cigarette girl. The West Elm girl would style it with an expensive blowout, a tiny shoulder bag, and a chic heel. She would look elegant, polished, exactly like someone who has more interests than just managing the perfect Notion board.

The Cigarette girl would wear the same dress differently. Maybe with a leather jacket thrown over it, eyeliner smudged just slightly, Marlboro dangling from her fingers as she stands on some dirty LES corner pretending not to care how good she looks.

Then they’d post a picture on Instagram. I would double-tap both, for the record, but they’d never make me feel the way any photo of Kate Moss does.

xo, e.m.

I have a hamper full of denim waiting to be donated. I didn’t think about which jeans I wanted to get rid of—Rag & Bone, FRAME, Abercrombie, MOTHER, etc.—I just scooped them all up in my arms and unceremoniously dumped them into the hamper along with sundresses and tops ranging from “cottage-core” or “trad” to “kind of slutty.” The jeans, an assortment of cuts and washes, some trendy, some classic-adjacent, bore the invisible stain of insecurity and frustration; hundreds of hours of my life spent hating the way I looked in them. Despite the fact that I loathe them, I also love them, and I’m learning that, despite all the time spent trying to stand out with aestheticized looks, “lived-in denim” and “elevated” basics have always been my destiny. Those ten or fifteen pairs of jeans didn’t just get chucked into the ether. They were replaced by two pairs of classic Levi’s: one medium-wash Bootcut Wedgie and one light-wash 501 Curve. This gesture alone has cut an unwieldy cognitive load down to something much more palatable.

The day after my great jean purge of ‘26, I noticed something happening on my explore page: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy mania. “Get Her Look.” Five Perfect Pieces! The Only Jeans You Need! A Black Coat, Slim Sunglasses, The Slip Dress! I felt like somewhat of an imposter, my Levi’s were now everywhere, my elevated basics about to become “basic” in a different way. Not even the humble tortoiseshell headband was safe. My “cognitive load” reset was already being packaged and sold as yet another kind of “it-girl minimalism.” Once again, we’re being sold a noteworthy woman’s personal restraint as an enviable shopping list, rather than being asked to cultivate restraint of our own, as though purchasing the list is what made her noteworthy in the first place.

What irks me is that our relentless media cycle has become a poor alternative to developing preference and taste. Heated Rivalry fans are more rabid and rigid in their hockey fandom than I am after years of rooting for my beloved Flyers, though they’ve never known the heartache of watching their team blow a perfectly good lead time and time again. Instagram girlies who’ve bent and twisted themselves to fit the algorithm have a firebrand adherence to dressing a certain way, though their looks rarely see life on the outside. Loving hockey, like wearing clothes, requires praxis—not just some “damn good theory.”

Personal style reaches maturity through subtraction. It’s not always as extreme as dumping an armful of denim into a donation bin, but it does require editing and refining. Trend-chasing only offers addition. Instead of painstakingly refining what looks good on us, we now chase what looks good on someone else—and, unsurprisingly, it usually falls flat.

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Last year, I read Emily North’s essay, “if you want to dress better, stop thinking about it.” In it, she argues that taste forms best in private, insulated from the algorithmic influence that now permeates through nearly every preference. I agree, though it now seems like the algorithm has outpaced that advice. The tastes once formed in private—the quiet luxury workhorse of a coat tailored to perfection and worn for years, the repeated pair of unremarkable jeans, the woman who looks like herself without feeling the need to wear a costume of who she aspires to be—these are now scraped, flattened, and redistributed as content. What once emerged from a life becomes a template for purchase, the imprint is mistaken for the source.

The algorithm doesn’t just influence taste; it industrializes it, and most frustratingly of all, it takes something lived-in and turns it into something staged to look lived-in. It does so while deluding us into believing we can carbon-copy someone else’s personal style and pass it off as our own, effortlessly.

When I pared down a dozen or so pairs of jeans to two, it wasn’t because I wanted to become a new person. I simply stopped negotiating with the imperfect body in the mirror. I stopped “optimizing” and “aspiring.” The decision was an unceremonious one, small and utterly inconsequential. There was no performance in it, just quiet subtraction, and perhaps a few satisfied Appalachian baddies who will be excited to discover my orphaned denim at a local thrift shop.

The reason girls want to dress like Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy isn’t complicated. She was a hot, rich blonde with proximity to power. Her style looked strong, but what made it strong wasn’t the coat or the denim: it was her; the repetition and the audacity to repeat looks. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline these days to not signal evolution through consumption. Her clothes weren’t a performance of her personal coherence, they were a downstream effect of it.

Carolyn isn’t unique in this regard. The same thing happens every time the internet turns its attention to a self-possessed woman with a strong personal aesthetic: we reduce her to a uniform and call it a formula.

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Before the CBK madness, my timeline was obsessed with another formula: “How to Dress Like a French Girl.” Red lipstick guides. Five pieces every Parisienne owns. The Breton stripe. The straight-leg jean. The basket bag paired with a trench coat. The undone hair that required twenty minutes of your time and no less than six different $40 products. For many of us, myself included, the very act of trying was the single point of failure.

The women we reduce to aesthetics weren’t trying to be archetypes. They were living inside constraints—geography, work, class, habit, personality, temperament—and repeating themselves until coherence naturally formed. Jeanne Damas does not look French because she assembled a French kit. She looks French because she is French. She walks the streets of Paris daily in chic but sensible footwear, she repeats the red lip because she likes it and it looks good on her. She built a brand around her habits, not the other way around. Brigitte Bardot didn’t ooze sensuality because she spent hours picking out the perfect gingham, she looked sensual because she was sunburned, always running late, and vaguely disinterested in pleasing you. The sex appeal was ambient. CBK looked like an old money rich girl because she was one.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me: a terminally online thirty-something American girl with an email job. Why are we cosplaying as French? Or an international sex symbol? Or a rich girl in a tempestuous relationship with a powerful man?

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The best personal styles are often a pastiche of influences. Style, like art, is almost always derivative in some way or another, and there is very little true “originality” left. That’s not to be all doom and gloom, in fact, it’s very much the opposite: style becomes compelling when the derivation is metabolized through lifestyle, habit, and personal—truly personal—preference. Influence becomes identity only after repetition and refinement, which can only happen after it’s run through the rigors of real life.

Trying to dress like someone else isn’t the problem: the problem is the pretending that you can skip the digestion process. You can’t download coherence, no matter how many sleek pairs of jeans or cute little headbands you buy. You have to live inside the reference long enough for it to flex to your own constraints: your body, your schedule, your geography, your temperament. For me, it’s chasing after a toddler at the park, sitting on a Zoom meeting with senior leadership and feeling like I belong in the room, or not looking like a total big-city freakazoid when I go to get a latte at the local “Evangelical church girl” coffee shop.

I’ll admit that I bought my Levis Wedgie Bootcut jeans after watching an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians in which Kendall wore a similar pair. More “WFH mom” than “off-duty supermodel,” it took a lot of trial and error to figure out how I could style them in a way that suited me. Simple black leather ankle boots and a thin, textured sweater ended up being the key. Not quite Kendall, not quite Jeanne, but a secret third thing. (Me.)

xo, e.m.

I’m one of those people who is so guarded and closed off from other people that I needed to do mushrooms to get out of my own head enough to realize we’re all just sort of figuring it out. I think this is how ketamine was able to cure my OCD.

There’s a shared connection, a common thread between us all, but it’s far more mundane than your first trip on psychedelics wants you to believe. Whereas we visualize a honeycomb or a spinning mandala, the truth is actually sort of banal: we all wake up, we all go to sleep, we all drink water, we piss that water back out with varying degrees of difficulty but more or less the same. We mistreat others and we are mistreated by others. We’re reticent to communicate the former and very vocal about the latter. We eat from the same earth, breathe the same air, and all look for similar moments of levity to get through the day.

