This August, after quitting my job, I born myself anew. I visited Sophie at her apartment in Ridgewood in hopes of buying my first pair of jeans. I rang the bell and waited for a dog to bark but heard no such noise.

I tried on two pairs of vintage Evisu’s before trying on ones that fit just right. Two jeans were the exact same measurements but couldn’t have fallen more differently. I liked the ones with a more muted detail on the back pockets. Just a small red tab I mistook as a Levi’s signal.

Before Sophie, I wasn’t familiar with the brand. A few days later, a t-shirt appeared walking in front of me down Dekalb: “Before Anyone did Anything EVISU did Everything.” What peculiar title case. To Be a Brand is to Bathe in Delusion.

Upstate, Story asks me about my jeans. I keep calling both Story and her daughter Story. She question’s me on the red label and asks me to spell Evisu. B E F O R E A N Y O N E D I D A N Y T H I N G E V I S U D I D E V E R Y T H I N G. We ask Story how she named her daughter and then I ask my friends about a name I see on a trash can.

I play it around in my mouth; Before Anyone did Anything Casella did Everything. Why do brands always lead me to ideations of daughters.

As a treat for paid subscribers here’s some denim + styling I have found on the world wide web just for you….

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Attersee has a belt that is a bag. Or a bag that is a belt.

I am reading a book about a girl who is in love with her friend or perhaps the two friends are in love with each other. It is clear the author exists in the same time, the same universe that I do.

Monday, I arrived home from Greece. A friend told me there was a location outside the ferry port where a man sells honey he calls “Liquid Gold.” I wanted to bring her home some, but the man only sells his delicacy between 7:30-9:30 in the morning.

Back in New York, I keep falling asleep too early.

What would I fit in a purse that is a belt?

A few years ago, everyone sported a clear bag with nothing more in it than an orange; a book by Djuna Barnes; a scrunchie; a pack of Marlboro Gold 100’s.

I found my old beach bag at my parent’s house in Florida a few years ago. It looked just like MNZ. My mom got the zipper fixed for me and wrapped it up for Christmas.

It is easy to fill, and holds it’s weight. I don’t worry so much about with what enters the bag. Almost anything looks good amongst its lime green veil.

I keep saying I am going to get my MFA so that I can break through Nightwood. Why are these lovers so tortured? I still have Djuna Barnes in a clear bag that glows green. Not from years ago, but decades and decades.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are belts + / bags I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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But…for paid subscribers… here are the items I’m dreaming of never returning to an office in <3

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It’s the last day of May but I’m staring down June — July too, for that matter. There is an entire stretch of time where I am away every weekend. I can’t find Michelle Del Rio on any stockists, except one in Korea.

Next month, I’ll head upstate to watch two friends say “I do”, then to Providence to do “I do” once more.

I keep buying new black clothes, even though I know I look more alive in the color blue. Maison de Cleo’s blue. Sophie Buhai’s blue.

I used to have a Brooke Callahan flower necklace that broke on the street somewhere in midtown. I guess that was two summers ago now. I only had one wedding that August. There was a starfish clip I still think about.

It’s hard to eat a tomato in New York again after getting home from LA. I tried to buy this Celeste skirt in orange, but I didn’t have a car to drive to El Sereno. I’ve always been partial to orange.

The “I do’s” I saw in May was full of bright red, durian, and hand-painted calligraphy. I don’t even remember if anyone said “I do.” It was so clear they did.

I keep calling stores to ask if they have passionfruit. I contemplate trying to get the tangerine skirt but I get distracted. I keep saying that if we lived in LA, I’d want to grow Meyer lemons. Figs, too. Or kumquats.

Wouldn’t the shirt pair well with a skirt for a summer wedding? A bright skirt perhaps? With gold accents, and a pair of Una Sandals?

I head to Grace and Monica’s days before their wedding. They offer me a passionfruit from a neighbor’s tree. Would I like it? I do.

I don’t want to order the shirt from a plane-ride away. I want to walk into a store and see how it fits with something I already own. To see how it feels on my body, to know what the ribbons feel like between my fingers. To try it in two sizes. To want it in neither. To change my mind and to walk out of the store without a return or a package to be sent or a label to be ordered. To go on about my day as if the shirt never even existed.

