It’s funny that whenever I should have a particularly good week I am inevitably presented with pain and a bad day. And today was a bad day.
I woke up starving at 5am for no reason. Everything hurt. My skin was peeling and I was freezing. A snowstorm barreled in overnight which was cause for some distress and an awkward moment of uncertainty as whether our spring chickens could weather the storm. It’s their first full week out of the barn and in the outdoor coop and the smallest one is still so very little. They did great but they were not happy about it.
Our five new pullets who are snowed in on the first week outside the barn
I also got a sad bit of news about a company that I had witnessed being birthed through its early years as a direct to consumer darling. My first boss had been on its board and their technical cofounder was a college friend who also worked with my prior boss.
If one is to believe the reporting it was sold in debt to a large foreign company whose own brand is the antithesis of what the startup has meant to its customers. It was the first and last of the direct to consumer companies.
I don’t wish to make anyone sadder than they already are about it and I am saddened common stock holders get nothing. It’s a common story in the space and it hurts to see every time.
So I went and bought a bunch of basics in memory of what the company had tried to be and in a show of mourning as I do not trust the new owners to maintain quality.
That’s a common story in all consumer categories now. One is sometimes let down by growing too quickly or raising too much too fast and I have so much sadness in my heart that reality. It was the end of an era.
The more power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.
Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated rather than relying on subjective, non-definitional standards.
How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.
You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”
Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.
Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.
Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.
His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.
Some of Tufte’s self published tomes
The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.
He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.
The Design of Everyday Things second book cover
Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function
You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:
Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.
Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.
A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.
Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.
Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.
Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.
With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.
I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.
I’m in my luteal phase so primed to be grumpy, frumpy and otherwise combative. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue as I’m currently experimenting with synthetic hormones and all sorts of experimental peptides but the feminine is a mystery.
Thankfully this cunty attitude had a positive side effect of spiraling me into a group chat debate over what constitutes couture. Haute couture literally means “high sewing” or “high dressing making” in French.
I just had to be technically correct as it’s the best kind of correct. I only know as once upon a time I picked a fight with Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode aka La Chambre Syndicale as old school fashionistas tend to still call it.
I may have done a kind of DDOS (allegedly) on their publicity fax machines to get their attention to further my guerrilla reporting efforts. They were not amused by the chron job I set to send them regular faxes at specific intervals. Anyways.
The TLDR is essentially that what constitutes couture is a bit like champagne. It only counts if it’s from the ateliers of Paris with very specific artisans (and a number of them) using hand sewn techniques which sell only to private clients with custom fittings. They then approve your atelier if you meet these standards.
Couture is not custom made clothing nor is it a form of luxury determined by price or self labeling. And it is definitely not “ready to wear” clothing you can buy off the runway. If an elaborate dance of craftsmanship and French bureaucracy. As an American I find it a bit silly but I don’t care for cartels of any kind be it drug, oil or clothing.
Many designers will try to get away with calling a custom made item couture in order to ride on the 170 year aura of French fashions but it’s not really what is meant by couture and it’s absolutely not what is meant by haute couture.
You don’t see Savile Row tailors calling themselves couture designers nor should they. That would be silly and imprecise. They are Savile Row tailors and that’s its own special custom suiting process.
Being imprecise in one’s specifications is exactly the opposite of what you’d want from someone making you a custom wardrobe based upon nearly two centuries of a professional cartel’s specifications.
So please don’t call something couture as a short hand slang for custom design. It may be ready to wear. It may be tailored to you. But only those who meet the standards of the Chambre Syndicale carry the designation haute couture. Otherwise it’s just sparkling custom made clothing.
My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.
Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.
I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.
But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.
I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.
My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed thebit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.
Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.
In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.
I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.
I am not up for the nostalgia festival around The Devil Wears Prada. It’s funny to have been in the fashion industry as the world of high gloss fashion magazines was rising in the public eye. It was ironically just as the business of publishing was about to be upended by technological change.
I never did take a job at Condé Nast, though I have some great stories. But I have enjoyed the largess of being inside a fashion brand with a closet. Nothing can fix a day like changing your look without spending a dime. Just “shop” the closet!
If a fashion closet doesn’t appeal to you, imagine a beauty closet. I was on the public relations gifting list for MAC during several of its glory years. I still treasure the packaging. Once I had my own beauty brand, I was swimming in samples that were far less polished but no less enjoyable.
So today that was the happy memory on my mind as I pulled together samples for a friend from my own beauty closet. who is about to go on tour for their work.
Finding just the right colors, chemicals and packaging for her needs was such a joy. I still love the hunt for just the right item that will work. From blazers to retinols, the closet contains fixes to almost all style problems. The bigger problems in life never have a quick fix so it’s worth treasuring the joy of the closet rummage.