They’ve started writing gay bullshit on Starbucks cups again, things like “you go, rockstar,” and “yay.” As I crawl out of the den of overwhelm and ennui I shrouded myself into for the sake of “postpartum healing,” I realize that there’s not a place for me in this world. Not the world at large, but my immediate world here in West Virginia. These are not my people and I’m not theirs. Appalachia and I have finally reached our uneasy détente. For me, this came with disappointment, for Appalachia, the same cool indifference it always had. Some days, the goth girl who writes a vaguely lesbian-coded sweet message on my Grande Misto with skim understands what I need more than I understand it myself; and when I continue on to my morning babywearing walk, and the baby waves to everyone we see, I can’t help but feel like baby does too. What is insurmountable for me is a way of life baby has been born into, I wonder what the second and third order effects of this will be.

As eager as I was to get my sleep back, now that baby is sleeping through the night—exactly eighteen months post-birth—I miss our late nights together. I felt it coming, and in the weeks before, every time I put baby down, I got sad thinking it might be the last time I get to do this. I made note of the stillness, the rhythmic sputtering of rain on the roof, the faint and unseasonable rumble of thunder miles away. It’s beautiful to be so exhausted from such special, sacred work. Uninterrupted sleep has given me the ability to think again and I just want to shut it off.

I often think about a summer night a few months before I got pregnant. It was a sticky, relentless West Virginia summer day and nightfall only provided a very minor relief. I wore Margiela sandals to Tyler’s house and did my oral ketamine therapy. We had dinner on the deck afterwards and smoked cigarettes and I talked about my “trip” while the sky turned orange, then red, then pinkish blue, then dark. You really never know what’s going to happen tomorrow: that used to excite me, and it used to excite me a lot. It terrifies me now.

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On The Genesis Of My Mom Uniform

When I first got pregnant, I made a pact with myself: I will go back to my pre-pregnancy clothes as quickly as possible no matter what that means or takes. The morning of my caesarian, I learned that I’d gained a dizzying 27 pounds throughout my nine months of growing a baby in my womb. Despite it, I was back in my pre-pregnancy jeans within a few weeks. The thing I quickly learned though was that the fit wasn’t the issue: I hated all of my clothes. Not some of them, not most of them, but all of them. I was so intent on remaining true to a version of myself that I was pre-pregnancy, that I didn’t consider that version of myself wasn’t even genuine to begin with. Motherhood is transformative in ways both expected and mystical; it caused me to become sharper in my instincts and more decisive in my actions. I stood one afternoon, baby in my arms, and resisted the urge to throw all of my garments onto the floor and set them on fire. I settled for eventually getting rid of around forty percent of them, putting more sentimental pieces I couldn’t bear to part with at such a vulnerable time into storage, and slowly replacing the lost staples with pieces that actually suited me.

It’s easy to put on clothes as a costume. “What do I want the world to think of me today,” a younger version of me would often ponder while sorting through clothes on her garment rack, dressed in lace underwear and a bra that hadn’t been washed in weeks. (Okay, months.) I bought a pair of platform Uggs shortly after moving here, my idea being that though I’m not ready to commit to Chacos now (or ever), I could conjure up some basic bitch energy when I went to get my morning coffee at the local shop. The thing is though, I’d be flagged as an imposter the moment I ordered a latte, extra shot of espresso, skim milk, and no flavoring. The baristas there still look at me in disbelief when I order a coffee with no flavoring. Perhaps it’s because I once played a convincing version of their average customer. If we must be something, I’m basic in a different dialect, une femme ringarde.

Once you undergo the tectonic shift from “main character” to “supporting character in your child’s story,” your wardrobe changes too. Anything with fussy straps, tops my big back requires to be pulled down constantly, sundresses prone to a nip slip (though useful when nursing), were immediately put on probation. I realized that my clothes were like museum pieces: pristine, theatrical, historically significant. However, my day-to-day required something more lived-in. Not just postpartum, either. Life here in rural southern West Virginia. Life in my mid-thirties. I couldn’t be sexualized and architectural anymore, and I shouldn’t want to, because that never actually suited me. I can be subtly sensuous and textured, that’s more my speed anyway. You learn how to edit yourself a lot better when you get older, then if you decide to have children, you learn to innovate around the lifestyle’s rigors and find some sartorial flexibility.

So what is my mom uniform now? Not to change candor and tone and revert to my previous life as an influencer, I want to share it with you. (For research purposes.)

I live in Levi’s now: an ankle-grazing pair of fitted 501s and bootcut pair in a slightly darker wash. (If you only own two pairs of jeans, let these be it.) Wrap tops are my immediate go-to, I reach for those when I’m low on inspiration, and pairing one with pairing those jeans and a stacked heel ankle boot makes it all look every polished and intentional. Skirts and simple tops offer a more feminine alternative. (I’m self-conscious about the fact that still nursing means I’m holding on to some extra fat in my arms so I’m doing a lot of blazers or cardigans on top too. )

Lately, I’ve been wearing a knitted wrap top (mine is from a few seasons ago but this one is just as good) or thicker denim wrap top, well-worn black leather boots (close enough), stiff denim in a medium wash with a boot cut, and my favorite effortlessly chic black woven leather bag at least once a week. I was inspired by my friend Cynthia to buy this lace-trimmed cotton tank and it’s been a solid purchase so far, looking great under a vintage blazer with the jeans or over a skirt. It’s also fun to wear any of these combinations with a cardigan that’s tied at the bottom instead of buttoned, and this light blue one Mongolian Cashmere piece is so soft and versatile.

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On Valentine’s Flowers

I’d always say that I’d never been the type to want a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day, but I was also never with the type of man who’d buy a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day. My husband and I spent our first Valentine’s Day together in Paris (beautiful, a little trite, but romantic nonetheless) with norovirus (painfully unsexy, the unsexiest thing possible, actually) and honestly, not much can top that. The following year, he got me my favorite flowers: Stargazer Lilies. The year after that, my first Valentine’s as a mother and our first as a married couple, he got me some beautiful pink roses, a tradition he continued this year.

Pink roses on foyer console table hold a quiet dignity. Despite their stationary nature, they’re expressive, and watching them wilt over the last week has felt uncanny. I remember many Februaries in the past spent here and there, never in my apartment long enough to enjoy a vase of roses, wondering if I’d ever settle into a more predictable life. I’m sure I scoffed at the sentiment.

I never could have been aware of the impermanence that “settled down” would bring. The margins are thinner, everything moves so quickly, and not every bond adjusts at the same speed. I never considered myself a rose kind of gal until I met my guy, the kind of guy who buys a girl a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day. Now, I see myself in the way they’re slowly fading away. Roses don’t collapse like other flowers, they only look delicate. If you leave them long enough, they don’t rot, they dry. Their petals curl, their color deepens, their stems harden. They transform into something less soft and less fragrant, but they last.

Turns out that’s the kind of gal I am.

xo, e.m.

A week or so before I moved to Brooklyn, I went to an influencer event with my best friend. We got tipsy on “Spaghetts*,” then wandered over to the Rail Park to reminisce about my time in Philadelphia and take some #OOTDs. (You may now know them as “fit pics.”) I wore a horrendous patchwork print dress, petal pink lipstick that was very much not my season, my still-beloved orange velvet Reike Nen pumps (purchased secondhand from a closet sale hosted by the one and only Aimee Song), and a cream Jacquemus bag that I’d foolishly purchased before parting ways with the requisite $15K you must sacrifice to the broker gods in order to secure an apartment in New York City. (Yes, even Bedstuy.)

