Tag: Taste

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1881 and Attemplate

I’ve wandered far from the traditional life paths that might have recognizable to past generations of my kin.

It scares me. Any time I contemplate the change I have already experienced, I imagine how much more change I can expect to see.

How are we supposed to raise children, mentor young leaders or align artificial intelligence with the good, the true and the beautiful when we adult humans have experienced life so far from past ideals?

So I’ve been toying with a portmanteau blending attempt and template to express the idea of “an experimental framework” or “proto-template for living, learning, or skill-building.” I need templates to help me attempt to adapt while retaining my humanity.

We will all be re-skilling, re-learning, and re-engaging with our values and as I try to structure templates that help me walk a life and prototype styles that might work for myself and others.

I hoped to communicate both clarity and flexibility with the choice. We are building good ways of being in a world of rapid change. Templates must change and we must always be attempting to learn and adapt.

I liked that attemplate sounds like a natural word you felt like you may have already encountered. It does a nice job of mirroring the thoughtfulness of contemplate. A template for a new era which will be attempt to build, even if the foundations we thought were firm in the past give way to much broader ways of being.

I played with “attempate” which sounds procedural (almost bureaucratic) as if one would take a sheet of paper with an assigned attempate to fill out and live. Why yes, I took the project management attempate sheet to see if I had natural aptitude for detail work.

“Temptlate” sounded engineered. Maybe it would be suitable name for an internal tool or concept document. We will add that to the family Temptlate and see who bites on it for Saturday plans. It’s cute, playful and almost experimental, but not entirely as serious as the scaffolding one hopes to build upstairs n.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels like I lost decade between Trump Derangement Era through Pandemic Biden Gramsci End of March Institutional Capture.

What I thought was true slammed into things I wished were not. And then we fought years of anarcho-tyranny as the state refused to budge even if you attempted to follow its templates.

So here I am trying to find new ways of being for myself, for the future, and for my present. Maybe it’s entirely selfish. Templates for how to live are the anchors from which we used to build religion and power.

We’ve stripped much of the meat from life and turned past ideals into brands and merchandised them into outfits and starter packs. But it’s worth an attempt don’t you think?

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 1866 and Never Escaping Veblen Goods

I love a good signaling and status competition. There are so many ways to to signal that at the far reaches of taste you will never fear to tread. Just don’t worry about how other people live.

I’ve worked in luxury fashion and venture capital and they run on the same rules. And it’s all snobbery up and down and it is a mixed bag when it comes to what works in reality.

I’ve known sneakerheads who seamlessly transitioned to private equity because they know in some fundamental way that rising price increases demand in strange markets. But the little signals can give away your whole game and you can’t always assume you are speaking their language.

Many an investor and fashionista has made good use of this basic understanding of a Veblen good. The more expensive it gets, the more it stokes demand. Everyone thinks they can become Hermes or Facebook but if you could well you would have.

This can fuck with actual performance as the thing being performed isn’t necessarily the thing that is getting done in reality. You can show your own displeasure with the pricing scheme by not participating. You can short a thing with a little creative and signaling of your own.

Many decided will continue to play along despite not needing to participate in status games. Outsourcing taste is actually something you can pay for and sometimes you should just get a realistic budget.

Often you really can’t afford to play the game and it’s better to cultivate your own taste and satisfactions in life so you are comfortable taking on the risk load of stepping out of unnecessary competition. You play your own game and win on your own terms.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1864 and Retail Therapy in Fashion Exile Land

Maybe it’s because it’s been such a wild week in the financial markets, but I’ve been thinking back to one of my moves to San Francisco just before the Great Recession. It’s a story about buying clothing but I’ll get to that.

I had just come off the high of being the first publisher to break (by live streaming and photography) a new fashion designer who would become one of the biggest names of his generation.

The low hit me as I realized I was unable to afford any of the pieces in his collection. And nor was I able to buy them anyway as the whole collection sold out instantly in New York City. I look back on being backstage at his first (and subsequent) shows with much fondness. Once he threw a full on carnival in a parking lot! Imagine models tossing their size 9.5 Manolo’s on concrete to hop into a bouncy castle.

Those models were his muses and he was known for an off-duty model look. I am about a foot too short, 20-30lbs too fat, and three cup sizes too large to be mistaken for a model so not an ideal customer.

Normally one could politely ask for samples or gifting if one helped break a collection, but this was not a sample collection that would have fit me. I’m a size 7 shoe and those boobs do me no favors for hanger sizes.

Still I wanted one item badly. Even if I couldn’t afford it and I couldn’t find it in stores, I kept an eye out everywhere for it.

The coveted item was a pair of high waisted pleated black wool trousers (lined with an ample cuff) that was the wearable merchandising anchor to a collection that was otherwise a bit tricky for mere mortals to wear.

