Hannah Huante very kindly had me on her podcast How I See It — we chatted the mental illness of working in a business where likes are currency, addiction, validation, nightlife, DJing, promoters, models-and-bottles, moving to New York from New Zealand, and how I went from blogging to journalism to influencer to DJ to interviewer. Also: the best advice my Dad ever gave me.

Watch above, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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I was on a flight to Berlin in early 2012 when it happened. I finished peeing, looked at myself in the mirror, zipped my pants, felt it get stuck, felt the explosion of pain, screamed, gagged, dropped to my knees, and puked my guts out in the toilet. And then I had to unzip.

It was my first time flying business class. I was with the marketing manager of Hugo Boss, he’d invited me to the brand’s semi-annual fashion show in the German capital, and I was drunk.

Six months earlier I’d bought a oneway ticket out of New Zealand to move to Paris where I planned to live as a fashion writer, but within a month or so it was clear that wasn’t going to work. I didn’t speak French, I didn’t have any Paris media connections, and the welcoming treatment I’d become accustomed to as a traveling journalist in town for Fashion Week disappeared as soon as the shows were over.

But when I arrived in Paris I immediately became friends with a group of Australian female models and one Dutch male model named Edmond, and they liked to meet and have a few drinks most days. I was 27 years old, I’d just left my family and religious community in New Zealand where drinking was forbidden, and I decided that I wanted to give it a proper go.

I’d gotten drunk about 10 times over the years, and it had almost always caused problems for me. At my first high school party, aged 12, I’d drunk three big glasses of red wine, puked all over the white carpet, and made out with a boy from my class in front of another boy from our class, who’d told everybody at school about it on Monday morning. The humiliation and bullying from that one night lasted the next three years.

Another time, aged 15, I had a few drinks and got in an argument with my best friend, who attempted to punch me in the face, but another friend knocked me out of the way just in time. At Glenn O’Callahan’s birthday party, aged 16, I drank nine beers, got alcohol poisoning and vomited for eight hours straight. That same best friend told my parents I’d eaten undercooked chicken.

No matter what I drank, I seemed to end the night puking or crying, often both.

But now I was 27, it was summer in Paris, I had new best friends, they were beautiful and carefree, and I was embarking on an adventure. These girls were unbelievably cool, too. They were flying between Paris and Milan and London and New York on jobs, they were walking the Prada show, shooting for Vogue, and booking campaigns. I had a fashion blog where I wrote semi serious articles, more energy than a three year old on a sugar high, and so much time to hang out. And they seemed to find me fun.

I’d never really hung out with Australians before and they were incredible. These girls would drop the c-bomb while speaking on the phone with their mothers, and for them, puking while drunk was just a means to an end – clearing the stomach to make way for more booze. And they never said they were going to get drunk, they were going to get MAGGOT. It was intoxicating.

In case you were wondering, there was no family money, no trust fund, no credit card debt. I’d gotten hired on a 10 week, $10,000 writing contract for a New York City-based e-commerce startup, and my job was to write the product descriptions of 7000 items of clothing. And I wasn’t paying any rent because back then I had no shame about asking people I knew if I could crash with them. My friend Tessa who’d been a French exchange student with me at The University of Auckland, had a massive apartment on Boulevard du Montparnasse, and she kindly let me live in the maid’s quarters – a tiny self contained mezzanine with a bed and toilet.

My days would go like this: Wake up early, write for hours, email it to the New York office for edit notes, leave the house, meet Edmond, wander around, meet the girls at a bar, and drink. I discovered that if I limited myself to four drinks and never had more than six, I’d have fun and not embarrass myself. If I drank a glass of water between each drink, I’d pee nonstop but keep a clear head. If I ate before I drank, I’d last way longer, and the hangover the next morning would be much more manageable.

Within a month, I’d drunk 30 days straight. Within two months, sixty. This was living.

By the end of July, everybody was going their separate ways – Edmond to go see his family in the Netherlands, the Australian girls to New York to meet clients in preparation for New York Fashion Week. We said goodbye and promised to reunite soon, I finished up my writing contract, then realized Paris wasn’t as fun without structure or friends, so I booked a flight to New York City.

Before leaving New Zealand I’d made one of the best decisions of my life, in a move I like to think of as past-me-looking-out-for-future-me. I’d gone to the American embassy in Auckland and applied for a journalist I-Visa to the United States, meaning I could live there as a foreign correspondent for 10 years, so long as I didn’t make money from American companies. The best $140 I’ve ever spent.

Landing in New York, I BBM’d the Australian girls, who were living in the IMG model’s apartment in FiDi, and they quickly said, “Mate come stay with us,” so I caught the yellow cab from JFK, arrived at their apartment, hugged them hello, and started to drink. New York was hot and raining, the apartment was cramped, the
non-Australian girls were giving me the side eye, seeing as no men were allowed at the apartment, and my jokes weren’t landing. I went to sleep on a mattress with no sheet and woke up to an enormous man standing over me.

Tom Bull was a 6’4” 21 year old with blonde hair pulled back and a thick dark beard, the perfect urban lumberjack coveted by casting agents in 2011. We went for breakfast and he told me he’d been living in London for the summer and had just gotten his O-1 Visa granted so, “Look out New York.” We walked around for a bit then headed back to the apartment where one of the IMG model bookers was waiting for us. “You guys can’t stay here, you have 10 minutes to pack your bags and get out, and you’re lucky we don’t kick your friends out too.”

I had one card left to play – Erika was the sister in law of an American male model who’d gotten stranded in New Zealand a couple of years earlier, and I’d helped him out by giving him a room to crash for a few weeks. “If you’re ever in New York, look me up,” he’d told me, and so every time I came to New York they’d let me stay at Erika’s – a full floor apartment whose elevator opened into the living room. Luxury on Bond Street between Lafayette and Bowery. I called Erika, told her I was stranded with a young Australian named Tom, she told me to come over, we hit the liquor store, bought a bottle of vodka and made our way up to NoHo.

Over drinks, Erika listened to our tale and laughed then said, “Isaac you can stay in the spare bedroom, Tom, you can stay on the couch. But this is short term! Okay?”

That night we went to Lovers Of Today on East 7th Street and drank heavily. I met a girl, it was her birthday, she whispered, “You’re my present,” I said bye to Tom and Erika and caught a taxi with this young woman to the Upper East Side where we made it up the stairs and through her door before running to the bathroom and puking in unison, me in the toilet, her in the sink.

I had one lifelong dream as a writer, and that was to be published by The New York Times. I also had an in. The same e-commerce company that had hired me to write the product descriptions had hired me to interview industry insiders about the trends of the season at the Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks of June, 2011, and one of the men I’d spoken with was Bruce Pask, men’s fashion director for The New York Times. When it came out he sent me an email thanking me for the piece, and said, “If you’re ever in New York, look me up.”

The same day I arrived at the IMG Model’s apartment I sent Bruce an email, he agreed to meet me, and within a day I’d convinced him to hire me to write a series of blog-style articles where I’d visit menswear stores, try on a bunch of outfits, take photos of the experience, and tell the story. The pay was $50 a story, but who cares? It was The New York Times. It opened a lot of doors.

I also told Bruce about this amazing Australian male model I’d met named Tom, showed him photos, and Bruce, who also styled major campaigns and commercials, said, “Wow, that’s the exact kind of guy I’ve been looking for this season, will you send him to meet me?” Within a week Tom had booked campaigns for Perry Ellis, Banana Republic, and Ralph Lauren, totaling about $100,000.

We made a deal – wherever Tom went, I’d follow, and vice versa.

A few days later Tom booked a campaign out in LA and left town. When he landed he called me and said, “How quickly can you get to the airport? There’s a flight leaving in two hours. If you make it, I’ll pay.” I dropped everything and jumped in a cab and eight hours later I was eating breakfast with Tom on set on Melrose Avenue at his campaign, where he’d be posing naked for eight hours with a not-yet-famous Emily Ratajkowski. Later that day, in my 27 year old hubris, I told the photographer he was ordering everybody around like a dictator. He took offense, and kicked me off the set. “Sorry mate,” Tom whispered, “You’ve gotta get the fuck out of here. See you back in New York.”

Back in New York I started hanging out nonstop with two American models, Jenny and Dierdre, who knew every promoter in town, and they took me out to 1Oak where the drinks were free and I met Busta Rhymes.

Everything I’d ever wanted was coming to fruition. I was working and drinking and partying and meeting editors and models and bloggers and photographers and Watch The Throne had just come out and Tumblr was exploding and it was all happening.

But something else was happening – if somebody said something I didn’t like, I’d ruminate on it obsessively for hours, days, weeks. Sometimes when I drank I’d be the happiest, most confident, charismatic person in the room. Other times I’d get dark and angry and brood and seethe and fall asleep at the bar.

Sometimes I’d wake up to find that I’d messaged girls I’d gone to high school with on Facebook that I hadn’t talked to in years. Other times I’d wake up to check my phone and see that I’d texted abusive, rage-filled messages to old friends in New Zealand. I knew I wasn’t a blackout drinker, I remembered doing these things, the ideas I had in the middle of the night always just seemed like the smartest thing I’d ever thought of.

Mornings after great nights out were euphoric. Waking up after a bad night was hell. “I’m not going to drink today, I’m not going to drink today, I’m not going to drink today,” was my mantra.

Of course I couldn’t tell my friends about this stuff, or if I did it would come in the form of hilarious anecdotes. I learned from an early age that if I could make my Mum laugh, I wasn’t going to get in trouble. If I made my friends laugh with the shameful stories of my late night escapades, maybe they weren’t so bad. Plus, they always seemed to be happy about their behavior, why was I so worried? By 4pm I was always feeling better, and I’d laugh at my own pathetic panic that morning. “I’m such a drama queen!” I’d think as I walked to the bar, to meet any one of my four or five different groups of friends because nobody seemed to want to be out as often as I did.

I now know that moving to New York without a strong sense of self is a dangerous proposition. This city pours fertilizer on our best and worst instincts – I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex hiding behind the facade of a nice guy who likes to party. All I knew then was that being out every night felt better than being alone with my thoughts.

My first few pieces came out in The New York Times, I pitched another blog-style series to GQ named Like The Boys, where I’d dress my female model friends in the menswear trends of the week, Justin Chung would photograph them, and I’d write a story about it. $200 a piece, but I had to split it 50/50 with Justin. I followed Tom around New York Fashion Week in a video diary for The New York Times.