In hindsight, I wish we would have put our phones away, gotten a mediocre pizza, and sat in my living room watching The Jersey Shore.

When I think about my twenties, I’m not nostalgic for the days spent mural-hopping to secure the perfect shots of my outfits, the fake-friend photo ops I did with other influencers in the city (none of whom I particularly got along with anyway, all of whom hate me now, btw), the disingenuous social climbing I made a lifestyle of, or the careerist misery of early mornings and late nights in the office spent trying to appease bosses who were going to lay me off anyway. I miss the long nights with friends I just met drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, observing passers-by and debating the most asinine topics. The time I bruised the bottoms of my feet because I tipsily ditched my green Manolos somewhere between Girard Street and my cute little falling apart rowhome on Norris. The late nights listening to couples argue about where they parked after leaving the Taqueria on the end of my block, thinking “I should text him.” I often wish I wouldn’t have wasted so much of my twenties doing the other things.

To be fair, while in the throes of dopamine-induced Instagram narcissism, I didn’t think that I was wasting any time at all—in fact, I was convinced that I was building something meaningful; that I could potentially gift my future family some kind of trendy-D2C-brand-paid-campaign generational wealth. The pure delusion of thinking I was as pretty as the Blonde Salad (you now know her as Chiara Ferragni) or as aspirational as a Girl Meets Glam (that’s Julia Berolzheimer for those who have not been online as long as I have) is something to behold.

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The Striver doesn’t recognize herself as such. She calls it drive, taste, “planning seriously for her future.” To be fair again, “influencing” did unlock a lot of opportunities and experiences for me, but none aside from some lingering credit card debt have lasted into this current iteration of my life. I actually hadn’t stopped to think about my checkered striver past until my husband and I recently started watching Emily in Paris, a series I tried and failed to watch twice before because I found the titular Emily to be so nerve-gratingly, irritatingly, irresponsibly frustrating.

Fifteen minutes into my third attempt at getting through the pilot, I realized: she was me. Or rather, she was the worst parts of me.

Watching the show feels like less of a guilty pleasure (I don’t believe in “hate watches,” we only have two episodes left in season five and I’m a little beside myself) and more of a postmortem of my twenties. The outfits—aside from Emily’s Rome arc which, admittedly, did have a few gems—are insultingly bad, but what makes them indefensible is the pure try-hard energy willing them to life. It is only painful to watch because I’ve been there myself. Every bright color, every platform heel, every carefully-curated “effortless” pattern mix is a neon pink flare with glittery purple smoke shot into the sky: “I’m here and in case you were wondering, yes I do matter.”

I didn’t wear that patchwork dress because I liked it; I wore it because I thought it would photograph well (it did not) and it looked like something that someone more self-assured than me would wear.

There’s something uniquely American about all of this. As women of a certain age, I can say a lot of us were taught to become brave little strivers before we even learned how to sit still. The notion that we must be something is as innate to us as breathing, eating, fucking. The problem with all the striving isn’t the ambition (which I think can be a good thing), but the utter displacement of it all. You can never just enjoy where you are, you have to be playing some grandiose game of 4D chess against yourself, rehearsing the person you would like to be instead of living as the person you already are. The striver lives in anticipation; she seldom enjoys her own life for the sake of it. Everything about the media we consume, the society we’re conditioned in, and the attached incentives all tell us that this is a good thing. I got a tech job and moved to Brooklyn because I thought it was what I had to do. I traded in my boho-inspired dresses and suede platforms for sensible Everlane basics and the same white Veja sneakers that every other girl shoving her way onto the L was wearing because it’s just what you did when you move to New York. It was a reinvention that felt mature, like an arrival or maybe even the natural order settling into itself. In hindsight, it was a different brand of “striving.” The striver is most dangerous when she deludes herself into believing she’s not trying too hard at all.

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My New York illusion was shattered very shortly after I’d moved there. (Eight and a half months, to be precise.) The guy I moved there to impress dumped me, the job I’d pridefully attained put me on a PIP (in hindsight, that reflected more on poor management than on me), and then, a little thing called “the pandemic” happened. We are rarely gifted such heavy-handed revelations at all, let alone in such quick succession, so I figured that my streak of misfortune must have been some sort of divine providence. Like Emily at the end of season four when everything horrible and inopportune happened all at once, I was at an impasse. One afternoon in late April 2020, in my cozy albeit very small apartment, I looked over at my rack of colorful vintage dresses, Everlane flats too narrow for my feet, and realized that none of it was actually “me.” It was content, simple as. Quarantine granted those clothes a forced sabbatical, and hanging there without an audience, they looked limp and strangely lifeless, stripped of the virile beauty I’d once projected onto them.

Sans audience, the striver within me was without a modus operandi. No men to impress, no offices to stand out in, no performative bottomless mimosas to sip alongside my insufferable social-climbing frenemies. I was a woman lost. I did what any reputable striver would do at first, and I posted through it. I wore nip-slip-prone sundresses to lie on the couch and watch Seinfeld, I went on Etsy and purchased about a dozen of those stupid masks (which likely did nothing helpful) to match most of my outfits, I staged silly little “floor picnics” just to feel something, anything at all. If Emily ever found herself alone in her apartment, I imagine she would have done the same. A new lipstick, a new man somehow, a new storyline; anything to avoid the deafening silence of compulsory solitude. The Striver cannot survive quiet. She requires motion—histrionic, theatrical motion. That’s why I impulsively bought a 110-year old home in rural Southern West Virginia: the ultimate striver move. Social and career suicide? All but guaranteed. Risk of discomfort? Astonishingly high. But, before the novelty wore off and the absurdity of it all set in, it was content. West Virginia, however, is not a place that takes kindly to curation.

When Emily’s storyline had gotten stale, she had Rome. I had Beckley. She’d be able escape to picturesque “Solitano” if things were getting too chaotic in the Eternal City; I’d drive seven and a half hours back home because I missed and craved the chaos of it all. Where Rome rewards spectacle, Beckley rewards immersion. There are no soft filters to make life here aesthetic, no ironic distance to pose from Dollar General parking lots. No one is particularly interested in your résumé if they can create more interesting gossip about you instead. If you stick out, you stick out plainly and the small town hive mind’s response to you will be merciless. For a while, I felt fraudulent in ways both physical and metaphysical. My city girl restraint and mystique read as costume, and my studied nonchalance looked ridiculous against these mountains, older than time itself, none of which have any interest in being aestheticized or idealized. I was forced to reckon with the difference between visibility and value, and I no longer wanted to be visible; I wanted to blend in. But despite my best efforts to do so, and in the ultimate irony of it all, I simply could not. It was a rupture that Emily could gloss over with a new co-ord with matching gloves, a new marketing pitch, a new foreign man. I ran out of reinventions. I needed to be real for once in my life.

Real looked like figuring out who I was: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I kept the sensible heels and sent the more garish or attention-begging ones to Goodwill for some other young striver to enjoy (as she fantasizes about life in a studio apartment in New York City, no doubt). I abandoned clothing with too much melodrama but kept a few pieces that invite speculation or projection, but no longer let my clothes do my talking for me. Instead, I read a lot of books and developed a personal philosophy and sense of self. I learned that it’s okay to piecemeal a worldview; in fact, all the strongest ones are formed like this. I became a stalwart force against aesthetics and beliefs easily summarized in a sentence or slogan, and a foremost skeptic of trends. A lot of people stopped fucking with me. It’s okay, I’m told it’s called “thinning the herd” or “addition by subtraction.”