Grace opens the passionfruit for me with a pair of scissors. I eat it in the car on the way to the market. Just as quickly as it has appeared, it is so sweetly devoured. Would I like a second? I can all but hear Andrea Gibson in my head. I do I do I do I do…...

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some summer selections I have found on the world wide web just for you….

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I now own the perfect trench. I bought it ahead of my birthday, in a familiar moment of actualizing my anxieties. The listing said the trench is 100% cotton which confused me, because it so clearly shines in The RealReal studio light. Where is this The RealReal void where all my la-di-da desires are stored away? I wonder if it even exists or not.

On my 30th birthday, my godmother sent me an envelope of letters she’s been writing me since I was born. As soon as I become an aunt, I begin to write to my niece, too.

When I write to her first, I don’t yet know her name. She only exists to me as an idea — I’m devoted to her, anyway. Niko takes me to the MOMA while we all anxiously await her entrance, but I see her everywhere.

I deduce on my birthday her name starts with the letter P, because I have known my brother since the day I was born, and when we start talking about the “P” necklace Ruby started wearing during her second pregnancy, it is evident to me he is all but overflowing with a secret.

On the day P is born, I sneak a photo of The Pierre Hotel, without my parent’s suspicion.

I’m in a different trench coat; one that’s thicker. The whole month of April has flip flopped between exceedingly warm and cool days. This other trench — what I thought to be the Perfect Trench —before I met what I now understand to be Perfect Trench trench — is by Paloma Wool. Paloma? Penny? Penelope?

I find my new trench in the depths of the Issey Miyake RealReal listings, and it just barely arrives by my birthday. I spend the week prior messaging customer service, trying to identify where in the void my package is stuck. It appears to be in a warehouse in Arizona, barely moving, for over a week. From the second it arrives, it doesn’t leave my side.

Poppy arrives, late, too, and is met with adoration that inches towards devotion. I have always known my ability to adore that which I do not even yet know.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some Perfect Trenches for the home I have found on the world wide web just for you….

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I did not think of myself as someone who would feel any way other than dread towards the alone. Never mind, delight in it. Who would rip sliding wooden doors off their tracks just to paint a trim on them white. Who would grow shiso on the fire escape. Or learn to embroider, simply to adorn my headboard myself, after seeing a Green River Project collection.

“I’d been avoiding myself,” Chew Bose writes. Which is hard to do in a home you have filled with mirrors, and no kitchen table. At least for those first three years — there was just a big gap where my stubbornness lay. To live alone is to confront the absence and then to fill it.

In my wood laden apartment, I made the toilet pink and hung a photo of Audrey’s ass above it. Until the plumber commented on it, that is. I taped “For Grace, After a Party” and what felt like hundreds of photos to the fridge that I had filled primarily with various bottles of hot sauce. Sauces no one could say were too many! For I couldn’t listen, for no one was even there to hear.

Except for the times Arielle swung by, out of the blue, preferring to call my name to my window, rather than ring the bell.

For four years, time moved in the way that it does when you are the only one on the clock. Some days were the same day, just once more, and again. One long stretch of continuous time that only belonged to me, the pile of books that I slept on, and at times, my neighbor, who I could hear walking in her apartment as if it were my own.

Living alone is “retracing the same lines over and over,” and I was always fond of the ones I traced on my bedroom door. Sometimes I was consumed by the idea that I was wasting away in there. Until Ritam asked to go to the market, or Molly proposed we make something with mussels.

But to live alone is to figure out how to make a Tuesday feel intricate or delightful even if no one is there to pull you out of the place that girls go on their laptops. In the dead of solitude; searching for something, anything! Be it a prayer; or a Le Kilt skirt. I am always mixing up the two.

To live alone is to create a world of “delusions in spite of reality’s firm hand.” Which at first felt like performance. Or other times like the audience. Or the producer, and the actor. But somewhere between authenticity and contrived routine, I found comfort in many a flower, hand written menu, and drinking coffee out of glass shapes of varying practicality.

When I think of that apartment, I will not think back with any fondness of the time Sophie spotted a bug in the middle of dinner. But I do like to remember the way she tried to not let me see it. I will miss the warm glow of the yellow lighting, welcoming me home through the arches of my living room. And the tree that made my bedroom alive with green in the spring.