One day I got an email from a German guy named Tobias who said he worked in digital advertising on behalf of Hugo Boss, and would I like to host a series of videos telling guys how to dress this season featuring Tom Bull? $1500 for me, $1500 for Tom. We said yes, and showed up to set in the fall of 2011, and that’s where I met Ward, the marketing manager of Hugo Boss.

I thought I was worldly and had traveled and knew my way around town, but I’d never met anybody like Ward. He was loud and brash and hilarious and competitive and the kind of guy who’d make a joke and slap you on the back so hard it almost knocked your teeth out, but he was also gay. A combination I’d never seen before.

When we finished the shoot, he took me and Tom out for drinks at The Boom Boom Room, and told us his two friends were joining us. His two friends? Lance Bass of NSYNC fame, and Joel Schumacher, a film director whose movies (Batman Forever, St Elmo’s Fire and about 20 others) had brought in over a billion dollars.

Ward grabbed a menu and called the waiter over. “You boys hungry?” We nodded. “Let’s have three of everything on the menu. You boys thirsty?” We nodded. “Let’s have a couple of bottles of champagne, a bottle of tequila, a bottle of vodka, and six beers.” Then he told us to look around the room. “See any ladies you like?” Tom and I looked around the room and pointed at some attractive women a few tables over. “Send them a couple of bottles of champagne as well, and tell them it came from these two boys right here.”

Within a few short hours I turned from wide-eyed ingenue to greedy hanger-on.

The next few months we never left Ward’s side. Wherever he went, we went. He’d order the cars, he’d pay for dinners, he’d buy the drinks, and he even hired me as a digital consultant for Hugo Boss for $1500 a month to give them suggestions of bloggers they should be working with.

In December I flew home to New Zealand for Christmas and found myself at odds with my friends and family. They couldn’t relate to my new life and I couldn’t relate to the way theirs hadn’t changed. I was depressed and moody, unhelpful and supercilious. I spent hours on my phone texting everyone in New York for scene reports, barely looking up as my parents tried to make conversation. I couldn’t wait to get back.

Ward emailed me one day and said, “Why don’t you cut your trip short, come back to New York, and I’ll fly you out to Berlin for the Hugo Boss show.”

Which is how I ended up drunk on that flight, flesh ripped by metal, and when I got back to New York and the injury hadn’t healed, and I had no health insurance, and the pharmacist told me the medicine I needed was prescription only, I began to get worried.

I drank my four vodkas and called Tom, who was in London for a job, to tell him what had happened. “Mate London has the NHS,” he said, “It’s free here, I’ll go to the doctor and get you the medicine.”

As Tom later told me, he made an appointment that day for the nearest clinic, sat in the waiting room for his name to get called, then started to panic. He was going to have to show the doctor something in order to get the specific steroid cream I needed. He went to the bathroom, dropped his pants, and pinched himself as hard as he could for as long as he could, grinding his teeth until he couldn’t take it anymore. He pulled his hand away, and there was blood.

The doctor took one look at him and gave him the steroid cream on the spot. Tom flew back to New York the next day and we shared the cream, passing it back and forth until we were both healed. We signed a lease on our first shared apartment, 337 Kent Avenue, later that week.

Around this time in February 2012, I realized that I’d drunk almost every day since June of 2011, and maybe it wasn’t serving me well. Sure I’d made the beautiful new friends, I had a new blood brother, but I felt estranged from my family, I was lying about what I was doing, I was guilty and ashamed and losing track of who I imagined myself to be. I made the difficult decision to quit.

A few days later I met a friend at a bar and she said, “Just have one drink with me.” I said no. “Just one,” she said. I said no. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” I said yes, took a sip, and the next two and a half years of my life were fun, then fun with problems, then problems with occasional glimpses of fun.

On July 21, 2014 I admitted defeat, made a phone call, and met a guy outside a coffee shop on Rivington Street who told me about his drinking and how he managed to quit, and it was like he was reading my mind. I now know that something magical happens when an alcoholic shares their experience with another. Today I’m celebrating 12 years of sobriety.

Thanks for reading.

I LIKE YOU!

I’m writing this from the EasyJet terminal at Linate Airport in Milan where I’m about to fly to Berlin, but yesterday I was in Florence for Pitti Uomo and I had a #menswearrific time. It was my first trip to Pitti in 10 years and I have to say I’ve been missing out. I usually skip the Italian legs of the men’s fashion seasons and fly straight to Paris, but Florence is the perfect town to get over jet lag, look at some suits, and run into the best dressed men on the planet confined in one square mile.

For those who don’t know, Pitti Uomo is a biannual menswear trade show that takes place in January and June in Florence, and it’s the place to discover tailors, leather footwear, shirting, ties, and more varieties of chinos than you’ve ever seen. Brunello Cucinelli is king (and I got to interview him!), and the demographic of attendees spans buyers, media, peacocks, and streetstyle photographers from across the globe (but mainly Japan, North America, and Italy).

I spent a couple of days in town interviewing insiders and experts about the best niche menswear brands we need to know right now. These knowledgeable gents include GQ and Esquire editors, major American department store fashion directors, creative directors, buyers, and more. Here’s what they had to say:

“JIYONGKIM, an amazing Korean designer. It’s familiar enough for people who love menswear, and freaky enough for people who love fashion.” — Jian DeLeon, men’s fashion director for Nordstrom. Also recommended by my friend David, chief creative officer and head buyer of Chicago/San Francisco store SVRN.

“Barbell Object from Japan – it’s pretty avant garde, a little bit more aggressive.” — Nick Roethel of legendary Vancouver store Haven.

“L.E.J from London – really cool tailoring with a funky twist.” — Scott Staniland, sustainable fashion consultant.

“I gotta put my homies on in South East Asia. This suiting brand called The Compendium.” — Denny Balmaceda, creative director, vintage aficionado, photographer and most stylish dude in New Jersey.

“Cawley Studio out of London. Lots of leather, lots of relax/drapey tailoring, and an amazing selection of hats.” — Richard Biedul, model and creative director.

“Right now I’d have to say Nicholas Daley. Love, love, love this brand.” — Britt Gray, director of Blue in Green.

“I’m from Orlando, Florida, so it’s a brand called Pearled Ivory run by two art directors from Orlando. It feels flamboyant, but perfectly tailored.” — Roman Shahpouri, photographer.

“Emily Dawn Long (above) or Carter Young (below).” — Sebastian Jean, fashion director at High Snobiety.

“The Brooklyn Circus is my go-to.” — Darrel Hunter, photographer.

“Goodfight out of Los Angeles. It’s an Asian American label, it’s got a punkish edge to it, but they do beautiful tailoring.” — Yang-Yi Goh, senior style editor at GQ.

“David Perry Jewelry, my husband.” — Rachel Besser, WSJ.

“This Is Kardo from Rikki in India. Everything is basically hand-dyed, everything is block printed, natural fiber, made to measure, all that jazz.” — Jeremy Mitchell, photographer, native New Yorker, and one of the most stylish guys I’ve ever met.

“I’m going to go with J.L-A.L (above), and or Soshiotsuki (below). A lot of people are calling Soshiotsuki the new Armani. J.L-A.L is a London based designer, very reminiscent of Kiko Kostadinov, but I still think that he does tailoring in a different way. Footwear is incredible, so if you want some unique loafers [J.L-A.L is for you].” — Madrell Stinney, Editor in Chief at Hypebeast.

“Cam Daly from Arran Studios – he’s based in Georgia, he’s very new, but he recently had one of his leather jackets appear on both Hailey and Justin Bieber.” — Dylan “walk with me” Kelly.

“Mine’s not as niche. mfpen. It’s Scandi, I love everything they do. I like a brand that is wearable, like you see things, you’re like, ‘Okay, I want to buy that.’” — Zak Maoui, style director at Esquire UK.

“Korean running brand called Somewhere Outside. They did this super sick souvenir jacket shell that I’ve never seen.” — Ramon Luna, senior buyer at FWRD, FWRD Man, and Revolve Man.

So, I like Pitti Uomo, I like niche brands, I like all these guys, and I LIKE YOU!

In the summer of 2006 I moved halfway around the world from New Zealand to Toronto to date a Colombian girl I’d met in person one time.

Her sister Isabella* and my sister Rebeccah had been in a multicultural, socially conscious dance troupe named Wildfire that traveled around North America by van doing dances about the dangers of drug abuse, gangs, racism, and domestic violence, and in the summer of 2005 we’d been invited to Isabella’s wedding to a lovely Persian man named Bayan.

I saw Camila at the wedding and took notice. She looked like Penelope Cruz with long dark hair, tan skin, and a smile that started in her eyes, and though I was too shy to chat to her that night, I was excited to see her standing out front of the movie theater the next day; my final day in Toronto before I was scheduled to fly back home.

Coming from New Zealand, I’d never experienced anything like a Toronto summer with its heat bouncing off every concrete surface, and so a group of us decided a movie was our best bet for a few hours of air conditioning. My memory is that we saw The Devil Wears Prada, but that didn’t come out until two years later**.

We spent my final afternoon and evening together, and the next morning she sat with me in the back seat of the minivan, our knees touching, as we drove to the airport. I hugged her goodbye, and she handed me a piece of paper with one single written line. Her email address. I emailed her that night telling her I was going to come back.

What followed was a classic early 2000s romance of emails, MSN Messenger conversations on other people’s computers, and calls made using $10 phone cards bought at convenience stores, always with the promise that someday soon I was going to arrive back in Toronto. One day a thick envelope arrived in the mail. She’d made me a mix CD of her favorite songs by her favorite artist, Bright Eyes.

At this point in my life, I was a diehard fan of The Cure, The Smiths, and whatever commercial hip hop and R&B were playing on the radio – Fabolous, 50 Cent, Outkast, Terror Squad, and a young Chicago rapper named Kanye West.

I put the CD in the six disc changer of my forest green 1996 Honda Civic, pressed play, and listened as a scratchy, complainy, sad voice hovered over the acoustic strings of a barely tuned guitar. It sounded like it had been recorded on a tape player. I listened to one song, put it back in its hand-drawn case, and never listened to it again.

I graduated from the University of Auckland in June 2005, with a degree in Film and Sociology, and one clear goal. I was leaving New Zealand for good, never to return. What I really wanted was to move to New York City, but in that era, with my lack of money, limited work experience, and zero connections, there was no conceivable way to get myself to the USA and find someone to sponsor my Visa.