Make no mistake: this is not enlightenment. I am still in a near-constant state of existential recalibration. I still want things, some things I want more than ever now that I’m a mom and realizing the stakes are that much higher. I still compare myself to anyone and everyone, younger versions of myself included. I still feel the old itch to compete when someone else ascends. I haven’t killed the Striver within so much as nearly suffocated her with a pillow for long enough to quiet her before putting her in the basement with a few bottles of water and protein bars. She thrives in my private Pinterest boards, my Instagram explore page, and in flashes of brilliance here and there in my vacation wardrobe. The patchwork dress is long gone, but the girl who wore it—for better or worse—is still here.

xo, e.m.

*Worst name for a cocktail by the way, I really hate it.

I can vividly recall these red mesh mules with embroidered flowers that I really cherished. I bought them at a surf shop on the boardwalk with money I made from babysitting and doing my chores. I would slip them on for a stroll through the mall with my friends, the short trip to buy a sugary sweet coffee Coolatta at the Dunkin’ Donuts a few blocks from my childhood home, or for Wednesday evening youth group. These shoes were not made for walking. They slipped off of my feet and the thin soles ensured that each pebble and small divot underfoot would inflict temporary discomfort. They were special for precisely this reason, they were the first in a long line of impractical but aspirational shoes for me. I didn’t have the language to describe why I liked them, I just knew that I did.

Around the same time, I had a black and cream floral qipao that I wore to a family wedding and at least one picture day. I didn’t know it then, but the way the silk skimmed my then-shapeless form set a high standard for dresses to follow. (I still hold my breath and wait for that same sense of ceremony when I put on a new garment.) A few years later, I would be shopping in Chinatown for bamboo-shaped enamel bangles and dangly faux jade earrings. At the time, none of this felt especially loaded. I didn’t yet know how to name what I was doing, or that these objects were part of aesthetic traditions far older and more complex than I could grasp. What I knew was that when I wore them, I felt like I was taking part in something bigger than myself. The desire to be draped in these fabrics and shapes arrived long before the understanding ever did.

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When John Galliano’s models marched in Dior’s Spring/Summer 2003 couture show—porcelain-white faces and slicked-back hair set the tone while bold shapes and layers of ornamental detail—I was eleven years old. The models didn’t look like women in costume so much as dolls that had briefly come to life, much more demure and refined than my friends and I trying on silk dresses in Chinatown, but held together by the same thread. Galliano’s Dior was not interested in accuracy or homage. It never claimed to represent or even to understand China, its culture, or its people. Instead, it oozed drama and desire—European, baroque, excessive desire—wrapped in architectural silk, thick lacquer, meticulously detailed embroidery. Like many others of its time, the show made no attempt to justify itself, explain its references, or soften its edges. It wanted in the way that want is a lost art today.

What’s most striking now is not that this kind of aesthetic excess would provoke backlash (because we all know that it would), but that the “desire” thread would be an afterthought, if considered at all. In a culture defined and shaped by algorithms, everything is optimized for immediate legibility: for takes, for reactions, for “the discourse.” Thoughts, ideas, and aesthetics are reduced to slogans and memes until they are rendered entirely meaningless. Want, desire, and obsession, by contrast, are slow, asymmetrical, deeply personal, and resistant to external justification. Desire doesn’t explain itself because desire doesn’t need to. Obsession doesn’t resolve neatly because it can’t. Want lingers, burning longer than the average twenty-four-hour news cycle will allow. In both cases—the algorithmic whir of discourse and the slow travail of yearning—the ouroboros is eating her own tail, just in the latter, she’s at least serving cvnt.

Galliano’s Dior belonged to a time when fashion did not yet feel compelled to justify itself in real-time. The designs spoke for themselves, fully-formed and cooly disinterested in consensus, leaving meaning to catch up later, if at all. That latency mattered because it allowed room for fixation, for misreading, for obsession to take root without immediately being corrected or shamed away. By today’s standards, this would be irresponsible, and this is why his designs somehow, despite ever-shifting trends and a major scandal, have stood the test of time. For anyone with a lesser artistic legacy, controversy and cycles would be definitive. For him though, they were merely incidental. From the moment they appeared on the runway to the time that teenagers like me purchased their simulacra on the boardwalk, they held their meaning.

As objects of art go, fashion seems to be the last medium that’s able to dodge reproach. Fashion, once released, does not remain tethered to intention or authorship. It becomes a life form of its own, though its DNA is indelibly connected to its creator, even if only in spirit. In this way, Galliano’s influence came back not as a rebirth, but an afterlife. His 1999 Saddle Bag was suddenly everywhere a few years ago, with personal style influencers causing a run on TheRealReal for the bag, once a fairly affordable unique vintage piece still inflated to match demand. Then there’s my Explore page, constantly littered with the repeated invocation of Carrie Bradshaw’s iconic newspaper-print dress, and later, her J’Adore Dior tee, an item that inspired hundreds of thousands of knock-offs (I think we’re calling them “dupes” now) and homages (I had my own translation once: a charcoal-black tee with orange lettering that read J’adore Giroux #28, a South Philly rewrite that mattered more for the reference than its origin).

It’s a resurgence that requires little context: these objects stand powerfully enough on their own; so much so that they practically created a micro-universe around themselves. Untethered from the burden of authorship, the burn of scandal, or even the aesthetic milieus in which they were imagined, they are a masterclass in form over timeline. Far from “timeless,” they have staying power because they are so damn iconic, and what makes them this way is how they cause us to feel. They were conjured through the same animating force that brought Galliano’s S/S 2003 Couture show to life: desire; a desire powerful enough to transcend its lofty origins and distill itself into something recognizable to the masses. The excess remains, but it has been rendered safe through quotation.

Art born of obsession survives even as culture flattens around it, but fashion does so in a particular way. Once archived, it no longer asks for the risk of being fully co-signed, only recognition. The creator recedes while the creation continues to circulate, waxing and waning in relevance if the creator is lucky (or exceptionally talented). We reproduce the symbols of excess long after we’ve lost the appetite for excess itself, the way we still tell stories about the old gods despite no longer worshiping them.

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In my own headcanon, Dior’s 2003 Spring/Summer Couture show is the “Miranda Priestly cerulean sweater” moment that defined my generation. While it didn’t mandate a single color, silhouette, or trend, it embodied a spirit that those of us who spent our babysitting money on Vogue still carry. That same logic still colors Dior today, even as the excess has been tempered. The details may have changed, but “the want” does not. Fashion doesn’t just trickle down, we are eager to participate in its cycles. Long before we encounter designers as names or scandals, we meet their work in diluted, translated forms: shoes bought at the Surf Mall on the Ocean City Boardwalk, dresses worn on picture day, references absorbed without provenance. This is why fashion behaves differently when we try to erase it. To cancel the work outright would require pretending we were never implicated in it at all.

I’m hopeful that Dior under Jonathan Anderson will feel like a spiritual cousin to Dior under Galliano. The excess has been refined rather than erased. Anderson’s couture resists the same forces Galliano once ignored: speed, disposability, the demand to explain oneself immediately. “What makes me angry at the moment is that we have no patience,” Anderson has said. “We just consume it, cancel it, move on from it.” His Dior, especially seen in his recent couture debut, answers that impatience with craft that feels a lot like a slow burn: feathers that masquerade as flowers, silks that become petals, garments that hang more like a sultry flirtation rather than a declaration. It is still aspirational if not a little theatrical, though grounded in the same kind of obsessive desire.

If Galliano showed what happens when desire is allowed to run wild, Anderson shows what it looks like when that same desire is disciplined and restrained. In both cases, the fantasy lingers because it asks something of the body: attention, patience, and presence. Fashion remains untouchable not because it avoids critique, but because it insists on being felt rather than reasoned. His designs make me want, but in a far more pointed and determined way. Still lofty and with a hint of whimsy, but more resolute.