Four years was enough time to have sat with myself. For I too am someone who asks “‘What did you eat for lunch?’ When what I meant to say was, ‘I love you.’” And four years is enough time to know that I don’t want to ask the question so much as I want to make the lunch and bring it out to share on a silver platter.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect musings for the home I have found on the world wide web just for you….

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It’s an image I first came across online, not in it’s proper home, just miles away at The Met. The same way I’ve never seen a true Kacere painting.

In any case, it’s an image that so deeply feels true to my 20s. The image that stared back at me as I unlocked my phone, as I checked for messages that did, or didn’t appear on my home screen. To reflect on my 20s is to reflect on my relationship to these images. To the way I found them, sought relief in them, wanted to be perceived in them.

There’s a piece of toast I baked into a heart. A pair of lovers, intertwined, staring at images on their screens. A bag of too many sauces with my name on it. A calla lily tucked into a ponytail.

Fabergé’s lilies hold nineteen individual stems, adorned with pearls and diamonds. I imagine he found great comfort, and stress, in arranging them quite so.

I lay out an image of a bouquet of cockcombs I used to love next to an image of an earring my mom finally pried out of my ear. Somewhere there is a hat I almost lost in the ocean. Next to it, new Balance socks paired with Mari Guidicelli heels, on my 25th birthday.

And for my 27th, flowers my mom sent me tucked behind my ears. And for my 28th, Kiki Boots paired with 90s Prada. And a single stem of Gladiolus from the farmers market. And a bunch of Raddichio in LA so pink, they could be in a vase, too. And a video of a flower, dancing on my street.

The website on the Met says that “in the language of the flowers [lilly-of-the-valley] symbolize domestic happiness and conjugal bliss” which makes me laugh, and delight.

I do not know if the flowers of my 20s follow suit. But I have arranged them just so, adorned similarly in delicacies, held tightly in hands that have been casted.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are saved searches from my 20s I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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Last month, Rama Duwaji wore Renaissance Renaissance as her husband was inaugurated as the mayor of New York.

In November, the brand had become the object of my fixation, after trying on the Louisa Satin jacket at Outline. It was far too small, with no other sizes in stock. I was enamored by its craftsmanship, drawn to its delicate touches and satin finish.

I found the jacket, with its trimmed collar, online elsewhere — but I was reminded that the U.S. had placed excruciating tariffs on items shipping out of Europe. I filed the piece away for “someday.”

The jacket already carried a legacy of place; of obstruction. Renaissance Renaissance makes all of its garments in Beirut. Designer Cynthia Merhej’s grandmother had run her own atelier house in Jaffa, Palestine in the 1930s. Years later, she was forcibly displaced to Lebanon, where her granddaughter continues on her tradition.

It wasn’t a surprise to see Rama in Renaissance Renaissance. It was cohesive; it was a continuation.

And Zohran followed suit. As he was sworn in the evening before, there he was in Kartik Research. In a Delhi designer, who had made it downtown. With a brick and mortar store on Orchard Street. Here was the Indian mayor, who had grown up in New York, making it downtown. Being sworn in right below Chambers Street.

Last May, when my sister’s husband flew his family in from Delhi, to dance and sing at the sangeet the night before their wedding ceremony, he danced to her in Kartik.

To wear Kartik the night before an inauguration is to honor the place you come from; to speak to the fascination of making it on Orchard Street; to say that you understand the commitment in front of you.

Zohran ran on a platform that promised to protect the people of New York, no matter where they are from or how they got here. As ICE continues its raids in the city, and as the people of New York push back, all eyes are nervously on the mayor.

To wear Kartik is a vow.

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Two Christmases ago I got one in bright red. Crowning my head like a maraschino cherry on top. In Mexico City, I try to visit an old ice cream parlor but am too sick to head back to Coyoacán. I make a note: “For next trip.”

This year, Gala gifted a carnation scrunchie in ice blue. Sara, with a black scrunchie on her wrist, positions a trade. Why not! I like the way the black blends right into my coloring, making it look as if the entirety of my hair is at once a blend of silk ribbon. Mostly, I am just endeared by how adamantly Sara finds desire in the shade of blue.