But Toronto was close enough, their dollar was weaker, Camila was there, and New Zealand and Canada had a Working Holiday Visa Program so that under-30-year-olds could move freely between each country and work for a year. I applied, was approved, and the wheels were in motion. My phone calls with Camila went from, “We’ll see each other again someday,” to, “I’m really coming back!!!”

To save money to move to Toronto, I moved back to Christchurch from Auckland to live with my parents for nine months, and worked 40 hours a week, 9-5, at Ballantyne’s, our Bergdorf Goodman, for $14 an hour, and 30 hours a week, 6-midnight, at a Mexican restaurant, for $13 an hour. By March I had enough money to fly to Canada.

What did I know about love? I was an emotionally avoidant escape artist. My teens and 20s were dedicated to a word I learned when I got sober: Geographics – moving towns, cities, countries, and continents to change feelings.

Almost a year to the day since the first trip, I arrived back in Toronto with no idea what to expect. The absence hadn’t exactly made my heart grow fonder, and I’d been so focused on my goal of getting out of New Zealand and the cinematic idea of moving to another country to be with someone I’d only met one time, that I hadn’t actually given much thought to what would happen when I arrived.

But when she met me at the airport, I was delighted to discover that I liked her. I really, really liked her. She was cute and funny and caring and spoke in heavily accented Colombian English, and called her father Señor Papi, which I found utterly baffling. Mister Dad.

With my Film degree, my plan was to get involved in the burgeoning Toronto film industry, but once I arrived I discovered that the unions could only be joined by Canadian citizens or people with specific multi-year visas. My first burst bubble.

I moved into the cheapest housing I could find, the U of T halls of residence, for $125 a week. It was summertime, and all the students had gone home. A day after I arrived 40 Irish youths moved in, on break from their schools in Dublin and County Cork and Limerick, to pull pints and wait tables in the city’s many Irish establishments. Every afternoon they’d bang on my door and yell, “Are you coming to the pub with us, Oyzac?” I loved them all and had never seen anybody consume so many pints or Buffalo wings.

One day a bunch of the Irish, plus Camila and me were hanging out in my room, and an Irish girl named Aisling walked in, hugged a few people, then gave up and acknowledged the group as a whole. Camila got up and walked out of the room. I looked around, unsure of what was going on, and followed her out. I found her crying in the hallway. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “She didn’t kiss me hello,” she sobbed. It was one of the most black and white examples of cultural differences I’ve ever experienced.

Back in New Zealand, I’d had success getting jobs in our local fashion industry, working for the country’s top menswear designer, two of the most successful hairdressing salons, and volunteering as a VIP driver at New Zealand Fashion Week. But every Toronto door I knocked on had the same response: Sorry, no. We don’t like to employ people on one year visas. I even got turned down as a retail assistant at American Apparel.

The one hopeful connection I had was the director of Toronto’s prestigious Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, a New Zealander named Gregory Burke. A mutual friend from back home put us on an email, we met for lunch, he barely looked up from his phone, and as we were leaving, he remarked, “I don’t understand these New Zealanders who think they’ll have something in common just because they’re from the same country.”

With each no, I grew more and more conflicted. I was having fun, it was summertime, I was in love with a beautiful Colombian girl, but I was ambitious and stifled. I’d had grand ideas that this move was going to come with the stardom I so badly craved. Nothing was going to plan, and just weeks into the life move my patience was wearing thin.

I ended up getting two jobs. The first was at Burrito Boyz, an extraordinarily popular Mexican spot, where we’d sell 600 burritos in the two-hour lunch rush. I was the guy who called out the orders, and to this day, it was the most fun job I’ve ever had. When vegans came in I thought it was hilarious to shout, “One vegan burrito, extra chicken!” They did not laugh. 20 years later, I’ve ended up with a German vegan.

One day I was hanging out in Christie Pits park, watching a group of young guys throw baseballs, and when the ball bounced my way I threw it back with the skills acquired from a lifetime of backyard cricket. “Nice throw,” shouted the older of the bunch, a mid-20s Johnny Knoxville lookalike. “Thanks bro,” I shouted back in my strongest Kiwi accent, because how else are you supposed to make friends in a foreign country than by forcing everyone you meet to ask where you’re from?

“Where are you from?” he asked, I told him New Zealand, they kept throwing the ball to me, and I discovered they all worked together at a restaurant nearby. “Are you hiring?”

And that’s how I got my second job as a busboy at Lily Restolounge, Toronto’s preeminent hangout spot for upwardly mobile guidos.

Picture me, a six foot tall, 130 pound, 22-year-old Kiwi with a shock of Robert Smith-inspired hair and the skinniest jeans legally available, in a nightclub filled with tan Canadian Italians with heavy gold chains, Rolexes, and slicked-back hair. But even better than that was their accents. They’d taken The Sopranos to the most extreme level and every word out of their mouths was a caricature of a New Jersey mobster. I was in heaven.

I earned five dollars an hour, but at the end of each shift the bartenders would pool their tips and break me off. On a quiet night, it’d be 40 bucks, but on a busy night I might get $80 or $100. I hardly slept, and barely saw my girlfriend, but this wasn’t bad.

On June 14, she got us tickets to go see Bright Eyes at Massey Hall, and I have one memory of that show that has stuck with me for 20 years. Between songs, Conor Oberst, Bright Eyes himself, addressed the audience.

“Now I’m going to play a song about depression and loneliness and the feeling you get when you’re all alone in this world, which is not something I’ve ever experienced, but I’m sure plenty of you have.”

The next song he played was Poison Oak, about a guy grieving his lost, drug addict brother. If you know it, you’ll understand. It turned me into an instant fan.

Two months into my Toronto move, I woke up with a raging toothache. It felt like I was being beaten in the side of my face with a hammer. Camila’s part-time job was at a dental office, so she made me an appointment for that day and I went and saw her boss, a tough Argentinian woman. She put me in the chair, told me to open my mouth so she could test the tooth for infection with a hot metal rod. “If it hurts with heat, you’ve got a problem,” she told me. As she touched the tooth, an electric shock went off in my brain. “You’re going to need a root canal and a crown,” she told me. “Without insurance, it’s $3000 but I can do it for you for $1500.” I had $1000 in the bank.

I called home, and my Uncle agreed to wire me the extra $500 to pay the dentist, and she did the operation that day. I picked up more hours at Burrito Boyz and Lily Restolounge, and saw Camila even less. Toronto was losing its appeal. One day in late August I felt a chilly breeze blowing down the Avenue. Cold was coming. A constant, obsessive thought took shape in my mind: What am I doing here? I need to get back to New Zealand and progress my career.

The day before I left, Camila and I laid on the ground in her room crying while listening to Lua by Bright Eyes. I was 22 years old and terrified I wasn’t going to make something of myself. I needed a break, or at least some hope that my life was going to improve. It wasn’t that I was working menial jobs, I’d done a lot of that in New Zealand, but that I could see no growth here. At that time Toronto was the most multicultural city in the world, and I was surrounded by people who had moved there for the opportunities Canada offered. I believed I came from a country with better opportunities, faster growth, easier access. It was time for another geographic.

20 years later, tonight in New York City, I’m seeing Bright Eyes play for the second time. I wish I could go back and tell myself at 22 that everything would work out.

Update: My German vegan girlfriend told me I didn’t finish the story as honestly as I should have, so here’s how it really ended.

I went back to Auckland in September. The city was alive with new music and style inspired by Pete Doherty, The Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, and Kings Of Leon. Hedi Slimane’s skinny army of male models had changed everything. Everyone I knew was starting a band, a brand, and a ‘night’ (our 2006 name for parties). Camila came to visit me that Christmas and stayed for a month, it was the best time together we ever had.

We decided she’d move to New Zealand to live with me, but first she had to go back to Toronto for a few months to get organized and apply for a visa. She flew out, arrived home, got everything ready, bought her tickets to come back, and two weeks before she was going to fly to Auckland I got scared and stopped replying to her emails or answering her calls.

The obsessive thoughts took over: We were too young, what happened if it didn’t work out? It was going to be my responsibility to look after her, to manage her feelings, her disappointment. I couldn’t see that she had agency in this decision or experience.

I called her and told her not to come.

A year later I found out she had a new boyfriend and realized I’d made a huge mistake. I flew to Toronto to win her back. I landed and called from a pay phone. She told me she didn’t want to see me, but I showed up on her doorstep anyway. We spoke briefly, she said she’d moved on, and I met her parents for coffee and apologized to them for acting like a dickhead. They told me I’d done them a favor; they hadn’t wanted her to leave in the first place.

In February 2012 I was living in Williamsburg, and she emailed me to say she was stopping in New York City for a day, maybe we could see each other.

I met her at JFK, we caught a cab into the city and wandered around like tourists, walking the bridge in the freezing cold. I apologized for how I’d behaved all those years earlier, and she said that yes I’d hurt her badly, but everything had worked out the way it was supposed to, she was happy with where life had taken her.

We never saw each other again.

I LIKE YOU!

*Names have been changed.

**My sister tells me it was the Bourne Supremacy, which makes sense, because it came out in 2004, and her memory is better than mine.

This is a story about the last 15 years of my life, I moved to New York City, became a club rat, got drunk, got sober, became a DJ, went broke during the pandemic, started a Tiktok account, threw a party named I LIKE YOU! that became a massive movement, then eventually walked away. There are high highs and low lows and I regret almost nothing. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, or just start here. It’s pretty self explanatory.

In 2024 promoters discovered Tiktok.

Promoters were once epic party-throwers who found spaces, discovered DJs, curated guest lists, and created culture. Now they’re dudes who round up girls, bring them to clubs, yachts, the AMFAR gala, and celebrity birthday parties, and are paid for it. Some of them are even the personal concierge of high net worth men and will organize the Uber Blade to the Hamptons house for their “intimate weekend getaways with friends.”

There are three different tiers of promoters, and three different tiers of talent:

1. Room fillers, who are paid lower rates to bring more people.

2. Classic promoters who bring models, get them a comped table, and free bottles.

3. Top tier promoters who bring top tier talent – celebrities, Victoria’s Secret angels, and whales.

Whales are unicorns. A whale is an extraordinarily rich man who will pay for everything. Literally everything. The most famous example of a whale is the Malaysian Jho Low, who came to New York City sometime circa 2010 with the keys to the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and spent up large – in one night at a club he allegedly bought every bottle of champagne, vodka, and tequila in the building, spending one million dollars in one fell swoop.