I wore a silk dress to church a few weeks ago, an elegant and simple one. The way it drapes over me reminds me of my old qipao. I paired it with a salmon pink mohair cardigan, I tied it gently at the waist instead of letting it hang. It’s got a loose knit so while cozy, it’s not the warmest sweater I own, definitely not a “January in West Virginia” kind of garment. I chose form over function like I often do though, like I’ve done since walking to Dunkin’ Donuts in my red mesh mules. Long before I understood fashion, I understood what I wanted. As my taste has grown along with me, that’s one thing that’s stayed the same.

xo, e.m.

I’ve been feeling like this bird that was trapped in Kroger on New Year’s Day. We were browsing the bakery when he or she dive-bombed the counter where employees prepare suspiciously good sushi (considering it’s a grocery store full of white people in landlocked West Virginia). A gentleman in head-to-toe Realtree Camouflage remarked, “that’s a good dinner” as I tried and failed to hide my astonishment. As we wandered to the alcohol section, the bird reappeared, perching on a “sparkling water” sign and watching us shop below. The baby saw and pointed, attempting to jump out of the shopping cart while clapping and squealing in delight. Babies don’t know that being stuck in Kroger is pretty much a death sentence for a poor little lost bird, they’re blissfully unaware, as the bird likely is as well.

I hate to sound like one of “those” girls but January always feels never-ending. It’s bad enough that it’s just sort of glum, but what makes it truly unbearable is that it’s oversaturated with “circling back,” “catching up,” and penance for all the time wasted doing nothing between Christmas and the new year. I wish I had a sparkling water sign to perch my dainty bird ankles upon. Maybe it would make all of the transience feel a little more intentional?

Home, Whatever That Means Anymore

I took the baby to visit my family for a week earlier this month and I had a Boris Yeltsin-esque moment in Wegmans with my mom wherein I actually cried. I CRIED at how well-stocked the shelves were, how there was so much variety, how everything was so nice, how the lighting was pleasant, and how there were no rednecks with eight-packs of Pepsi and Mountain Dew straddled across the top of their shopping carts anywhere to be seen.

I didn’t cry because I didn’t know this is how “the other half” lived, I cried because I forgot about it, and wandering the palatial arrays of foreign, domestic, and local beers dislodged an upper middle class suburban blood memory for me. Somewhere between October of 2020 and that moment, I’d adjusted to “making do”—fewer choices, unflattering fluorescence, a constant low-grade annoyance that I told myself was normal, even character-building. I had mistaken endurance for virtue. I didn’t want to be the silver spoon bitch that everyone here in West Virginia assumes me to be.

I felt guilty about it, then jealous about it, then just kinda sad. I realized that my emotional upheaval wasn’t about taste, class, or just being generally precious about anything at all. It happened because I’d simply lived too long in a state of mild deprivation, and for the sake of not feeling overwhelming remorse or grief to have lost the lifestyle I once knew, I called it “resilience.” It’s more than just the grocery stores here, it’s everything. Scarcity is the animating force behind pretty much everything where I live now: money, social status, creativity, all of it. I’ve gotten used to the ambient despair that comes along with that, and it made the abundance I once took for granted feel incredibly destabilizing.

The baby, comfortable in a shopping cart with four working wheels and a cupholder, reached towards carefully-constructed arrays of colorful snacks that a baby from West Virginia couldn’t even fathom. Babies don’t know yet that many circumstances require delight to be rationed. Babies don’t brace disappointment or understand that some environments ask you to shrink just to survive them. Babies don’t know about class, about resentment, about “belonging.”

I’m always torn between two liminal spaces: one requiring constant adjustment, one that will always be more or less “lost” to me. The thing is, while I’m waiting to figure out where I’ll “end up,” I’m realizing that time is passing by me faster than ever before. I just thought we were taking a trip to Wegmans, I never expected to be mourning not a life I never had, but one I had already learned to live without. Option fatigue got the better of me and I grabbed a few things from my list: beers for Tyler, some items requested by his friends, and a snack for the baby. Next time I’ll at least bring some escarole back to West Virginia.

Grieving My Collection Of Reasonable Stacked Heels

Have you ever noticed that sometimes, time feels like something you’re moving through, and other times, it feels like something that’s happening to you? Yeah, I’m deeply into the latter. Time used to feel somewhat abstract, years and months marked by deeply personal epochs such as “the summer I went blonde,” “the autumn of despair, pt. 2,” “2022 from Phoenix to Los Angeles.” Now, everything is suspended in “the in-between” and dates don’t matter as much as deadlines (mostly self-imposed) and baby milestones. I can’t seem to make my husband understand why I’m so upset all the time which is fair because I can’t even understand why I’m so upset all the time. Could just be that it’s winter.

I look at my array of city girl heels collecting dust in our entryway, the kind of shoes that hurt your feet but not enough to dissuade you from walking 20 blocks at a time in them. If you’re an urbanite of a certain age, you know the kind—the ones that make you feel sexy as you sip an overpriced martini and split a side of fries with a friend after work. The kind that you can wear with jeans or a dress and look undone and chic all at once. I look at these shoes and feel like our time together may have come to an end, I begin to question my own sanity and place in the world, then consider purchasing some Chacos like everyone else around here. (I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.)

I wrote about an AI stylist app I tested a few months ago, I didn’t love it, there’s something sinister about allowing yourself to be dressed by an LLM, so I’m an Indyx girl now. (You can look at my closet here is you’re particularly nosy, you can even style me if you want, which seems more dignified than being styled by an AI.) There is something somatically comforting about going through and indexing your closet which is why I’ve done it twice now. This time came along with a grand culling, I got rid of almost 40 pieces that don’t serve me anymore. Doing to provided the same catharsis that I’d always hoped cutting bangs in my bathroom at 1AM could give me.

I’m unsure about what all of this means but I suspect it’s in the same vain as the Wegmans cry and the Kroger bird.

Everything Else

I have gotten bad, like REALLY bad, about documenting my outfits. I’m afraid that all I have for the entire month of January is an errands fit and a “tanning before getting dinner” fit, both mostly unremarkable. It’s not all caused by laziness or ennui, we’ve been snowed in for a week or so. We got some really beautiful snow, then about two inches of ice, then a layer of sparkly icy snow on top of it. Lovely, but not great for leaving the house.

I started going to the gym again for the first time in almost two years, which means I’m back to listening to my fun little pop music.

In addition to this playlist of tracks I had on repeat, I’ve been listening to Oklou’s Choke Enough album a lot and some lofi versions of songs from Pokémon games. (This one is so good.) I finished reading my friend Audrey’s gorgeously rich and layered collection of short stories (it’s called Utter Goodness, go buy and and read it, inject it into your veins even) and it’s inspired me to continue working on my own short stories. I also finally finished Didion’s Play it As It Lays and Cocteau’s Letter to the Americans so you can’t say I haven’t been busy. I always wonder if I should write about the books I read, but I absorb them in such a deeply personal way. Also, no offense to anyone on this app, but when I see that someone is writing about a book they read, I immediately check out. It’s the same as listening to someone talk about their twelve-step skincare routine or what they eat in a day. It’s not always self-congratulatory behavior, but there’s almost always at least a touch of it in there.

I have an unspoken goal that I guess I’m putting out into the universe now: more leaving the house in February, please.

xo, e.m.

Did you know that SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) hosts meetings on Zoom? I learned this in 2021 and immediately took advantage of it. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. I knew I wasn’t a “sex addict” (that would have been fun though) and my relationship with “love” was far too complicated and exhausting to be a proper addiction in itself. I fought off the nagging feeling that my particular malady was a much more complicated one and logged into a meeting based in Baton Rouge. Or was it Iowa City? I tried and tested several different meetings. The Midwest had the most handsome men. The West Coast had more certifiably insane women than anywhere else. I went to meetings based in Peoria or Kansas City (MO) when I needed to “feel something,” Los Angeles or Vancouver (WA) when I needed to feel better about myself.

