Hey!

One of my worst fears is getting caught in a white lie about having watched, read, or listened to something. You probably did it when you were a little kid, too. Your friends are all talking about how much they loved a certain R-rated movie, and you have to nod and agree so that they don’t assume you’re a baby loser who wasn’t allowed to watch ted (the movie about the hard-partying, foul-mouthed teddy bear). And then your friend asks you a super specific question about it in order to catch you in your lie (which is a really shitty thing to do), or they say “Didn’t you love the dog?” even though there was no dog in the movie. And you say how much you loved the dog, making yourself look stupid. You ultimately realize that you should have just told the truth and admitted that you have no idea what the movie is about.

This is apparently a universal experience.

The thing about growing up is that we try to define ourselves in terms of the content we consume. We scroll through the great plain that is the internet, and we decide to become the kind of person who reads Tumblr sites about Alexa Chung’s style (we unfortunately then start wearing denim overalls, only to eventually realize that she only looks good in them because she’s 6’2’’ and built like a rod), or the person who knows a lot about 70s rock music, or to get into film photography and inevitably take shitty pictures of your feet. You may decide that you live for the thrill of chasing sneaker drops and waiting in line for hours on Spring street in SoHo, and you become a hypebeast. Alternatively, you may find that your tastes are more aligned with vintage Levi’s 505s than with Dover Street Market, and you become someone who barters on Depop.

Did anybody else obsess over this book?

I just read Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, for a class I’m taking about cultural criticism, and it made me realize that I’ve basically never had an original thought. Hsu describes his teenage self as someone who was “into being into things”. I think that applies to a lot of us in our teen years and early 20s. We haven’t yet entered a phase of our lives where we have started accumulating real economic capital, so we build up our cultural capital in the meantime. And not only do we define ourselves in terms of culture, but we use it to find our people, too. “Everybody likes something—a song, a movie, a TV show—so you choose not to; this is how you carve out space for yourself. But the right person persuades you to try it, and you feel as though you’ve made two  discoveries. One is that this thing isn’t so bad. The other is a new confidant,” writes Hsu. Maybe you started listening to the Arctic Monkeys because a guitar-playing ex-fling liked them. Or, you deepen your friendship with a new companion by exchanging RealReal finds that would suit each other.

I want this newsletter to serve as a little window into the content I consume, the clothes I like, the music I’ve listened to, and the memes that made me laugh. At 21, I have no idea who I’m going to become, and I’m definitely not an expert on culture of any kind. But my youth affords me the luxury of time to try everything out, and I want to share my findings with all of you. Think of this like a diary.

I like celebrity gossip, reading The Cut, and rom-coms. I’m always looking for a great new hair mask. I love the Olsen twins’ style, and I fold over sailor pants and flared jeans. I love Fleetwood Mac, reading about conspiracy theories, and British fashion brands like Molly Goddard, Shrimps, and Bella Freud. I am addicted to shoe shopping - here’s my current shoe rotation. I online shop obsessively, and then feel guilty about how much I consume - not in an environmentalist way, but in the kind of way that people tell me I have more stuff than anyone they have ever met. This may all change, and hopefully, it will - it would be weird if I was still wearing Jane Birkin-inspired sheer crochet dresses to pick my kids up from school.

I just bought a knockoff version of this iconic dress from The Garment. Fun fact: Jane wore this backwards - the cutout is supposed to be on the back - because she thought it was boring when worn the regular way. She’s so fricking cool.

I’ve been thinking about how my intro to this newsletter needed to be perfect. Because it ~sets the tone~ for everything that follows it. But a here’s a line that you won’t normally hear in journalism - but I think it’s allowed in email newsletters, thankfully - “fuck it.”

One more thing from Hua Hsu that helps to romanticize my shopping addiction: “You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around.”