He also allegedly bought a 9.2 million dollar Basquiat painting as a gift for Leonardo DiCaprio, 8 million dollars worth of diamond jewelry for Miranda Kerr, put 100 million dollars into the making of The Wolf Of Wall Street, and purchased several apartments for several high profile models, before being charged with stealing 4.5 billion dollars from the sovereign fund and disappearing in China. As of last year he was alleged to have been living in Shanghai under an Australian passport with the name Veis Constantinos Achilles.

But I digress.

Promoters. I like promoters because I am, at heart, attracted to extreme personalities and outrageous individuals. To be a promoter is extreme and outrageous. I don’t know what the day-to-day life is in this era, but in my day a promoter had to have the courage of a pickup artist, unafraid of approaching multiple beautiful women every hour, not getting offended when told to F Off, but also the wherewithal to massage the egos and credit cards of the wealthy men who funded everything. They were guys with a wardrobe full of Chrome Hearts, the energy of a jackrabbit, and a preternatural lyrical knowledge of every rap song ever written.

They’re also fun dudes. It’s entertaining to watch them work a room. They have insane swag. They’re constantly beefing with each other. Their Instagram stories are like reality television. Two of them are still good friends to this day. They know who they are. Whenever I run into them on the street the gossip and reminiscing sessions are an absolute delight. There’s nobody on earth I’d rather trade nightlife war stories with.

I spent an enormous amount of time with promoters over the years. Right when I first got to New York I spent almost all my time with them. They were my key to free meals, free drinks, a crew, and access to every club I wanted to go to. As a young man with no money and little to no clout, I was of very little use to these promoters, but I was fun in a room, never tried to make out with any of the girls, and could always be counted on to bring three or four models with me everywhere I went. So they kept inviting me. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, the text messages kept coming.

“Hey man, we’ve got dinner at Darby then we’re going downstairs and then late night at Oak,” or, “We’re doing drinks at Boom Boom Room then dinner at Catch then tables,” or, “Real fun crew tonight, pull up!!!”

I sat down with Rachel Winters, a fellow club rat turned DJ for dinner in Milan recently, and we were sharing our battle stories, and we both agreed that the worst part of the job was texting people incessantly to invite them to parties.

Because the reality is, everybody who works in nightlife is a promoter. A doorman is a promoter who also chooses who can get in the room. A general manager is a promoter who also makes sure the business is running smoothly. A DJ is a promoter who happens to play music.

It’s never just a two hour DJ set when you play a big club. It’s dinner for 10 people beforehand, then submitting a list – who you want on the table behind the booth, what the ratio is…

I forgot to tell you about RATIO. It’s the most commonly used word in my sector of the nightlife industry. In its simplest sense, it’s basically a formula that says, to make a good party, you need something like three women to every one man in a room.

One of the things that I’ve always loved about nightlife is the eclectic mix of people. New York clubs were a place where people from all walks of life could congregate. It was often the only place where they would congregate. They’re ethnically and sexually diverse, there’s a big mix of ages, there are rich kids and poor kids and skaters and hedge fund managers all mixed up in one room.

But this is also a euphemistic view on what was often a binary formula. The nightlife world that I come from is often described as “models and bottles”. Think: Jay Z and Pharrell music videos from the early 2000s. Clubs need models because models attract celebrities and big spenders. If five guys rock up to the door, the only way they’re getting in is to buy a table and commit to a minimum bottle spend, $1500 or so. What’s going to make them spend $1500? The possibility of something exciting happening inside. What do five average guys find exciting?

And we’re back at promoters.

Tiktok had exploded my nightlife career because the more viral my videos went, the more I could fill a room. Before the pandemic, I was a guy who could make upwards of $5000 DJing an event, but I was lucky to make $300 to play a club gig. Now as a result of my internet presence, I could command $5000 to play at a nightclub. I had my choice of bookings, I was making incredible money, I could choose the other DJs who’d play with me, and I had endless spots on the guest list. It was everything I’d ever wanted. And I was miserable.

So, like I said, in 2024, promoters discovered Tiktok. It was a guy in Miami who did it, and he went viral because when somebody is willing to tell the truth about something like this, it’s a car crash you can’t not watch. “I have a table at [insert club here] tonight, there are five spots left, you must be a Miami 9 or 10, if you’re a group of five girls and four of you are 9s and your friend’s a 6, leave her at home, she ain’t getting in.”

The thing about this guy, though, was that he was funny. Like Howard Stern in a Chrome Hearts snapback. The guys who began to replicate him, were not. And one day I was scrolling through Instagram and a guy popped up who claimed to promote tables at a club that I regularly worked at, and he said, “I got a table tonight. If you’re fat don’t bother messaging me, you’re not getting in.”

The internet exploded predictably with rage and every douche bag with a private account responded in turn, commenting, “If you’re ugly and you can’t get in just say that,” or, “Teach me your ways, Master.”

For years in an era of puritanical overcorrection I loved how chaotic and lawless nightlife was. It’s the last truly unregulated industry. All bets are off. People behave badly and are celebrated for it. I fucking loved it. But with age, sobriety, a committed relationship, the desire for a healthy lifestyle, and a little birds-eye perspective from the DJ booth, the gap between me and nightlife grew a little too wide.

It was like the fog lifted and I was slapped in the face with an unpleasant reality: The friendships I’d prioritized because it was easier to hang out with people who could gain access wherever I wanted to go, the knowledge that whenever I texted people to ask them to come for dinner before my gigs, I knew who to ask and who not to ask, who would put a smile on a club manager’s face, and who would have the opposite effect. I knew who would drive more engagement in my Instagram stories. I saw that in so many aspects of my life, I was just as shallow as the people I loved to look down on.

And that was the exact moment I knew it was over for me. I called my manager and said I’m done. I don't want to DJ clubs anymore. Unless the offer is extortionately high, it’s a no from me.

At time of writing, I’m about 18 months free of DJing in clubs. Funnily enough, since starting writing this series, an offer came in to play on June 10. I said yes. The offer was extortionately high.

I LIKE YOU!

I am an American citizen, but I only became one in 2024. If you’re an American and have been for life, or you’re just a person who has never lived in America, you’ll never know the fear of flying into this country and waiting anxiously to present your passport to a border patrol person who could cancel your visa on sight and bar you from ever returning to the country.

Just yesterday one of my best friends (Australian, married to an American), told me how her lawyer had advised her to delete all her pro-Palestinian Instagram posts before she went into her Green Card appointment. “They’re looking at everything right now,” she’d been told. And today Trump announced Green Card seekers must leave the United States to apply.

One time in 2018, having lived here legally for seven years, I landed at JFK from Paris and the border patrol guy looked at my New Zealand passport and asked me where I lived. “The East Village,” I said. “No you don’t,” he replied. “Yes I do,” I said, confused, “But I guess technically it’s Alphabet City because I live on Avenue D.”

“You are a non-immigrant alien, a temporary guest of the United States of America,” he barked. “You do not live in this country.”

My apologies.

Sometimes the punishment makes a bit more sense. An English friend who lived in New York had his visa canceled when he landed from London because they asked to view his Facebook account and saw he’d been messaging friends about the grams of coke they were buying that night. He was deported and hasn’t been back.

For years I refused to post, text, or DM about Donald Trump, just in case the government was reading and might revoke my O-1 visa. It’s a subtle but effective silencing technique to gently threaten removal if you step out of line. My strategy? Self-censorship in the land of the free.

So in 2017 I was on a flight from LAX to JFK. The night before I’d deejayed a party at James Goldstein’s residence. I was not a happy chappy. It was my final gig with my DJ-duo-partner, we were not getting along, I was miserable, and terrified I’d never work again as a solo act.

Plus, I’d behaved poorly the night before. I’d lashed out on a winning combination of fear and humiliation and rejection and self-righteous anger and said some shameful things. I think I’d even cried (or attempted to, to generate some much-needed pity), and the Uber ride to the airport was long and silent.

When we checked in I took things one step further and told the gate agent that we’d prefer not to sit next to each other. She took one look at us and promptly stuck me in 28C near the back of the plane, by the toilets.

The flight was unremarkable, besides my self-loathing hangover. But as we landed, the pilot made an announcement. “Welcome to JFK. When we arrive at the gate, please remain seated, federal agents will be boarding the plane.”

I may have been drunk on despair, but I’m still the class clown. “GUILTYYYYYY!” I sang in the whoopee voice of the Mortal Kombat knockout commentator. Nobody laughed.

We arrived at the gate, the seatbelt light went off with a ding, and the captain came back on the loudspeaker. “Once again, please remain seated. Federal agents are boarding the plane.”

Three agents, two male, one female, yellow FBI emblazoned on their jackets, boarded the plane and walked down the aisle. Everyone leaned in to get a closer look. They walked through business class. They walked past the emergency exits. They kept coming towards the back of the plane, past rows 25, 26, and 27. They stopped at 28. My 28. They stood over me.

“Are you Isaac Hindin-Miller?” They asked. My life flashed before my eyes. Everything I’d ever done was suddenly laid out, and they knew I was guilty. Or had someone stashed drugs in my bags? Was it my former business partner??? Had my family been murdered? Who was going to pack up my apartment when I got deported!?

“Yes?” I answered, my voice breaking.

“You need to come with us right now.”

“I have bags in the overhead-”

“Leave them. Come with us right now.”

The first agent stood in front of my seat, the other two behind, and I walked the length of the plane flanked by the FBI, sharing a panicked look with my ex-DJ-partner as I passed her seat.

Off the plane, the two male agents stood me in the tunnel, while the female agent re-boarded the plane. “What is going on?” I asked. “Is my family okay?”

“Just wait.”

Thirty seconds later, the female agent reappeared, followed by a Hasidic Jewish man. “Is this him?” They asked him, pointing at me. He looked at me for a moment, studying my face, before shaking his head. “No, that’s not him,” he said.

“Mr Hindin-Miller, you’re free to go back on board and collect your bags and leave.”

Everybody on the plane was still sitting in their seats and watching me with equal parts fear and fascination as I walked down the aisle to row 28, pulled my bag out of the overhead locker, and walked back up the aisle and off the plane. The agents were still standing there as I entered the tunnel.