Neal Stephenson gets a lot of credit in the shaping our science fiction imagination. Maybe too much credit given Anthropic trained on grim depictions of AI. But I would say that, I’m a William Gibson fan while the most I can say about Stephenson is that I really enjoyed Snowcrash fan.
Still the man coined the term metaverse (not that we ever got it), there isn’t an education entrepreneur who will shut up about the Diamond Age (AI harnessed to provide a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), and of course his cryptography obsession Cryptonomicon.
But Stephenson has a few interesting takes on media when it becomes overrun run by content created artificially. I think his Anathem might be worth looking at as our open internet gets hard to interpret. The plot is loosely intellectuals are confined to monasteries for having misused technology.
Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,’ Sammann said.
“‘Crap, you once called it,’ I reminded him.
“‘Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.’
“‘What is good crap?’ Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“‘Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.’
“‘As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,’ Osa said. ‘This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium
The artificial Inanity of the First Millennium is a pretty good joke about the Internet of 2026. Lots of people and machines are spewing misinformation into enemy reticules.
He later refined the concept in a slightly insulting way in Fall: Dodge in Hell. That society uses augmented reality glasses that deliver personalized news and media feeds. AI algorithms curate content based on users’ physiological responses, creating “personalized hallucination streams” or filter bubbles. He takes it to insulting places like Ameristan which is the interior country of reactionary racists.
But we do seem to be somewhere between Poisoned Reticulum’s of Artificial Inanity and needing to buy your way into high end human curated media feeds which is what the wealthy use to make sure they are not ruled by propaganda bubbles. At least now you can write your own algorithms to try to combat the inanity. How will we know when we’ve trapped ourselves in our preferred view?
One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.
She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.
Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.
Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.
There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.
Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.
My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.
Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.
So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.
They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.
We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.
We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage
I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.
Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.
Meltdowns seem to be a going thing at every layer of human interaction. Something in consensus reality slips, a schism arises and then you have to hard tap at the glass to decide to see if it’s a mirror.
In preparedness communities they talk about “normalcy bias” as the preference of individuals to avoid looking at a problem straight on. Adjusting to bad news is like grief. It has some steps.
I think that it’s relatively clear to anyone watching that the world is in a particularly malleable place. Old assumptions about institutions and power are tested.
I think it’s never been easier to have your grip on reality rocked. We are all getting rocked daily by meta-narratives and players of games because the internet is a sea of competing games and stories.
Maybe that level of instability is too much to manage for any of us so we install pressure sensors and we let off steam and we carry on with whatever seems manageable. So someone has a meltdown. Seems to be going round.
I have been feeling rather sad. I am stymied on a few matters (family matters, visas for said family) and absolutely wretched over the state of artificial intelligence. The successes are in shadow and so I need to cheer up.
In an effort to do, I have a little group chat going for women interested in having friendly conversations about pretty skills. That’s right being pretty is a skill set. From nutrition and exercise to scalp care and makeup, looking good is a series of skills that can be taught.
If one feels like personal agency is a stretch, nothing is quite so fine a balm as learning a new skill. And might I suggest your personal appearance as an easy uplifting place to start?
Pulling together a beautiful look is not just some genetic privilege meted out by fate. Our presentation is something we sculpt with attitude, posture, movement, care and thousands of tricks and tips that add up to a lifetime of skills. Pretty is a skill set.
If you didn’t learn those from your mother or aunts or an elder sister. Or if you learned everything and want to pass it down. It’s safe to share and learn the skill sets you’ve picked up that make you feel pretty. It’s in your hands.
So if you want a space to learn more about those skills there are a bunch of women who want to be friends with you.
Every time a new AI image generation model comes out, there is a wave of people creating new content riffs inspired by their friends testing out the newest capabilities.
Yesterday OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 which is tool powered by the gpt-image-2 model designed as a “visual thought partner.
It is pretty fun to play with if you have even the slightest design or visual vocabulary to work with. Or even just a couple cool selfies.
No need to focus on regulatory capture politicking, compute shortages, geopolitical drama or shipping choke points when you can create cute social media content right? Screw a grey zone informational wars (or even a hot kinetic one) girls just want to be remade as a fairy princess science or as Studio Ghibli character.
So what’s the next trend? My feed produced a wave of mood boards with color theory, swatching, fabric pins, makeup stories, hairstyles, other mood board elements that combines everything from descriptive prose to capsule wardrobes. And all this from a a couple of basic uploaded photos and some simple prompts.