Frida Kahlo’s house is exactly the hue I imagine it to be. I am, as always, struck by her androgyny. It is clear from her smirk she knows the viewer is struck. Or perhaps she is merely struck! Unamused by the viewer, but her own gaze. There is a portrait of Diego Rivera that sits above her bed. I like the idea of sleeping under the image of a lover.

In the next room, there is a different bed. This one must be hers, for there is a mirror fixed to the canopy above her bed. To reflect her own image back to her; to paint herself; with colorful ribbons adorned in her hair.

There is no information at the museum about her queerness, or about her husband’s infidelity, or about her own infidelity with her husband’s mistress! For some reason, that has always stuck with me. Maybe for the way that I came to understand my own queerness through the lens of the women who came before me or after me. To become the object of interest of one of the many girls whose names sound like they belong in a Maryam Nassir Zadeh collection.

Una Sandals; Cora Skirt; Serafina Slides; Anais boots; Emilia Cardigan; Luna Gown. They all sounded like the notes app lists of my friends’ future daughters. Of the girls in New York who made MNZ MNZ. Of the girls before me. Or after! Who often are just the girls before, but again.

Everyone, at once, is listening to a new young brown haired singer who was born in New York. He looks like he strolled right into Carnegie Hall from Norfolk Street. I listen to the same song over again until I am up all night with the words ringing through my head. It’s from his solo album, released the same year as his band’s fourth album. I wonder what kind of bartering, or trade, happened here.

In Mexico, there are bows all around.

Annie and I leave the store empty handed. I try on shoe after shoe only to remember I can barely make it to the train in the ones I already own. I don’t feel sad about the store closing because MNZ was never something to attain. Merely something for me to run towards, after. To jot down in my notes app: “For next trip!” To flip through the rolodex of names of when I can’t fall asleep. Una; Serafina; Anais.

MNZ closes on Norfolk right as Mess opens on W10th. There’s a Hades sweater I don’t take off after I buy it. I think it is a print of Michelangelo’s David but quickly realize it is Aphrodite which is neither here nor there to me.

There is a clip of Judith Butler talking about having a son that endears me. “I think the initial moment of learning that our child was a boy was actually disconcerting to me. Gender is the kind of thing that freaks people out. It’s like metonymic chains of anxiety, fear, wish, memory, all kinds of stuff. I got through that pretty quickly. The minute I had bodily contact with this creature. His very being was at the center of my concern and love. It’s a good undoing.”

And yet, it does feel harder to name a son.

After the earthquake in New York in the spring of 2024, I was often struck by phantom shaking. Why would there be an earthquake in New York? 4.8, which wasn’t monumental in magnitude, but nonetheless disarmed me. For months, I had to search to see if what I felt was measurable on the Richter scale. Often, it was not.

There is a skirt by Le Kilt that was a Dover Street Market holiday exclusive. It has a giant pin in the bottom corner and a silver buckle on the opposite hip. It is wool that turns carefully to silk. I register that its dimensions don’t align with my own. It is a desire that turns carefully to an itch, a compulsion that I try to reason with. Often, I can not.

In the winter of 2025 I awake to a similar feeling. This time, it is was unquestionably Richterian. I was no longer in my corner apartment when the shaking began but a hotel in Delhi. It was my 29th birthday, all of which allowed for a type of meaning assigning not as easily accessible on a working morning in April. Instantly, the reports show a 4.0 magnitude, and I drift back to sleep, so that I can awake not once but twice.

There is a skirt by Molly Goddard I am always already tracking. I’m surprised when I find it online to see that it is not a skirt but a dress. I can’t reason with the price — or the dimensions for that matter — but because the price is already prohibitive I forgo negotiating with myself twice. After I fall back asleep, I awake this time quietly. The same age, but newly, and again.

Paloma Wool releases a skirt called “Plugin.” Or is it plug-in? It’s a mute grey, in a palette I can’t decipher if I am attracted to or simply proximate to. It’s not just the skirt, it’s the whole line. There is no color left to Paloma Wool anymore. A decade ago, the brand was vibrant, if not comedically so. I once bought a bag that was so blue.

Now, when I search for “Plugin” it only exists as a 404 error online. Wiped from the website, something I am unsure ever existed. A flirtation; phantom.