“Will you please tell me what is going on? I just had a heart attack.”

The bigger of the two male agents spoke up. “Somebody handed that guy a note on board saying, ‘I’m going to kill you [insert religious slur here]’. That’s a federal hate crime. Guaranteed prison time. He said it was the guy sitting in 28C. Have a good night, Mr Hindin-Miller.”

And here’s the really crazy thing.

45 years earlier, my Dad was on a flight from London to LA. After living in London for a couple of years writing folk songs and working odd jobs, he decided to move back home to New Zealand to go to teachers college and start his adult life. He was 22 years old.

The plane took off, and after being in the air 20 minutes, the pilot came on the intercom. “Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain. Is there a G Miller on this flight? Please make yourself known to the flight attendants.”

My Dad, Grant Miller, put up his hand.

Two minutes later, another announcement. “We will be making an unscheduled stop in Dublin. Please remain in your seats with your seatbelts fastened. We expect to be on the ground shortly.”

Nervous whispers from the other passengers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be lightening the aircraft before our approach. There's no cause for concern.”

Anxious gasps echoed through the plane as the pilot began ejecting enormous amounts of fuel from the wings.

“When we land in Dublin, we’ll be disembarking on the runway, please exit as quickly as possible.”

The plane landed, and taxied to a remote part of the runway, fire trucks, ambulances, and police standing nearby. The doors opened, a staircase was mounted, and the flight attendants ushered everybody off board, and to a safe point 100 meters away from the plane. They pointed to my Dad, and the police and men in dark suits circled him and moved him into a waiting car, which drove towards the terminal.

One of the dark-suited men turned to my father and said, “Mr Miller, do you have reason to believe someone would want to cause you harm?” My Dad, 22 years old, Kiwi, replied, “No, why?”

“Because after your flight took off this morning, we intercepted a telegram saying that G Miller and the other passengers on board wouldn’t make it to their destination. We have reason to believe there’s a bomb on the plane.”

The passengers were shuttled to the terminal while the plane was searched. Dad was escorted to join the other passengers. They moved as far from him as possible. Two groups on two sides of the room. Them and him.

The flight was grounded that day and didn’t end up leaving for LAX until the next morning, so all passengers were given vouchers to stay at one of the airport hotels that night. On the way out, Dad saw one of the dark-suited men and approached him for answers.

“It would seem there were two G Millers flying out of London today. One, a 22 year old New Zealander, and the other a career criminal with connections to East End gangs. Lucky for us we got the 22 year old New Zealander.”

Like father, like son.

I LIKE YOU!

In the last four weeks I’ve flown New York to Milan, Milan to New York, New York to Venice, Venice to Berlin, Berlin to Athens, and at time of writing I’m sitting at the airport in Greece, Frankfurt flight canceled, trying to figure out how to get back to Berlin tonight so I can fly to Venice tomorrow morning for a job. It’s not looking good.

When I was younger this was the dream life. Now that I’m older, it’s still a dream, but one that has me waking up feeling not particularly well rested. All is good when all is good, but when something goes wrong, life becomes a never-ending calculation: if we go to Amsterdam instead of Frankfurt can we make the 8pm back to Berlin? It’ll add seven hours onto our journey but at least we’ll get to sleep in our own bed. But the stopover in Amsterdam is only 50 minutes, if we’re delayed we’re fucked. Ad infinitum.

Before you roll your eyes, this is not me feeling sorry for myself. I chose this with my eyes wide open. There were whole periods of my life in New York where I was too terrified to leave because what if I missed out on the potential DJ booking that might happen on a Tuesday when I’d decided to fly out. My life was dictated by FOMOOM. Fear Of Missing Out On Money. And FBSBAJWD. Future Bookings Secured By A Job Well Done. Fear spelled with 14 letters.

Then I met Brenda and started traveling for love, got back on the fashion week circuit — something I’d promised myself I would never do again because it is a miserable and demoralizing life — went to some art fairs, interviewed the radical and boring, the sneaky Trump supporter and the self-invented legend, and now all of a sudden I’m one of those people who simply must see the Tilda Swinton live performance in Athens this weekend, so off I fly to Athens to see the Tilda Swinton live performance.

Tilda Swinton comes from a serious Scottish family.

From what I remember of her biography, her Viking ancestors landed in the British Isles in the 700s, valiantly fought the wild boars that were wreaking havoc on farms, and in the 11th century were awarded the land and estate from the King that they still hold to this day — Swine Town —> Swinton. She grew up in a slightly smaller, slightly less grandiose Scottish version of Downton Abbey, and went to boarding school with Princess Diana.

Hers is an aristocratic family filled with military grandeur and scientific invention (her great-great uncle invented the precursor to the television), but the arts and artists were not trusted or revered. So Tilda is the outlier.

Tilda Swinton ONGOING is an autobiographical theater piece told through individual items of clothing, from the christening gown worn by 25 generations of Swinton children stretching back to the 1700s, to her father’s military dress uniforms and prosthetic leg (his was blown off in the war, aged 19), to the Chanel gowns she wore to Oscar premieres.

The entire thing is done as a conversation with her friend, the fashion curator Olivier Saillard, and as she tells the story of her mother’s favorite silk dress or her father’s handkerchief collection, Olivier asks her to assume the physical characteristics of each person, which she does to brilliant effect.

I cried when she told the story of the sweatshirt she shared with her great friend and collaborator Derek Jarman, who died in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness, aged 52. She has not worn the sweatshirt since.

Athens is a city of ruins. Not just classical ruins, but everywhere I looked I saw a 1960s office building with a hole in the wall or an 80s apartment falling apart. Crumbling grandeur, ripe for investment.

The most spectacular thing I saw was the private residence of Afroditi Panagiotakou, artistic director of the Onassis Foundation, filled with contemporary art, framed doodles by David Byrne, a healthy sense of humor, trays of almonds and olives and chocolate, and a view from the Parthenon to the sea.

The neighborhood I couldn’t make my mind up about was Monastiraki, at the foot of the Parthenon, which mixes tourist trap Dubai chocolate gelato with gems like the restaurant Wine Is Fine and the bookshop Hyper Hypo. I have a personal hatred for graffiti/street art and there was not a bare wall in sight.

We ate dinner at Wine Is Fine, an impossible table to get on a Saturday night, but I’ve known one of the owners Rafael Wallon-Brownstone since he was DJing at Le Montana in Paris circa 2009. Brenda, a vegan, had spiced cucumber, eggplant ratatouille, and ginger kombucha, and I had the steak frites and a molten chocolate cake so delicious that when Raf came to the table to say hello and we ended up standing around chatting for 10 minutes, I had to keep telling every passing waiter, “DO NOT TOUCH THAT PLATE I’M NOT FINISHED.”

Honorary mention to Birdman/Ekiben Kitchen, a vinyl store slash ramen restaurant that serves karaage chicken and 90s west coast rap. So good.

It is now 3:42pm, we’ve been at the airport six hours, and we’re scheduled to board a flight to Amsterdam at 5:45pm. Living the dream.

I LIKE YOU!

This is a story about the last 15 years of my life, I moved to New York City, became a club rat, got drunk, got sober, became a DJ, went broke during the pandemic, started a Tiktok account, threw a party named I LIKE YOU! that became a massive movement, then eventually walked away. There are high highs and low lows and I regret almost nothing. Read parts 1, 2, and 3, or just start here. It’s pretty self explanatory.

In July 2021 I started a new Tiktok series: Once a week I’d post a video telling people the best NYC parties of the week and if it performed well I could create enough hype to make a line around the block outside clubs. Great for my DJ friends, great for the clubs, especially great for me, because I’d include my own gigs in there, too.

Helped by the rise of new invite apps like Partiful and Community, I created a text-to-RSVP phone number, and within the space of two or three parties had collected about 2500 phone numbers of people who were dying to go out. Imagine how many people turned 21 during lockdown who’d never had the opportunity to walk into a nightclub. Now they could.

In September of 2021 the first New York Fashion Week since Feb 2020 was scheduled, and I wanted to plant my flag in the ground. As someone who spent my early career sneaking into fashion shows and parties and events, I have never believed in gatekeeping, so I made a TikTok video with the days, times, and addresses of all the private NYFW after parties of the week (mine included), and it went ballistic online.

Not everybody was a fan. At one brand party hosted by Emily Ratajkowski at Jeans on Lafayette later in the week, hundreds of young people crashed, leaving PR agents scrambling as they tried to pull in VIPs amidst the crowds outside. Doormen I’d known for years sent me laughing texts all night long telling me my name was being cursed by clipboard-toting publicists outside their clubs. I didn’t see the problem, it was fun. More is more is more. Everybody takes themselves too seriously. Plus, like I said, it was an amazing way to publicize my own party.

From my perspective, I was just paying it forward. When I was coming up there was a website modemonline.com that had the times and addresses of every fashion show from New York City to Paris and it was the bible of all fashion obsessed young people with no industry connections (it still exists, but they stopped publishing the addresses a few years ago). The uninvited like myself would stand out front of the biggest fashion shows in the world and, sometimes, just as the doors were about to close, a sympathetic PR person would open the velvet rope and tell us to come in and fill the standing section. Shout out Elgene at KCD, you were so kind to me when I knew nobody. I was just doing the post-pandemic 2020s nightlife version.

Just to recap where I was at this moment of my life: 37 years old, seven years sober, paying $2700 a month living paycheck to paycheck on Avenue D, earning money from DJ gigs and the occasional social media job, making TikToks every day, and spending far more time than was healthy or appropriate in nightclubs. As a validation addict, all my serotonin came from likes, views, and the amount of people showing up to my gigs.

I LIKE YOU! NYFW Edition was scheduled for Tuesday, September 8 at The Jane, the night before the fashion shows started. A tidal wave of RSVPs were flooding in.

As an anxious party thrower, my belief has always been that for every 20 people who say yes, maybe one will show up. Which is also why I will tell anybody who listens that cutting off or capping a guest list is the number one guarantee of party failure. If a room has a 250 person capacity and you allow only 250 RSVPs, you’re going to be looking at an empty room all night long. Exclusivity only works in exceptional circumstances.

Amrit and I were scheduled to DJ, and I booked an eclectic group of hosts to try and hit as many demographics as possible: Hello Tefi, Livia Rose Johnson, Zach Macklovitch, and my friend Ella Priya who’d moved to LA to work for David Dobrik and would bring everybody associated with that internet-famous world.