I choose the below images and said “do a color analysis of the woman in this picture including best colors, makeup choices, hair choices, style options and create a mood board with outfit inspiration, prints that work, accessories and other details”
From there it spat out a long analysis which I will post below. I then asked that analysis to be mocked up in a mood board based on the look and feel of the images with the descriptions from the analysis. And I’m not going to lie it’s pretty good and clearly ChatGPT can smell the Ann Taylor on me. I mean, umm, it can tell I spent time working for some of best known American heritage retailers.
Now it gets weirder the more you try to edit it. The slow warping of my face from my own to I’m going to say Sheryl Sandberg is a little unsettling. But I do wear a lot of silks and prefer greens and browns though I am often a little black dress defaulter.
Now I just went through an enormous exercise in which I tried to find a television and camera ready foundation where other models were sure I was a soft autumn but a soft summer isn’t all that far off.
And I appreciate the buttering up OpenAI does with their quiet luxury spiel. I’m more of an Italic luxury buyer and a Quince if I’m feeling like a gamble. But somewhere back before all this inflation I for sure was the kind of girl who wore chunky antique vermeil accessories and never turned down a nice olive green.
This is a great set of photos for analysis—different lighting, styling, and contrast levels make it much easier to see your natural coloring clearly.
🎨 Overall Color Season: Soft Summer (leaning Neutral-Cool)
You sit in that refined, muted, slightly cool palette with:
Low-to-medium contrast (your features blend rather than sharply contrast)
Soft, diffused coloring (nothing overly bright or high-chroma)
Neutral-cool undertone (pink in the skin, but not icy)
You can borrow slightly from Soft Autumn (especially olive/green tones), but your best looks are cooler and more muted.
🌈 Best Colors for You
✅ Core Palette (your power zone)
Dusty rose, muted mauve
Soft plum, blackberry
Blue-gray, slate, steel blue
Sage, eucalyptus, muted olive
Taupe, mushroom, cool beige
Soft navy (not inky or harsh)
⚠️ Approach Carefully
True black (can feel a bit heavy—your blazer photo shows this slightly)
Bright white (too stark—soft ivory is better)
Bright jewel tones (too high contrast)
🚫 Avoid
Neon anything
Super warm oranges/yellows
High-contrast combos (black + white, etc.)
💄 Makeup Direction
You look significantly more harmonious in the softer, diffused look (photo 1 and 3 vs the sharper blazer look).
Skin
Light to medium coverage with a natural or satin finish
Avoid overly matte—your skin looks best with a bit of life
Blush
Rose
Soft berry
Muted pink (what you’re wearing in photo 1 = excellent)
Lips (this is your strongest feature zone)
Rose gloss (photo 1 = perfect)
Mauve nude
Sheer berry stains
Avoid: orange-red or overly brown lipsticks
Eyes
Taupe, mushroom, soft plum
Cool brown instead of warm bronze
Soft liner (charcoal > black)
Mascara: brown-black ideal
💇♀️ Hair Analysis
Your natural coloring works beautifully—this is key.
Best Hair Direction
Neutral to cool brown
Slight ash or soft cocoa tones
Subtle dimension (very blended, not high contrast)
Avoid
Golden highlights (too warm)
Very dark/black dye (overpowers you)
High-contrast balayage
Styling Note
You shine with:
Soft movement
Natural texture
Slightly undone polish
👓 Glasses (important win here)
The black frames:
Add structure (good)
But slightly overpower your softness
Try:
Soft charcoal
Translucent gray
Muted tortoiseshell (cool-toned)
👗 Style Essence + Mood
You read as:
Soft Minimalist + Intellectual Romantic
(very understated, very intentional, very modern)
Think:
Quiet luxury
Slightly academic
Soft structure, not rigid tailoring
🧥 Outfit Direction
Silhouettes
Fluid tailoring
Draped fabrics
Soft blazers (less sharp shoulders)
Relaxed but intentional lines
Fabrics
Silk
Fine knits
Matte satin
Soft wool
Avoid stiff, shiny synthetics
🧵 Best Neutrals (your wardrobe backbone)
Mushroom
Cool taupe
Soft navy
Dusty olive
Muted charcoal (instead of black)
🌿 Prints That Work
Because your coloring is soft, your prints should be too:
✅ Ideal
Blurred florals
Watercolor patterns
тонal (low contrast) stripes
Soft geometrics
🚫 Avoid
High-contrast graphic prints
Sharp black/white patterns
Loud, busy designs
📌 What Your Photos Show (Specific Feedback)
Photo 1 (window light, glasses)
Best overall look
Soft pink lip = perfect
Brown shirt = harmonious
Natural light = confirms your muted palette
Photo 2 (black blazer)
Black is wearing you slightly
More contrast than your features naturally support
Makeup slightly sharper → less aligned with your softness