Anonymous Participant 7 immediately caught my eye. He was boyishly handsome and blonde, which isn’t usually my thing but who am I to deny an unmistakable vibe? I wonder if he’d write long, romantic messages or short, decisive ones; whether he was the kind to make the first move or not. I got so lost running probabilities in my head that I missed my cue.

SLAA didn’t work for me because I couldn’t quite figure out how to not bring my delusion into the room. Why couldn’t I have just been an alcoholic instead?

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“Addiction” is a term to which we assign both too much and too little gravitas. I remember how it felt when I learned that a friend died of a heroin overdose. I also remember that my great grandmother always had a half-eaten roll of Snackwell cookies in her bedside table. She swore she didn’t, but various family members had seen her sneaking some here or there. I’m sure they found it next to her Bible and a roll of stamps after she died. I’d say my vice is somewhere in-between. It’s more damaging to spirit than body, though I’m sure the argument could be made that I’ve defiled my corporeal form on its behalf on more than one occasion Addiction needs more than permission to flourish, it requires access, a supply.

I kept a supply, or rather, a “supplier” on call. Usually via text messages but we’d met up a couple times when our travel plans happened to align in the most unlikely of places. He was someone I had once and though I didn’t want him back, needed access to. It ended more than once, always in some illusion-shattering heartbreak, often quite messy and unrestrained. Even at its worst, there was room left to imagine; to fixate upon if not careful. When we did revisit each other, we did so not out of desperation or curiosity, but ritual. There was a rare stability to be found in the ambiguity of our periodic vague flirtations and I couldn’t get enough. Over time, there was less and less emotion involved as we enjoyed an intellectual spar now and again. I found it all to be more of a nervous system regulation exercise than romantic exploration.

Intrigue is one hell of a drug. It’s particularly potent in its ability to stabilize, and there’s a certain euphoria to be found when the dreamlike becomes the mundane and the mundane takes on the flavor of a dream. Where in most circumstances, the anticipation is the killer, intrigue rewards the in-between rather than the outcome. Something in me is hardwired to seek this like a rat will always find a source of water. I don’t believe that intrigue is inherently destructive or especially salacious. I’ve been careful to calculate desire; to make sure that it’s mutually calibrated, at least for a time. Intrigue is an undercurrent gently moving them towards a well-choreographed dance between reality and possibility, and for most people, it’s something you visit: briefly, as limerence, or later, as nostalgia. But for some of us, intrigue isn’t a place we pass through, it’s where we choose to set down roots.

I rarely experience intrigue as longing, for me, it’s more of an orientation or the legend on a map. I set my sights on an unsustainable kind of novelty, not because I needed excitement, but because it could hold my attention so well. I can remember the meet-cutes and first dates with every one of my past boyfriends with an uncanny attention to detail. The way my TOTEME mules left an indentation on the top of my foot, how it swelled into a bruise as I, dizzy and drunk, took ladylike bites of pizza despite being utterly famished. I remember not wanting him to know my foot was hurting me because I would have walked from Battery Park to Inwood with him if he’d asked me. I remember the scratchy wool of his blazer, dapper and darling despite the early June heat and humidity. The way my Le Labo Santal 33 met and lingered with his Creed Green Irish Tweed. I recall every beginning just like this. (At least the major relationships. In between those, I tried to capture the same lighting in a bottle feeling with various levels of failure.)

I like to imagine my muses noticing the tension in these moments and indulging in a Polymarketesque betting scandal for each and every one; running odds, placing bets, and covering the spread.

Fifty-seven percent he kisses her before her Uber arrives. If he doesn’t, ninety-six percent she texts him the moment she’s back at the hotel.

Thirty-three percent she tells that story about getting lost at the Harbin Ice Festival.

Forty-two percent she books the flight.

This was how I learned to stay present without being vulnerable. Turns out, it’s easier to just watch the line move than it is to ask for what you want.

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Intrigue is a safe bet, the center always holds. It’s a hedge against a specific kind of uncertainty by celebrating it in a different form. It flips the discomfort of tension on its head, it makes tension a delightful indulgence. There are no decisions, there are no revelations, there are no disappointments. Just you, a person onto which you can project all your needs and desires, and a street corner in Brooklyn, or Venice Beach, or Bowness. Nothing is lost, nothing is found. You simply are. Attention is contained, affection diffused. Over time, the spark doesn’t cease to exist, it just stabilizes and becomes commonplace. Comfortable, but slow.

That pace worked for me longer than it worked for anyone else. I could stay suspended, attentive, oriented toward possibility while moving forward. What shifted wasn’t interest or desire so much as momentum. Rather than moving in lockstep, attention relaxed on their side first, their curiosity thinned, and I eventually found myself dancing to a different tempo altogether. After enough repetitions, the pattern becomes familiar and beginnings start to feel safer than continuity. I remember trying to explain it all to a boyfriend, rigid with apathy, our last day together many years ago.

“You love beginnings. You can find a new one.”

“I don’t want a new beginning, I want to go back to the one I had with you.”

I didn’t think that marriage could interrupt this pattern, I always thought it would be like forcing an addict into a harrowing cold turkey withdrawal, which has been known to backfire more often than it works. This beginning though, this first date, caused me to do something I’d never done before: I stopped wanting to be suspended in the moment and started living to experience the next. Even my muses had stopped running the numbers.

I didn’t meet him in the most remarkable way, which to me, felt special. There was no story I could tell that would explain what happened next. What mattered wasn’t circumstance, but recognition: the immediate sense that this was not something I could optimize, revisit, or hold at a distance. The pattern I’d relied on for years simply didn’t apply. He held my attention and captivated all of my sensibilities—artistic, sensual, domestic, feral—in a way that felt durable rather than charged. The feeling wasn’t one of urgency, but of depth. I had the strange, immediate sense that the rest of my life wouldn’t be enough time to know him fully, and that instead of frightening me, this felt like relief. To be able to wake up next to one person and long to spend the rest of the day with them, over and over, until death takes me.

They say “when you know, you know.” I knew, and I knew it was time to delete my “dealer’s” number as well.

xo, e.m.

In Breton, there is a saying: “you have to wait for the night to know if the day was beautiful.” I think about it often now more and more as my life grows busier and more complicated, refusing to settle into anything static at all, not for a moment, not even an uneasy détente here or there. I used to fight the idea of long, arduous transitions between states of being, longing instead for some comfortable stasis that I now understand to be the exception, not the rule. Life is definitionally a pastiche of in-between moments, and the refusal to judge the middle of things may be the only way we maintain our sanity (and our hope) through it all.

Last week, I did find myself fully at peace. (For a few minutes.)

I stood in front of a Saint in repose, Saint François de Laval, who is sleeping under The Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec. Though hidden somewhere below the church’s stone floor, like all saints, his holiness permeates matter, allowing those receptive to it to be blessed. Since he is not one of “our” saints, I knew little about him, but a brief reading revealed a man who willingly took on conflict so that others might be spared from it. It is not uncommon for visitors to feel an almost eerie peace in his presence because of this. Standing there, I understood something I hadn’t before: peace is not the absence of burden, but a calmness and quiet that can exist despite it. Our lives are only fully legible at night.

My biggest burden is that I am quick to anger, and just as quick to forgive. (Or at least, to declare forgiveness.) Motherhood has made time feel compressed. Everything, everything happens at a breakneck pace, days telescoping into one another, unresolved conflict taking on the weight of years because there is so little margin for pause. In that compression, the need for forgiveness has become reflexive, a way of restoring order before I collapse upon myself and the home again. It’s perfunctory at best, but what is forgiveness, anyway? Does anyone really know or understand?