The day of the party I hit the streets for some last minute promotion, but as soon as I got to Soho a group of 20-something year old girls I’d never met came up to me to tell me they were coming to the party that night. My next stop was The Jane to put up our I LIKE YOU! Vinyl DJ backdrop and to drop boxes of t-shirts.

I was terrified. What if we flopped? What if it wasn’t fun? What if there were too many parties that night and everybody decided to go to the other ones instead? Why had I mentioned three other parties for that night in my TikTok video? Am I stupid? God I’m stupid. I’d gotten 100 t-shirts made to sell at the party. Who was going to buy a t-shirt? Nobody was going to buy a t-shirt.

I rode over to The Jane early on my scooter, alone. Why stop the warring voices in my head with company and friendship? Plus, having played with Amrit since 2014 I knew she wasn’t going to arrive on time, and somebody had to start the music. (Hi Amrit, love you!) But what I saw as I neared The Jane shook me to my core.

The further west you go in Manhattan, the longer the blocks get. The Jane is on one of the longest — it’s at the end of Jane Street between West and Washington Streets. The crowd started outside The Jane, stretched all the way east to Washington, around the corner, up that block, all the way around Horatio Street, back down West Street and back around to the front of The Jane. A full city block of people waiting to go in.

The door guy asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “Open the doors, let’s fill it up, and when friends arrive we’ll send people out to pull them in.”

The problem with my brain is that when amazing things are happening, I’m so focussed on the minutiae of what isn’t perfect that I’m often not there to enjoy the good. (You know what your problem is, Shapiro? You’re always focused on The Wackness.) But that night was honestly pretty cool.

The Clermont Twins came. Nikita Dragun came. Apparently ASAP Nast came? I didn’t see him. The cast of the Gossip Girl reboot were there. I was too busy DJing to know what was happening with the t-shirts but at a certain point it seemed like the best case scenario was to just throw them all out to the crowd.

Despite the late summer heat, The Jane had a quirk of keeping a roaring fire stoked and burning all year round. This was a whole other story. The room was hot to the point where I could feel heatwaves radiating off people’s bodies. Everybody wanted to be behind the DJ booth. There was space for about four people comfortably, and at one point there must have been about 15-20 back there. I was sweating to the point where my entire body, including my jeans, were soaking wet. At one point it all got too much and I fainted while playing Come Clean by Hilary Duff.

I was 37 years old, living an 18 year old’s dream. And so followed the next three years of my life.

I LIKE YOU!

There are two Venices. One is inhabited by tourist men in Shein matching twinset shorts and shirts walking with their families. The other is chic, discreet, and travels by wooden speedboat from back entrances of palazzos to back entrances of hotels to back entrances of restaurants. Now that I think about it, there’s actually a third set: locals who take their own boats to the bar for aperitivo on sunny afternoons.

On my first day, I discovered there are no cars. I made it to 41 years of age without knowing that Venice has no cars. I can’t tell if this is pure ignorance or information gatekeeping or the fact that I hadn’t been paying enough attention in the myriad spy films set in this city, but I was genuinely surprised to land at the airport and discover that the only way in was water taxi, the only way through was walking.

Google Maps was my best friend. How anybody navigated those twisty little streets before live GPS is beyond me.

My life these days as a traveling content creator interviewing fabulous and amazing people requires me to be wherever the fabulous and amazing are, and this week they were in Venice for the Biennale, so off I flew.

I may live in New York, but I grew up in New Zealand and have a relaxed attitude to making plans and occasionally leave things to the last minute. I didn’t apply for Biennale media accreditation before arriving in Venice. This thrilled my German girlfriend.

So over to the media pavilion I trotted, like I’ve done at so many Art Basels and Fashion Weeks and Trade Shows over the course of my 20 year career, to sign up and get my pass. But when I got there, I was promptly told that accreditation ended on April 26, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because, “We don’t-a give-a accreditation to you-a social media people.” Well, fuck.

Luckily, my friend Jillian Choi was in town. Remember how I went from a fab DJing career pre-pandemic to unemployed and penniless in Miami during the pandemic? Jillian was Director of Global Exhibitions at Design Miami and very kindly hired me to be a tour guide, showing off these three gorgeous Gaetano Pesce chairs. I paid rent that month!

These days she has one of those art world jobs that constantly has me asking, wait, what do you do again? Whatever it is, she’s super connected and invited me for lunch and then to a few exhibitions, including my favorite thing I saw all week, which was the Alighiero Boetti retrospective at SMAC Venice right in Piazza San Marco.

I’m an art appreciator more than critic, and one thing I always love is when something looks good hanging on a wall, and Boetti’s work is aesthetically pleasing and easy to like. That does something for me.

I drank a coffee (12 euros) and ate a microwaved quiche (21 euros) at the spectacular Venetian-Rococo-meets-Art-Nouveau salon Caffe Florian. What does that mean? Lots of gold and cherubs and fabulous excess. Did you know that depending where you sit, there’s an added music tax of 14 euro per person to pay the players on the patio? I do now.

Harry’s Bar is the original Cipriani location, and for how famous it is, it’s a pretty ordinary yellow room absolutely rammed full of people drinking their Bellinis, a cocktail invented in that room by Giuseppe Cipriani in the 1930s. While there, I ran into a Miami-based-art-lawyer-who-also-DJs who complained about the terrible music at the parties he’d attended the night before.

I took the obligatory selfie with Klaus Biesenbach at the Neue Nationalgalerie party for Maurizio Cattelan. The invitation for the event was Maurizio’s US Visa, which I loved. I gave Maurizio an I LIKE YOU! sticker, which he loved.

Things I didn’t know before coming to the Biennale: Most exhibitions stay up for six months, so art lovers can visit anytime between now and November. I’m a sucker for Calder and Picasso, so the permanent collection at the Peggy Guggenheim museum is a must-see, and the delicate Calder gold earrings next to the elaborate silver headboard he made for Peggy herself were some of my favorite things. I also loved the African, Oceanian, and Asian room, which holds wooden masks and carvings from my part of the world.

The Dries Van Noten Fondazione has an exhibition of Steven Shearer photos of people sleeping: some drunk, some afternoon napping, at least one outside in the grass. They felt intimate in a way that’s been lost with iPhone and Instagram photography – they’re close enough to really see the subjects, and there’s beauty in the crooked teeth and graffitied bodies and half-drunk whisky bottles.

The New Zealand pavilion featured photos of native taxidermied manu (birds), some extinct, all barely hanging on, with tiny images of what each one might have seen reflected in their eyes.

Bottega Veneta held two events, one public (for the kids), and one private, held in conjunction with Hauser & Wirth, in the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel. I saw Gert Jonkers of Fantastic Man and Butt at the latter and got starstruck and chickened out from saying hello. I DM’d him later that I’d love to do a video with him about Instagram taking down the Butt account, but at time of writing it had been put back up. At least he replied! I meet lots of well known people in my travels, but it’s always the skaters and fashion editors I was in awe of in my teens and 20s that I get nervous around.

I kept walking past this gorgeous looking restaurant named Piccolo Martini and so one night Brenda, our friend Karol, a Mexican/Italian/Polish art advisor who grew up in Austria, but lives between New York, Paris, and Milan, and myself, split from our group to go eat a late dinner.

Upon sitting down we were handed a menu. First page, Italian, next page, English, next page, French, next page, German, next page, Chinese, next page, Russian. The ultimate tourist trap. We ran out, apologizing profusely, and made our way towards the Teatro La Fenice opera house, where we found a gorgeous restaurant named Taverna La Fenice. The steak with a sweet potato mousse was the best I’ve had in months.

That was my third favorite meal of the week. My number one pasta dish was a tomato based ragu at Beccafico Guna. Why are some ragus with tomato, some without? I hate a non-tomato based ragu. But the best meal of the week was eaten at a canal-side restaurant named Osteria Anice Stellato, booked by my German friend Lisa, the planner of the group. Apparently it was on Maurizio Tentella’s list of best Venetian restaurants, but when we ran into him and told him where we were headed he drew a blank but told us that Anice Stellato is the name of a liquor from his hometown.

At Osteria Anice Stellato I started with green and white asparagus drenched in a delicate butter and lemon sauce, topped with translucently-thin sliced bacon. Heaven. For my main I had the thinly sliced roast beef with a pepper crust, served with rucola and sliced parmesan. Sweet mother of all things merciful it was delicious. I hit my protein goal that day.

Like I said up top, there are two Venices. That night, for the first time, I got to experience the other one. Our friend Chris, who works in arts and culture for Chanel, had a boat pick him up from outside the restaurant and deposit him at the private water gate of his hotel, and we joined him for the ride. For a brief, 15 minute period, we were kings.

I like Venice, and I LIKE YOU!

“By the way, I’m DJing at Short Stories this Thursday night, consider this your invitation.” - Direct quote, my Tiktok video, sometime around early June 2021.

That was the line. Pretty innocuous. The video didn’t go super viral, it had maybe 40,000 views, but something happened in the comments: People started tagging their friends, saying, “lol should we go to this?”

The night of the party I showed up to play and there was a line of Gen Z 20-something year olds wrapped around the block. 500 or more Gen Z 20-something year olds. To put into context how insane this was, prior to the pandemic, if I did a DJ set at a random bar or lounge and posted the flyer on my Instagram account with 50k followers, about 15 people might show up especially to see me.

Now all of a sudden as the result of a throwaway line at the end of a Tiktok video, I was Diplo. I was Tiesto. I could pull a crowd. I tested the theory a week later and many more hundreds came. So one week after that I made a flyer and threw my first I LIKE YOU! party at Kind Regards on Ludlow Street with my friend Amrit DJing alongside me, followed by Hank Korsan, and it was mayhem. Over 1000 people lined the street, you could barely move in the club, going to the bathroom was impossible, and if there’d been a fire, we all would have died.

Validation is a hell of a drug. DJing to a packed crowd who are all there to see you feels good. Partying felt good. Nightclubs felt good. We’d all been cooped up inside for so long that the summer was guaranteed to be a good one. But the problem for me has always stayed the same: If I get high, there’s a comedown.

For years I’d struggled with self esteem. I LIKE YOU! was on my stickers, my flyers, and my merch. I did not like myself. At best, I’d feel okay for a couple of days. But more often I’d walk around with a constant voice in my head saying, “You’re a piece of sh*t. You’re a f***ing piece of sh*t. Every mistake you’ve ever made has lead you to feeling like this, and you deserve to feel like sh*t because you’re not a good person.”