I wake Niko up in the middle of the night to see if he felt the shaking. Although he is not quite conscious, he is sure there was not an earthquake. There is nothing on the website, any website, to hold witness to my case. He falls back asleep and I follow.

There is no substitute for my seeking. I follow, past a 404 error, undetectable by scale.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are 20 skirts I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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I once looked in the mirror after running around all day to notice my blush sat perfectly untouched on my cheeks. I was upset if not surprised no one directed me to rub it in.

I’d like to wear a vintage Pierrot collar, too. One I remember to order on time. Not one from the 18th century, but from the bespoke costumes of the 1920s. I like costumes for the way they wink at your desires. As if all desires are just something you could try on for size. How darling!

“I thought your makeup was like that on purpose.” How strange! How strange to be so known and so unknown at once. I like naming my desires so no one can misperceive them.

I’d love to walk around with two pink circles on my cheek!

Before leaving for France, I was haunted as I usually am by the delusion that one could be a new self on vacation. A different self. A better self, (bien sûr!) My manifestations landed where they often do — on eBay, perhaps (bien sûr). Somewhere beautiful to tame my desires within the myth of control.

The only item I acquired, in the weeks and days before my trip, was a giant seashell belt. A muse to project my Côte d'Azur ideations onto.

Each night, I returned to the same object of obsession.

To dinner, to pretend to smoke a cigarette, to a restaurant named Balthazar, to miss New York, even just for a moment.

To a beach swim that turns into an evening swim that turns into drinks that turns into dinner. With a sweater, to make the voice in my head that sounds like my mother’s voice content. In case I get cold, which I am still surprised each time I do.

To play cards and steal my boyfriend’s pants.

To order a Coca Cola and a white wine I’ve never heard of but write down the name of.

To meet my sister, just miles away, in Geneva. To jump into water that feels too cold for August. Like it had just melted but without any trance of the heat required to do so.

Last month I reread Eros The Bittersweet. Anne Carson uses ice to describe the paradox of desire. We want ice to be ice, even as it melts away in warm hands. Both pleasing and painful.

I love the end of summer for the way that it demands your attention as it slips away. Like a pool of glacious ice right in your hands, ready to be sipped, to absolve your thirst.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some end of summer outfits I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3 Plus, a few more outfits and details to all the ones above <3

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I’ve long thought of tattooing my middle name across my arm in thin cursive script: Colette. Instead, I often search the internet for apparel from the now defunct but formerly beloved Parisian store with the same name.

By the time I made it to Paris, Colette was already gone.

In Italian, there is a term “buonanima” that loosely translates to a combination of “rest in peace” and “dearly departed.” As in, buonanima Colette.

Last week, I thought I found a picture of my grandfather in a thrift store in Williamsburg.

As I dug through my camera roll, I came across photos of my grandmother. Her name, like mine, is Colette. Or rather, my name, like hers: Colette.

I wonder why she put her name in quotations. As in, buonanima “Colette.”

I saved a voicemail she left me when I got back from France just a year before she passed: “Paris! Way to go! Woohoo!” She never pronounced my name correctly. It always came out like she had swallowed the second A. Nat-lie. I like the way she draws a line under her own name when she writes it. As if to emphasize each part of it.

Next month, I’ll return to a post-Colette France. I search for cheeky alternatives to the movie premiere t-shirt and am delighted by my results.

I like the way they signal that I, too, may miss a syllable in a name that is vaguely french.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect cheeky t shirts I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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I love June because of the crushing promise of delusion.

I want to buy a pair of pants for a trip to Durga Chew Bose’s France.

I want to pair them with a shirt so white; to eat lychees on a front stoop I don’t live in.

I want a belt made of shells for the days I don’t make it to the Rockaways, and a toe ring to lose in the ocean on the days I do.

I want to wear the same skirt each Saturday to the farmers market, and to reoriente my schedule around finding a just ripe peach.

I want my keys to hang from sterling silver as I bug the sommelier about a chilled red I can’t recall the name of.

I want to sweat through my shirt and then to follow its orders.

I want to finish a day’s monotony and then decide to jump into water as a second act.

I want to live in a Goddard skirt, and continue to pray to the same hue of blue.

I want to bake a cake just to top it in currants.