I’ve been considering a new definition of forgiveness, something quieter and more difficult: we are allowed to, and honestly should, wait until forgiveness is true. Forgiveness offered too quickly does not heal; it merely displaces the anger. Like the Breton’s beautiful day, true forgiveness reveals itself only after its occasion has passed. For me, this means it arrives only once my heart has cooled enough for my mouth to speak honestly, without defense. Some things cannot be rushed into daylight. They must be carried, unjudged, until night makes them clear. Now that it’s a new year (I apologize for this journal entry being a little late…) I can say: 2025 was beautiful. Poignant and painful, unbearable at times, but resplendent when it mattered.

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Our First Christmas With Just Us Three

We went to Québec City for Christmas almost impulsively, the way people do when they sense, without fully articulating it, that staying put would be far more costly than leaving. There was a lot of noise in 2025, and most of the cacophony had not resolved until the final few days. Because of this, we found it necessary to spend this Christmas as a trio.

We didn’t seek to “disappear” as much as we simply wanted to “recede.” We love that we can speak French (though I’m neither quick nor fluent enough to not be utterly exhausted by the constant switching back and forth) and be “unseen” if needed. We actually got engaged in Québec, at Le Massif, I’m not sure if I’ve told that story here before. I should. It includes us going to a music festival somewhere between the St. Lawrence River and the Saguenay Fjord, spending the night in our rented Tesla (with me 30 weeks pregnant), whale watching, and the most memorable ham sandwich I’ve ever experienced. Basically, Québec is a very special place for us.

We spent one week walking through the negative-degree-Fahrenheit chill up and down slush-covered streets and sidewalks. We ate the best food, drank the best beer, and went to bed before 9PM most nights. We were bonded by the cold and the raw joy. Christmas Markets and snow-capped churches run a huge risk of being too romanticized, but everything about Québec City in December was entirely worth it. The baby shared seafood pasta with us for Christmas Eve dinner, we ate more croissants than I care to admit, we learned that the baby is NOT ready to sit on Santa’s lap (though he did sing a beautiful french song to her which she loved and gave her a silly little toy ambulance that later saved us from at least one mealtime meltdown), and I discovered that I speak my best French when ordering Lebanese sandwiches.

This trip is one that will always live peacefully in my memory, with one small stain: Air Canada kept our bags in Toronto on our layover rather than sending them home with us, and they took a week to get back. Living one week without makeup, skincare, and my Air Wrap was humbling. That’s all I say on the matter.

The Baby And I Did A Little More Than 24 Hours In Chicago

Earlier in the month, I went to Chicago alone with the baby. This wasn’t a grand gesture of independence so much as a work-relatednecessity. Something about doing it without backup, without my husband or mom as backup, bonded me and the baby even more than 16 months of nursing did. We learned each other’s rhythms and dislikes, we learned how to occupy ourselves and have fun without distractions.

We nearly missed our flight home, despite arriving at the airport more than an hour and a half early. I’m going to blame American Airlines and a comedy of errors that only they could pull off. Airports are a place where time is suspended, both still and breakneck. I let my NEXUS lapse (dammit) so I lost my Pre-Check privileges. Going through security with the general population is a humility ritual of sorts. Why do I need to take my laptop out of my bag? Why am I always randomly selected? Why are you so desperate to get a glimpse of my feet when we’re not even supposed to be taking off our shoes anymore? Doing it all while babywearing makes it seem even more bizarre. I remember hearing them saying our names over the intercom as we waited in line to get a bin for all of our belongings. I was uncharacteristically chill about it all, standing there, oddly calm, thinking: either we make it or we don’t. We made it, of course. I had to run. I was out of breath, but I did take a mental pause to admire the fact that I was running through the same arched corridor that the cast of Home Alone ran through thirty-some years before. It seemed almost spiritual.

Once seated on the plane, I came to the realization that motherhood has completely rewired my relationship to control. There is no time for perfect conditions. You move. You decide. You act, and meaning follows later, if at all. (Finding out that I was pregnant was a crash course in this.)

Baby own’t remember this trip, but I will. We had so much fun. I was nervous beforehand, I don’t know about what. We’re lucky to have a baby who travels well.

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The Miscellaneous

Ever since discovering the solid perfume I keep in my purse at all times, baby always smells a little but like Glossier You. It’s kind of insane how observant babies can be, mine watches me put it on and mimics with uncanny accuracy. Toddlerhood means picking and choosing your battles, this is one I de-prioritize, as when we’re out, taking things out and putting them back into my “essentials” pouch is an engaging activity without a lot of destruction or potential for harm.

I had a few sartorially experimental moments while we were in Québec City. One was when I was short on sweaters and had to run to a nearby tourist store with all sorts of cheeky tees and other assorted bullshit to find a crewneck to wear under my puffer coat. (A t-shirt just wasn’t cutting it in the windy, sub-zero temps.) I figured that even though it was incredibly lame to wear a Québec shirt IN Québec (like wearing the band’s t-shirt to their show), it would be cool to wear back home. I paired it with these plaid wool trousers and it was a pretty okay look as far as touristcore goes. (Sidebar: I love traveling like a local but I also really hate people who are like “I’m not a tourist,” because, well, yeah you actually are.) The other moment for experimentation happened on Christmas Day. We had a casual brunch planned but I wanted to be festive in a “not TOO on-theme” way while keeping warm because, once again, it was cold. Red tights are having a moment, and though I’m usually averse to bright colors, I had to give ‘em a try. It was fun to dress like “someone else.” I loved the way they looked paired with these ByFar velvet Mary Janes, but I ended up wearing them with some chunky brown lug-sole boots instead.

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In/Out Predictions for 2026

As embarrassing as it is to say this, we’re only five days into 2026 and I’m already outpacing last year’s consumption of highbrow media consumption. So far, we’ve watched Et Dieu... créa la femme and Le samouraï and I finished reading Didion’s Play It As It Lays. I want to fill my brain with things that inspire me to create rather than more of the same mindless slop that dominated my desires while in the worst throes of “my grey matter is all gone” part of postpartum. No more stupid reality TV. No more “guilty pleasures because my brain can’t handle anything else!” Only things I’m not embarrassed for my husband to see me reading/listening to/watching.

After a very trying year in 2025 of doing the “difficult work” with things like getting laid off from my shitty job that I hated and finally entering my “self-employed era” (great, though REALLY HARD while being our baby’s full-time caregiver as well), slowly accepting and embracing the all-consuming change that is MOTHERHOOD, and recognizing that “suicidal empathy” is the biggest threat to all that I hold dear and beginning to quietly sever ties with those who live that way, and finally figuring out that choosing peace is more rewarding than “being right,” in 2026, I will be focusing on:

• Looksmaxxing

• Being a hater (niche topics only)

• Pilates

I’m (mostly) joking.

I think it’s better to be vague about my in/out list for the year so before I go, I’m presenting it here with no further elaboration.

Happy New Year.

xo, e.m.

Tucked between the myriads of Spotify Wrapped posts, those shameless annual displays of algorithmic media consumption, I saw it. Five Olympic rings and an American flag, embroidered with almost pastoral earnestness across the back of a leather-and-shearling jacket. On the underside of the popped collar, aged script (almost certainly inspired by the way WWII-era fighter pilots emblazoned their nicknames on the sides of their jets) read, “Team U.S.A.” (The punctuation, the periods between the letters, for whatever reason, really got me.)

“Lauren, you brilliant bastard,” I thought, “you’ve done it again.”