For the first time in my life I really started to understand the appeal of opiates and tranquilizers. I didn’t relapse, but jumping on top of a DJ booth while hundreds of kids partied below me got me high, and walking out of the club and going home alone at the end of the night to scroll through Instagram and click the heart button on anybody who’d posted me on their story felt lonely and sad. I was gagging for something to take the edge off.

One night I was booked to DJ at the Soho Grand Hotel and I had this impending feeling of doom as I drove up and saw the giant line on the sidewalk out front. I called my parents in New Zealand and tried to explain that I was an impostor and these people were there to see me, but I hadn’t really done anything to deserve it. I’d just gotten lucky on social media. With the practicality that only they could harness, they told me to be of good cheer, “Your job is to entertain, go and enjoy yourself.”

I’d become the sad clown.

A man goes to a doctor and says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor... I am Pagliacci."

But that’s the thing with low self esteem, it speaks in your own voice. Never mind the hundreds of gigs I’d played on the road to this moment of success, forget the thousands of hours I’d spent making Tiktok videos over the pandemic, I was a fraud and my only solution was to make sure every person in the room had the best night of their entire lives.

And that’s when I started playing pop music.

It was funny at first. I’d come of age in the late 90s, early 2000s, in New Zealand, where hip hop and r’n’b reigned supreme. DJs would mix Da Rockwilder with Ante Up, 50 Cent with Lloyd, Lumidee’s Uh Oh into No Letting Go. But in the mid 2000s when indie sleaze, Pete Doherty, The Strokes, Girl Talk, LCD Soundsystem, and Peaches got big, there was an ironic pleasure in mixing Juicy by Biggie into Close To Me by The Cure; post-punk into a certified club banger.

These two eras defined my DJing style and musical tastes. For most of my career I’d been a hip hop-first open format DJ, mixing all of the above. I loved The Smiths and Drake. I adored New Order and Kanye. I was obsessed with dropping Don’t Speak by No Doubt in the middle of a set. But the music always had to be at least kind of cool.

But when everything opened back up and these Gen Z kids started coming to clubs for the first time, I remember these weird moments of disconnect when I’d play a New York City nightclub staple like This Charming Man or Bizarre Love Triangle and be met with blank stares from the audience. Blank stares meant I was failing in my job to entertain, and failure could not be tolerated.

Tiktok had changed everything. All of a sudden kids were obsessed with 10-20 second snippets of songs, often with a quotable lyric or chorus, with no guarantee that they’d know the rest of the song, not to mention hundreds of other songs that I considered famous.

But I’ll tell you what they did know: Come Clean by Hilary Duff. Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield. Love Story by Taylor Swift. Gimme Gimme Gimme by Abba. Playing one of these songs would elicit such an extreme reaction from the audience that I figured I must be doing something right, so I did it more. And more. And more.

The only respite was that I’d counter a bubblegum pop song with a hip hop song so heavy or dirty that it would shock the audience to an even bigger reaction. It was the indie sleaze formula without the indie or the sleaze.

I may have been the first person to mix Taylor Swift into Waka Flocka Flame.

Surf Lodge opened back up, and I was their number one guy. For years I’d been playing upwards of 22 hours a weekend, 10 weekends a season, at an hourly rate of $100. But now with my added clout from the internet and I LIKE YOU! parties, my managers were able to renegotiate it to $250 an hour. The first train ride out on the LIRR from Penn Station to Montauk I got recognized by a handful of passengers. “Aren’t you that Tiktok DJ? We’re coming to see you this weekend!”

I respect Jayma Cardoso, everybody who works there, and the absolute powerhouse of success that is Surf Lodge. But the crowd is not my type of people. Imagine every terrible person from New York City that you’d hope to avoid all rolled into one drunken mass of sunburnt privilege, and that’s the Surf Lodge patronage. And as a general rule, any type of music that I thought was good, they couldn’t relate to. So take my new bubblegum DJ sensibility and remove the hip hop because this type of white person wasn’t into that kind of music, and now I was playing music I really couldn’t stand behind.

I started making passive aggressive Tiktok videos poking fun at the Montauk crowds, and listening to A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara any moment I wasn’t DJing. The bookings kept rolling in.

To be continued.

I LIKE YOU!

The pandemic hit and I became an unemployed DJ.

It was good timing for me, I needed a break. I was 35 years old, five years sober, and I didn’t want to be in nightclubs anymore. The thought had been bouncing around my head for a while at this point, but every time I was ready to walk away, something like that 1Oak booking I mentioned in Part 1 would drag me back.

I’d quit the promoter dinners a few years earlier. At a certain point I realized I’d rather pay for my own meals than eat for free with people I didn’t wanna be around. That was progress.

The reality was that after I got sober, clubs stopped being fun. My social anxiety was crippling, and I was like an open wound bumping into sharp edges. I could not relax. So the only way for me to have fun in nightclubs was to be DJing, and at this point I was getting paid thousands to play events from 6pm-8pm, and a few hundred to play clubs from 12am-4am. The economics did not make sense.

In March of 2020 I had $22,000 in my checking account and figured the shutdown would all be over in a matter of days. Within a couple of months of rent, food, and utilities I was broke, applying for government aid, and starting to get worried.

I’d also started posting on Tiktok. Constantly. I had nothing else to do, so I set myself a goal of posting two or three videos a day, attempting to mesh whatever was trending with anything I felt passionate about. I’m a firm believer that the only way to succeed is to climb cringe mountain, but I was a guy sitting at home alone for months on end with nobody to judge me but my phone camera. I felt no cringe.

One day, three girls* posted videos saying, “These are the best nightclubs in New York City,” and I watched and thought, ‘I know more about NYC clubs than just about anybody alive because I’ve worked in so many of them,’ so I made my own video, and it blew up. So did the next one, and the next one.

If you’ve ever gone truly viral on the internet, you’ll know how wild the experience is of watching likes and shares jump in the thousands every time you refresh the page. My Instagram started blowing up with hundreds of people sharing my video, and my nightlife friends from the old days started reaching out en masse. We were all so starved of real life, tangible experiences, that we were salivating to party.

At this point I was almost out of money, New York wasn’t opening back up, and my friend in Miami was relaunching his once-successful clothing brand, and we discussed me coming onboard. It was everything I wanted: something I could throw myself full-force into, and more than that I was going to finally be a member of a team. It was also actually a pretty viable business endeavor at that point in the pandemic – people were making millions of dollars off logo t-shirts, why couldn't we?

I agreed to it before we’d settled on a contract, payment terms, or a chain of command, and at the end of 2020 I sublet my apartment on Avenue D and moved down to Florida for the job, signing a year lease on a one bedroom in South Beach for $1250 a month.

My friend was the brains of the operation, his NYC-based business partner was the financier, so my guy put off any money talk and said that was between me and his partner. Three days into living in Miami I got the business partner on the phone and asked what he was thinking for my salary.

“$500 a month.”

I hung up the phone and cried. Always a sucker for punishment, I agreed to the terms and started work the next day. Desperation is desperation.

Within a month it was clear that the brand couldn’t succeed. The two founders would sit on the phone arguing for about three hours a day while I took notes, made mood-boards (screenshotted old Supreme lookbooks), and built a raging resentment. I’d been making upwards of $5000, $10,000, and $15,000 for two hours of DJing just a couple of months earlier. I had over 100,000 followers on social media. I used to eat dinner for free at expensive restaurants and get velvet ropes opened for me wherever I went. Now I was 36, working for less than minimum wage, and a side character in somebody else’s ill-fated side quest.

One day we did a photoshoot with some young Miami kids, I took the photos, and when they were published on Instagram the next day, I received no credit in the caption and complained to my friend. “All you did was press a button on a camera,” he said, “It was my concept, you don’t get credit for that.”

The smaller my life got, the more I sweat the small stuff. I quit that day.**

So here I was in Miami with an apartment, a bruised ego and the beginnings of a tan. I bought a baby blue off-brand Vespa, and did the only thing I could do to make money: started DJing bars and lounges for a couple of hundred bucks a night. (Shout out Jason Odio and the team from Baby Jane who kept me alive during those months.)

I kept making Tiktok videos, and one day in February 2021 my friend Maggie who runs the successful interior design company Claude Home called me up and said, “You need to meet my friend Jake, he’s a DJ agent in Miami.” A meeting was scheduled, I met the three partners, told them about my former glory days in New York and the money I’d been making, and they signed me on the spot.

Jobs started trickling in. $500 to play Socialista Miami. $2500 to make a Tiktok about the Fendi cafe opening in the Design District (see photo above). $1500 to show up to the horse racing and post photos on Instagram. I booked a photoshoot for an energy drink company that never launched but paid me $6000 for a day’s work.

I flew up to New York for a job in mid-May 2021 and found a city alive with the anticipation of lifted restrictions and warm weather. I flew back down to Miami, packed up my South Beach apartment, sublet it to a bartender at Soho Beach House, and moved back to NYC, baby blue scooter in tow.

DJing was the best job in the world. We were so back.

That first week, I made a day in the life video and at the end said, “Oh by the way, I’m DJing at Short Stories this Thursday night, consider this your invitation.” I clicked publish, with no idea that my life was about to change.

That Thursday night I showed up to DJ and there was a line wrapped around the block.

To be continued.

I LIKE YOU!

*Alessia, Michiggy, and Ariana.

**We made up and are good friends again, we spoke on the phone for an hour on Saturday.

You’re either a nightlife person or you’re not a nightlife person. It’s a lifestyle. Whether you do it once or seven nights a week, if it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. Mark Ronson’s book had the euphemistically aspirational title Night People, but my friends referred to ourselves as Club Rats.

I spent over 20 years of my life in the club. From patron to busboy, host, and a 15+ year DJ career.

At my best, I played to rooms of hundreds of people, hitting some kind of euphoric equilibrium where I could do no wrong. At my worst, I’d finish a set feeling edgy and empty, tweaked off four red bulls (what else do you drink when you’re sober?), needing something more but not knowing what, unable to go home until I’d passed by two or three other spots just in case I was missing out on something.

Addiction is like whack-a-mole; you smack one down and three others pop up.

I’ve spent years trying to understand my relationship to lots of things, but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to try to understand my relationship to myself, so here’s my theory: When I was seven years old I moved to a new school, and in the month of March there were four different birthday parties, and I was the only kid who didn’t get invited. And it hurt my feelings.