I want to plan an entire trip around the promise of a Weiser Bonnie melon. And then only pack silver sandals.

I want to cut my bangs to match a pair of shorts and to look up from my musings to see its not even yet July.

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I’ve thought of them so often, for so long, I don’t know if I would feel relief or confusion to own a pair.

Today, I’d like them in all black. The alerts trickle in.

2 NEW: Sophie says the stone fruit has come up in LA. Weiser Farms doesn’t yet have melons. The tomatoes I like? They’re ready. Her birthday is on a Thursday this year.

I’ve changed my mind. I’d like the glasses in tortoise shell. Brown lenses, I suppose.

1 NEW!: Annie is in Mallorca. I funnel all my desire into the promise of Europe in the summer. I want to jump into water that blue. I guess I don’t care what color the lenses are.

I first saw the glasses on someone else. Often I recognize my desires by seeing them repeated back to me.

2 NEW!: There is a note for me on my dining room table. For years, I have searched for and written out my desires. Screamed them into the algorithm. Rarely are they so clearly articulated back to me.

1 NEW!: Now, too, there are emails trickling in to my inbox.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect sunglasses I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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Molly Goddard’s Pre-Fall 2023 Mertyl Dress is one of the only dresses in the world to me. It’s exactly pure in a shade of green I could not name. It’s structured in its playfulness. It’s cheeky in a way I feel so serious about. It is not a dress I would know how to buy or where to wear.

I love the way Molly Goddard makes clothing feel like an art project. Like a collage of desire masking somehow as order.

I like the proposal to keep warm in absolute sheerness with a sweater. I welcome her impracticality. I melt to her delusion.

On Saturday, my sister will get married. Her wedding, too, an invitation to spend just the right amount of time perfecting a font. To revel in a detail — not as frivolousness, but as play. As art project.

Her relationship, an invitation to reconceptualize my understanding of what it is I am In Search Of. I’ll spare Molly Goddard’s PF2023 Mertyle Dress my impending collage of ceremonial tears.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect dresses I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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A list of places to take a butter yellow purse in the month of March:

• To a dinner party, with a long black bow tied tightly around a bottle of wine

• On an airplane, for 48 hours in Miami

• To Central Park, to see the first cherry blossoms bloom

• To Molly’s, in an oversized sweatshirt I once found a dead roach on

• On a Citibike, on the first warm day before the weather suddenly turns

• To a birthday party, with extra candles in a zippered pocket, just in case

• To drop off a roll of film, which I will long desperately for until the scans find their way back to me

• On the 2 train, which I always forget makes too many stops

• To Bridges, to ask Carla what she thinks is drizzled over the dates

• To run and grab a cortado, before a 3pm caffeine cutoff

• To work, in theory, but never in practice

• On a Sunday morning walk, when my mind makes more stops than the 2 train and I grab another cortado and oh well if it is after 3pm, the weather has not yet turned and I would like it iced.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect hand bags, purses and bags to pretend you’ll use for work I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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1. A pair of custom shorts. I cannot will myself to steam the shorts I had made so you will just have to take my word that they fall just so. I’m in the car when Avery sends me a song that has pulled Frank O’hara reading Having A Coke With You. I realize without practice I can recite 80% of the poem out loud, and with some practice, 90%. I am somewhere between Delhi and Jaipur. (is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona).

2. A green silk shirt. For fool’s spring. I write down fool’s spring. How lovely a play of words. (Partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt, partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches, partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary).

3. A crisp cream shirt to pair with cotton trousers. I’m asked why I keep announcing what I do the way that I do. My work, that is. I wonder so, too. Back in New York, I’m asked why I keep saying I don’t care about clothing, when so evidently I do. (It is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it. In the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them).

4. And a vest to boot, for business. By business I mean pleasure which perhaps is the problem there, again. I continue to confuse what I do and what it is that I am writing about. (I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time.)

Even with practice I can’t get this line right. “Except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway….” I keep mistaking “except possibly for” with “except for possibly.”

5. An anklet like Pauline’s that has always wowed me. (and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me).

6. A flower printed fabric. For a shirt. We’re at a store back in Delhi sourcing fabric for my sister’s wedding when we spot a print I would put in The Frick if only I would let myself visit. My sister wants to use it as a tablecloth at the reception but there is disagreement. There isn’t enough fabric, except for possibly a shirt. I try again. There isn’t enough fabric, except possibly for a shirt. (and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse).