For the men (and some women) who haven’t given thought to runway models, the metrics are specific. You need to be over 5’ 10”, never over 115lbs and have an A cup to fit a designer runway model call sheet.

These aren’t aesthetic preferences, just that models are a glorified hanger and not a person for purposes of ease of fitting. Yes it’s a bit degrading.

And so I resigned myself to never getting those pants and having only the glory of discovery and first to market coverage. Though the proof on that may be debated.

But then a small miracle happened. As I was relocating to San Francisco (by the buyer of my first startup) I began to get invited to events and parties.

A brand new Barney’s opened up off Union Square in San Francisco. An old girlfriend who had just married and moved to San Francisco told me “you will love the shopping out here as the good stuff never sells out!”

Mind you the collection had sold out in other fashion capitals. I had called around. I asked all the major stockists. It just wasn’t to be had anywhere.

But the new Barney’s was very late in opening and had stock from the previous season saved. I missed the opening party but thought maybe I’ll see something from the newer collection and I’ll splurge.

Well I got even luckier than I imagined. The pants were not only at the new Barney’s but on the sale rack. No one in the market had even liked them.

The salesgirl said weren’t moving as they were too formal and too trend forward for the town. They were having trouble moving most of the pieces from the designer in fact.

There were multiple pairs of the pants in size 38. That is a size 6 in American sizing which is almost always the first to sell out. I purchased it without even thinking. They were 40% off.

I still wear them to this day. And anytime I visit a bigger city or capital with a retailer of high end fashion, or designer goods, I’ll go looking. Sometimes in the strangest places you will find the exact item you wanted marked off in the middle of February.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1854 and Will The Real Fake Fendi Please Stand Up?

I don’t know if I should be flattered or irritated but I learned funniest thing this week. Netflix “stole” my Real Fake Fendi story for their hit show Emily in Paris. Let me explain.

Emily in Paris wrote a plot-line into the current 5th season which appears to be riffing on one of my old blogposts “The Real Fake Fendi.” It is a true story & anyone who has known me awhile has heard me tell it.

I wrote about it in ‘21 on this blog five years long before this season premiered. I am on day 1853 day of writing a daily blog and published the story on Day 89 of my writing experiment though the actual experience took place sometime in the late aughts or early teens where I believe I first wrote about it on an old blog I took down.

Emily pitches a campaign to Fendi for a “real fake Fendi” on Emily in Paris

I suspect I would find earlier variants of this tale from my very first (somewhat popular) fashion blog as well. I suppose where fashion is headed is always where fashion has been. Or as they say on the show “it’s super meta and self referential”

The story goes like this. I was once was asked by a tourist for directions to find “a real fake Fendi” when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

I was honestly stumped by this inquiry. I didn’t answer immediately as my mind raced through the implications of their request. Imagine my mind retrieving.

Was there a fake that had inherent realness that other knockoffs did not possess? Was there a vendor who sold the most authentic mimicry of Fendi which the tourist wished to find? I had no clue how to answer.

Did they mean the realness one sees on the catwalks overseen by RuPaul? But which kind of realness? The creation that evokes the spirit of its inspiration? A realness so over the top and yet absolutely true to its essence?

Or perhaps the blunt direct feedback from being “read” by a drag artist that no construct, no matter how convincing, is the original artifact. Is is serving realness? I honestly didn’t know. I had Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction swirling in my head and still has no answer.

Apparently tourists looking for Canal Street want to buy the most authentic real fake Fendi

I just told the tourist that Canal was one block north and walked away. I don’t know if they ever found what they were looking for and I may have even given them the wrong directions I was so flummoxed.

Now can I really complain about someone taking one of my coinages and injecting it into a Darren Starr show about spunky brunette girl from heartland American who becomes a luxury fashion marketer by being good at social media. You see where I am going with this. That girl is me.

Perhaps my friend and fashion scholar Susan Scafidi of Fordham Law School’s Fashion Law Institute & author of “Who Owns Culture” would know who owns this cultural artifact. I bet I’ve told her this story too.

This life story archetype has been aspirational long before me. Murphy Brown anyone? It has been done in many different formats including Darren Starr’s best known work Sex and The City.

But it is my story too. So is Emily in Paris the real story of Julie in Manhattan? Is Julie in Manhattan the real Emily in Paris? Am I a retro causal multiverse prequel version of Emily?

Who is the real Emily? Am I the real Emily? Who buys a fake version of the real thing? Either way, I think Netflix owes me at a walk on spot. It would be very self referential. Or me-referential

Categories
Travel

Day 1847 and Cardio versus Packing versus Ski Bunnies

I’ll be on the road for a portion of tomorrow. Other members of my traveling party have already pulled ahead to parts unknown, as shifting obligations and vehicle needs turned schedules this way and that. Nomads as we adapt to a new world.