I hadn’t remembered it was about to be an Olympic year. Because of the current “monocultural hegemony of the boring West” I’d nearly forgotten I even lived in the United States. But there it was: this Ralph Lauren jacket, this almost mythological piece of clothing in its mild-mannered glory. It dislodged something inside me, something arcane if not slightly embarrassing, and before I could intervene, every mitochondrion of every cell in my body rose to their feet. I was helpless to stop them. My entire being had already rallied itself into a chant:

“U.S.A.”

“U.S.A.”

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Like most others, I find myself in a precarious position, re: “Americana.” Politics aside, once I started to see this country as our leaders seem to (as purely an economic zone designed to make a select few very, very, disgustingly and despicably wealthy) everything started to make sense, especially the way time itself has begun to feel scarce. At the same time though, I want to believe in something and align my ethos with anything that commands some gravitas. I think this must be why so many young people are going “trad” and converting to centuries-old versions of Christianity: if the American identity no longer holds an expressive value or real meaning, what does that mean for us, as Americans? I’ve written before about how our culture has been flattened by irony and rendered joyless thanks to unfettered safetyism, but I think those are both downstream of the real issue behind our “stuck culture,” which is that we were convinced a long time ago that the worst thing we can be is, God forbid, offensive.

Around the same time as Ralph Lauren dropped the Olympic team gear of a lifetime, Pantone announced their color of the year, which everyone should know by now is really just their annual bid to make us all upset so we’ll talk about them for a week or so. We collectively forgot and threw a fit over the color they selected, “Cloud something or other,” I genuinely can’t remember its name, I just know that it was a dull greyish white. Pantone tried to do something inoffensive, and succeeded (only sort of), but it was so jejune and uninspired that people got offended by it anyway.

This is what happens when culture is afraid to stand for anything, and this is why Ralph Lauren is practically an institution at this point. Even the barely-fashion-literate girlies (myself included) can’t break out of his gravitational pull. Aesthetics aside, Ralph Lauren isn’t just a brand: it’s an artifact of American pop culture.

Rachel Green, perhaps the most famous fictional RL employee of all time, built an enviable visual vocabulary around that tomboyish “girl next door, but in an elegant and elevated kind of way” look. Thirty years later, I still find myself studying her outfits the same way I once slept with a copy of Wheelock’s Latin under my pillow in high school, hoping that with enough proximity, some sort of cosmic osmosis would make it all “come to me.” (By the way, I’ve learned that the secret to both learning to dress like Rachel Green and learning Latin is the delusional confidence of it all.)

Ralph Lauren’s (arguably) second-most iconic fictional employee, Natasha Naginsky, is so lifelike in all that she represents that she’s practically not even fictional. She was preppy in the way early-2000s highbrow prep once was: immaculate, meticulous, and though shallow, somewhat intimidating in the mystique of it all. She was the blueprint for a certain kind of American womanhood, the proto–Instagram girlie. Not basic, more like the everywoman optimized to be everything all at once, and yet at the same time, nothing at all. Neutral palettes, a string of pearls, tasteful headbands gracing perfectly shiny hair. She ironed her sheets and exfoliated her elbows. She’d work for Google as some high-level sales manager if she was alive today. In her own way, Natasha was as mythic as Rachel: two poles in the Ralph Lauren cosmology, one accessible and warm, the other cool and self-possessed. The duality of Americana.

Ralph Lauren has always been a Jungian force in that he’s understood that clothes are never just clothes; they’re the archetypes. Even when mass-produced, his garments are intended to be worn as myths that we drape over our bodies, hopeful that they’ll transform us into a higher, tidier, more composed version of ourselves. If America has a visual lexicon, he’s been its most consistent curator; refining, polishing, and occasionally inventing whole aesthetics that feel much older than they are. The rogue-turned-cowboy, the Ivy League know-it-all, the low-maintenance Upper East Side ingénue, the fussy Aspen heir: all Laurenian composites. As Americans, these tropes are stitched into our subconscious, blood memories of a promise that our ancestors, whether they’d been here for a while or came here with ambitions for a better life: we can have it all.

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What struck me about Ralph Lauren’s 2026 Olympic uniforms was not the design (I knew they’d be great, though they were greater than I could have imagined) but the reaction to them. The loudest anti-American voices in my orbit—the people who light-cancelled me for the time I put on my best “shitty suburban Lana Del Rey” and drunkenly posed next to a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag with a cigar and wiffle ball for a Dan Bassini film photo—were suddenly posting about the uniforms with genuine excitement. It all transcended irony and meme ideology: something in the gumption of it all slipped past their defenses in the same way it slipped past mine.

It took a shearling bomber shouting “U.S.A.” on my Instagram feed to make me realize how incredibly sad we all are. It’s a kind of sadness that we’re ashamed to admit because it is not just passé to be genuine on the internet, it’s entirely verboten to express any care or pride in your country at all. It’s not just sadness either, it’s also a kind of disillusionment that’s deeply humiliating. “The American Dream” for many, if not most, Americans, is a quaint relic of a different time; a vestigial member of a since-disembodied whole. It’s been systemically plucked apart and disemboweled, its organs removed and sold while its pale, empty carcass is paraded around and we, in horror, have no choice but to decide that it was, is, and only ever will be a joke. (Out of self-preservation.)

It’s not always gauche to drape oneself in the American flag. From time to time, we even allow ourselves to admire it as design, as symbol, as something safely removed from its true meaning. When it’s filtered through fashion, music, or image rather than as something we’re expected to live by, it becomes a tolerable, compelling reminder of the American spirit, whether we’re ready to admit that or not.

Lana Del Rey has built an entire career inside that narrow, acceptable corridor. Her America is one we’re permitted to admire precisely because it is packaged as atmosphere rather than rubric. She gives us flags without introspection and nostalgia without acknowledgement. Her beauty and the artifice of her “American dream” suspends disbelief because it can. Everything is filtered through dusty motel curtains, heart-shaped sunglasses, plumes of fragrant cigarette smoke, Cinemax-like soft focus until the symbolism becomes palatable. You don’t have to agree with her America, but you secretly desire it and wish so badly that it could be real. Her art makes you want to become a Laurenian archetype: perhaps you’re the detached heiress, the fearless cowboy, the ungovernable beatnik.

What Lana understands, instinctively, is that irony isn’t rejection, but rather protection. It’s how you hold onto a dream that’s already disappointed you without being humiliated by the fact that you ever wanted it in the first place. Her version of Americana doesn’t insist that the promise was fulfilled, it insists only that the promise mattered. And for a generation raised on the wreckage of that promise, that distinction is everything. So few of us are ready to admit that it’s all been a farce, we’re reticent to fully give up the dream.

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I don’t think the reaction to the uniforms, or our steadfast admiration for Lana’s version of Americana, is really about this country we live in at all. I think it’s about us, whatever that even means anymore. There is a stubborn, almost irrational desire to believe that, against the despicable and greedy powers that be, our effort still accrues, our identity still coheres, at that someday we will find ourselves comfortable rather than fighting tooth and nail to afford groceries and heat. (Imagine!) Rooting for America, in these strange, aestheticized ways, under layers of abstraction and from a safe distance, becomes a way of doing what, for whatever reason, we’ve determined is not worth doing: rooting for ourselves. We have to get excited about a shearling bomber jacket—quietly, without announcing it, without having to defend it—because we must hold on to some kind of hope. It’s a tiny act of rebellion, one that we keep to ourselves.

Jean Cocteau once observed that Americans believe luxury is money, while Europeans believe luxury is time. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Personally? I think that means a good amount time with my husband and baby without having to worry about work deadlines and that infernal Slack notification sound ringing in my ears forever and always, while still having a couple thousand dollars to burn on a Ralph Lauren Team U.S.A. bomber jacket.

(I’m American, I was told we can have it all.)

xo, e.m.