7. A collection of letters, on my 29th birthday. The most treasured items I brought back from Delhi. Which is to say, I don’t care about clothing so much as I care about desire and declaration. In the first of the letters I received, which my sister coursed for me throughout the day, scattering pink envelopes around Delhi, Sophie begins by detailing the outfit she wore on the day we first met in New York, 2019. She doesn’t know what outfit she’d choose if she were to only choose one for the rest of her life. It’s a question Ruby and I ask on the very first episode of our podcast, Covered.

She does not know what outfit she would choose except possibly for that outfit she wore in June 2019.

It is not wasted on me. I am interested in clothing. And I am here precisely to tell you about it. (It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it).

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect silk shirts, anklets and prints I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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In December, I bought this Paul Stewart set on TheRealReal for $46.00 (pictured left). I thought it was a good cover for this Prada S/S 1999 jacket (pictured right).

The suit arrived, the proportions all wrong. I felt like an ‘80s secretary with secret ambitions to be a synth pop star. I was hoping instead to look muted in the way that clothes from the ‘90s often do — devoid of any one specific ambition — a vessel open for projection.

The Paul Stewart set and I have now been to three tailors. One to shorten the skirt, another to remove the elbow pads, and a third to add in new elbow pads. The suit has been washed (a poor choice) and to the dry cleaners for a press (following the very poor choice). I feel no closer to my blueprint vision.

I am often looking to replicate my desires precisely. I compile a list of my favorite covers. More often than not, they are slower, softer, sadder. Maybe replicating someone else’s desire always is.

In July 2018 , I watched Alex Turner at Forest Hills toss away his own portfolio of existential quandaries to instead cover “Is This Is.” I wonder if the closer Turner got to becoming The Strokes the farther he felt from it. He had just shaved his head.

I pick my suit up from being pressed and decide no one would notice any of my peculiar dissatisfactions.

When I hear George McCrae’s original, it’s clear that “You Can Have It All” is a love song. A song that sounds the way I want desire to feel.

I’m eating a blood orange dipped in chocolate for the second night in a row when I see that Miuccia Prada sent a synth pop secretary down the 1999 runway herself.

As a treat for paid subscribers here are some perfect suits, ‘90s Prada, and covers I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

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When I came across Lyn Marshall in a spread of 1975 playsuits and matching tights, it was clear there are some things I cannot unsee, either.

In 1975, Lyn Marshall published Wake Up To Yoga — a book to accompany her BBC morning program by the same name. In 1976 came Keep Up With Yoga and in 1982, Everyday Yoga.

Everyday Yoga plays precisely to my delusions. Despite the title, which communicates the eternal routine, one that is mundane and known, there is nothing pragmatic about Lyn Marshall’s practice.

Whether this woman is engaged in yoga is of no importance to me. For here is a woman who is praying with her hair down, in utter devotion.

In an Everyday Yoga broadcast from 1984, Lyn Marshall begins the series in her living room. There she is then, moments later, in a strange and blissful void. The things that I am In Search Of promise the same trajectory.

I am not In Search Of athletic wear, I am In Search Of transportation. There are some things I cannot unsee, like a playsuit that brings you to an unknowable altar.

As an end of year treat…..here are some (UN-PAYWALLED) playsuits, monochrome tights, and pragmatic accessories I have found on the world wide web just for you….<3

• My favorite of the leotards I ordered

• The closest I found to Lyn Marshall’s silhouettes (pictured above)

• With matching footed spandex here

• Or red, sheer tights here

• A pink leotard for the ballerina that haunts my delusions

• A perfect tie top

• Footless tights to boot

• Footless tights are of course the most optimal option to complete the Lyn Marshall look — but it is difficult to find them in mid-century palettes. Because I am nothing if not practical about my delusions……….…here are some iron on grips I bought to add to the bottoms of my tights. Nothing like an order from StickyFeetShop showing up in your mailbox to help you get closer to prayer…

<3 If you would like to stop yearning in 2025 update your subscription to become a paid subscriber of ISO (new deal I made with Substack and God) <3

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