So what do you do when you’re terrified of not getting invited to the party? You make yourself indispensable to the party. First by curating the personality of someone fun in the room, then by supplying everything a party needs, then by providing the entertainment in the form of music, then by throwing the party and becoming the gatekeeper yourself.

I moved to New York August 8, 2011, the only people I knew were models, they took me out, and on my first night in town I got introduced to a promoter named Joe who took us to an expensive dinner for free, then to Boom Boom Room, Darby and 1Oak where every velvet rope was opened, we were given a table next to the DJ booth, bottles were delivered, I met Busta Rhymes, saw Leonardo DiCaprio IRL and I HAD ARRIVED.

I didn’t stay home more than two nights in a row for the next three years.

The more time I spent in the club, the more my phone rang. I’d found my people. Soon the doormen knew me, the promoters were hitting me up, and club owners were asking me to host tables.

Promoting always seemed grimy to me – dudes hanging outside model castings in Soho asking girls from Ukraine, Australia, Brazil, Korea, and Sudan if they were new to town and wanted to come out for dinner and to a party that night. So my best friend and I enrolled in DJ school, formed a duo, and started throwing parties and DJing.

Our first gig was Up&Down in 2013 and it was slammed.

Within two years we were everywhere, playing Yeezy NYFW after parties with Virgil Abloh, YSL fragrance launches, and even a Calvin Klein jeans event at Macy’s where we were paid $16,000 for four hours of family-friendly music.

We ended our working relationship in 2016, I printed up some I LIKE YOU! stickers, and within three years I had a successful solo career, playing Surf Lodge every summer weekend, an American Eagle store opening in Union Square where Rick Ross handed out Wing Stop chicken from the stage, Paris Fashion Week parties, Fat Joe’s album release at Art Basel, the whole circuit.

Obviously, I was thrilled. JK. I spent most of my time obsessing about when the next job was going to get booked, pocket-watching other DJs and trying to figure out why they’d been booked over me, and getting angry at my friends when they didn’t show up to my gigs.

My number one goal was 1Oak, and I finally got the opportunity to play the downstairs room in March of 2020 when the actual DJ’s computer broke, I happened to have my USBs in my pocket, and Dougie Joseph and Steven Badias convinced Richie Akiva to let me jump on. It went so well that they booked me to play again the next week, on Friday March 20, 2020.

To be continued.

I LIKE YOU!

I’m on the flight back to NYC (sitting in economy, which cost me a whopping 150,000 AAdvantage miles, thanks Trump) having just attended my first-ever Salone del Mobile.

I was there working for MYTHERESA X JW ANDERSON and was supposed to interview Jonathan Anderson but sadly he couldn’t make it, which marks the second time I’ve almost nabbed the white whale and missed out at the last minute. Third time’s the charm. At the party I spoke to a reporter from AirMail who said someone needs to go around and ask attendees at the 1300+ events if they had set foot in the actual Salone convention hall. I’m afraid to say I would have answered in the negative.

But the events, oh my god the events. This was like Art Basel circa 2022 X Fashion’s Night Out circa 2010 (RIP). Luckily Milan is small and easy to get around on a Lime bike if you don’t mind centuries-old cobblestones.

First though, the restaurants.

I ate ragu during date night at Sant Ambroeus with Brenda. We had a 9pm seating and were two of the first people there. It started filling up around 10pm. Couldn’t be me, I hate a late dinner. I would’ve been happy to eat at 6pm.

I’m a creature of habit and Sant Ambroeus on Lafayette is my favorite restaurant in New York. The Milan location is even more chic (with the added bonus that they don’t refill your water glasses every 20 seconds — my biggest restaurant pet peeve). By the way, did you know the Italian spot was the original? It was then licensed by the Guarducci family in New York, and they turned it into one of the most powerful brands in the city before buying the entire company and completely overhauling the Milan restaurant to its original glory. Thank God, because I remember going there 10 years ago and it felt like a sterile dentist’s office with a giant TV above the main table. Now it’s gorgeous with carpet and dark wood and green velvet banquettes and about 300 lamps set low and sexy. I love it.

It’s good to be a Guarducci/Gherardini (the other branch of the family). I’m friendly with cousins Gaetano Guarducci and Cosimo Gherardini, two of the best looking, best mannered, best dressed young men around. It’s rare to meet 20-something year olds with that easy air that comes from fraternizing with both grandparents, and the youth. Methinks Alireza taught them well.

Gaetano’s brother Camillo, handsome and about 6’5”, has just joined the family business. He’s moving to LA to work on the opening of the Beverly Hills outpost. Watch this space.

Also happy birthday Sant Ambroeus. They celebrated 90 years in business on Tuesday night with a slammed party of mostly Milanese locals and New York regulars like me.

I ate ragu for lunch at Bistrot Giacomo where I ran into Sevdaliza who has relocated to Milan from Amsterdam, as well as James Harris from Throwing Fits, whose live pod for that night had been canceled due to the guest not flying in from LA.

I drank an espresso, coke, and agua frizzante trio at Santa Lucia, and marveled at its weathered air of restaurant-sprezzatura with its headshots of Sophia Loren and other Italian screen and stage stars. The guests were a fabulous mix of elderly Milanese and cool kids, like Cipriani SoHo but with fewer paid dates.

I ran into my favorite Edward Buchanan and subsequently met AD Italy editor Asad Syrkett walking through the Duomo, Edward said he heard me before he saw me, not the first time I’ve been told that, and Asad mentioned that having Edward in town had been a godsend since he first arrived in October. Gorgeous, gorgeous men.

As for the events, on the first day I hit Gucci, where vending machines gave out energy drinks with names like DRAMA QUEEN and FASHION ICON, and the tapestries stretching the entirety of Piazza Paolo VI were magnificent. I met Danish artist Esben Weile Kaiser who told me he’s helping out on a Venice Biennale pavilion in an exhibition that features porn stars and 200 liters of expired semen collected from sperm banks. I’m told the shipping was an absolute nightmare.

At LV I met model Cesar Casier for the first time and did a Best of Belgium with him (coming soon), and Georgia Tal (her Best of Athens will be out next week).

Besides them, my favorite people of the week were:

David, who’s one of those guys who is always wearing something spectacular like a knotted gold necklace, and when you ask him where he found it he says something annoying like, “Oh this is just a vintage Givenchy chain I found in a thrift store. I tied some knots in it and threw it on.”

Fiona Zanetti, the Swiss-Italian DJ who lives in Paris and is my go-to person when I need to ask someone questions like, “Who wins in a c*nt-off when a c*nty Italian meets a c*nty Parisian?” It’s a stalemate, she tells me, but Italians dislike the French more. Whoever cares less wins?

Dalad Kambhu, the first female chef to ever earn a Michelin star in Berlin, and whose delicately spiced coconut chicken curry at the Nike event was the single best thing I ate all week. She lives part time in Mallorca and I’m about to start spending a lot of time there so I’m looking forward to eating more of her cooking this summer. I absolutely have to do an origin story about her come-up from Bangkok teenager to NYC model to restaurant hostess to Michelin star chef. Grounds for a movie.

Sara Beolchini, who in my eyes has been the Fed Tan of Milan since the mid 2010s onwards, and seems to be single-handedly responsible for bringing every cool POC DJ and creative over from the States to Italy via her job at RetroSuperFuture. She’s now at Radical PR.

And finally, Bogi the Bulgarian, who is part owner of gallery/creative space Spazio Fonte and also a video director/photographer, who was hosting an exhibition by Giulia Sormani’s family’s company E.Rancati Props, the 160-year-old Italian firm who make the swords and armor for everything from Game of Thrones and Troy to Gladiator and the upcoming Odyssey. Very fab.

My final note is that when picking an Airbnb in Milan, avoid those narrow corridor-like side streets, they’re noisy at night and get no sunlight until noon, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. When you wake up it feels like midnight.

I don’t like that, but I like Milan, I like Salone, and I LIKE YOU!

He had one of Nike’s biggest ever collaboration success stories with the Air Max Kiss Of Death, he now has a deal with Adidas, he’s married to a Chinese supermodel, he’s good looking, moves cool, and he’s the kind of guy that I’ve wikipedia’d many a time over the last 15 years.

I saw he was coming to New York for an Adidas Stan Smith collaboration release last month, so I did what I do whenever I need access to someone from the Asian market: Hopped on Whatsapp and messaged my friend Fed Tan.

I met Fed Tan through Rocky Xu (another insanely connected guy) in Paris last year, did a Best of Hong Kong video with him, and since then he has been my secret weapon for China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. He knows everybody. I’m not 100% sure what his exact job title is but he seems to be one of those cultural liason connectors who is friends with and does business with everybody.

The conversation went like this:

A few days later I met up with Edison and a couple of Adidas and PR Consulting publicists outside Sant Ambroeus on Lafayette and knocked out two videos in quick succession; an origin story, and a Best of Tokyo. I had originally asked for a Best of Hong Kong, but he has been living between LA and Tokyo for the past few years, and I always love a Tokyo video, so we settled on that.

In person, he was pretty much what I’d expect – cool, confident, energetic, quick to laugh, no-nonsense and ready to record the moment we met. The interaction lasted all of nine minutes, and I was very happy with the results (the origin story video currently has 1.3 million views on Instagram).

I’ve been toying with the idea of a Substack for a while now because it makes a lot of sense for me to make these lists into clickable Google maps links, and after procrastinating for weeks I sat down this morning and decided to just get it done.

So, welcome to my Substack, this is Edison Chen’s list of spots to visit in Tokyo with a clickable Google Maps link, and the the video is linked at the very bottom. And that is all I have to say about that.

EDISON CHEN’S TOKYO PICKS:

Neighborhood: Nakameguro.

Coffee Shop: HIMA COFFEE&KAKIGORI.

Restaurants: Sukiyaki-Botan, Nogizaka Yui.

Ramen: Afuri.

Date Spot: Nakameguro river, teamLab, Olive Spa Penthouse.

Bar: Gen Yamamoto.

Clothing Store: ARTS&SCIENCE, ESTNATION (Roppongi Hills), Various Artists (V.A.).

HERE IT IS IN GOOGLE MAPS!!!

SO, I LIKE EDISON CHEN, I LIKE TOKYO AND I LIKE YOU!