Europe is in a tense state and the weather hasn’t helped much. As I’m writing, Davos is awaiting Trump speech in the Swiss mountain town.

I finished a workout in the hotel gym but my room wasn’t quite ready for me, so I went down to the lounge to take in the BBC having had my fill of Bloomberg commentary while in the gym.

Management must keep up with their bosses

You can probably spot the hotel brand and imagine easily my experience intaking the World Economic Forum by proxy as I attempt to manage my life and health in the unspooling of the order of things.

I packed up a slightly unusual range of things for my transit tomorrow, as I had been going by car but will hop a low cost carrier to recenter. Somehow this has my large luggage separated from me. I’m carrying a very fine leather duffle I recently acquired as a gift for my husband.

Will this work for my carry on and personal item?

I have gone from doing a bit of cardio bunny as I work to improve my V02 max to a pack rabbit, as I moved around this and that to be sure my cascade of items and medications were within reach and packed appropriately. And would make weight but I’ll get to it.

I’ll not end my travels as a snow bunny in Davos though I have seen rather a lot of snow in Southern Europe as far south as Greece.

Why are bunnies on my mind? Well I have to keep in mind some odd weights for the low cost carrier I’ll be using for a short hop. Just look at this guide to baggage.

3kg is a silly amount of weight for a bag. That’s the weight of a house pet like a bunmy

3kg (3 kilograms) is equivalent to approximately 6.6 pounds. While this weight is roughly the size of a medium-to-large house rabbit rather than a “small” one, it is a common weight for many everyday household items like a large bag of flour or three liters of milk. Via Perplexity and Weight of Stuff

For whatever odd reason, the carrier listed your personal item or under seat bag as needing to weigh 3kg. This is about the weight of a house rabbit.

Which is honestly not a lot. I doubt any purse I’ve ever carried is under 3kg when you account for laptop, shoes, cosmetics, wallet and other sundries. But we shall see if my backpack can do it. Nothing but pajamas and medications ought to keep it light.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1807 and Set Hyperparameters to Dumb

As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.

I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.

So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.

The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.

I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.

I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.

For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.

What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.

And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.

Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).

“The cure proves incurable.”

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1803 and Anemoia

You know I am old as I just don’t consume or create short form video content. Every new trend that filters to me on Twitter or on my reader feeds presents as sadness to me. I don’t fully understand them and probably never will.

The newest TikTok trend involves Zoomers pretending to be happy millennials in 2012 Williamsburg Brooklyn. They romanticize millennial optimism as unpolished and carefree for some sort of shared but unreal nostalgia for pre-gentrification Brooklyn.

I left Williamsburg in 2010 for Manhattan’s Chinatown as even the south side past the JMZ had become too expensive. The loft I shared above Future Perfect on North 8th and Berry was getting expensive on just the other side of the Great Recession. It was a loud place to live and a lot of fun but I needed a lease with my name on it and prime Williamsburg wasn’t it in 2012.

I wasn’t in a position by 2012 to buy an apartment but neither did I have any debt. So I’m sure that made me better off than the Zoomers coveting my life just before New York would go ZIRP. Not making a fortune wasn’t too bad when you could still enjoy a lot of hipster consumer choices.

You can’t blame the Zoomers for feeling like today’s economic volatility and social fragmentation makes our “before times” life look relatively utopian.

Michael Milaflora brought to my attention Gen Z’s “anemoia” which is a broader trend. A 2023 study in Emotion journal found 68% of young adults report nostalgia for past decades they didn’t live, linked to rising anxiety levels post-pandemic.

I’ve previously enjoyed when my own past lifestyles are the subject of nostalgia rehashes on social media. Now I think worried as no one should be too obsessed with the past. Especially not the young.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1801 and Parked in Front of The iPad

My immune system must be reacting to something, be it travel and environmental factors or perhaps a bug I caught, so I’m in bed and trying to keep my body happy. That means catching up on a few Love is Blind seasons.

As the American seasons get worse and worse, the international editions offer up clues as to the politics and tensions that producers feel the need to offer up to international Netflix audiences.

I am an unabashed fan of the franchise and what it offers up as a cultural mirror especially as different countries try to show the ways their status, class, colonial and power structures impact marriage.

The United Kingdom had a Manchester season that was more commentary on the failures of the working class and the country’s immigration systems than it did romance. It almost hurt to watch.

France’s most recent cast was more pan-Asian colonial tensions at the forefront (with an Algerian or two) than featuring any continental or regional ties. The Italian season reflects a more United Colors of Benetton than Georgia Meloni’s. European franchise spin offs feature more immigration more than America.

While everyone is talking about Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers today, I wonder if Hollywood will drive new cultural directions or if the data driven Netflix will produce endless remixes of subgroups and niches so no matter your identity you too will have an avatar on a spinoff of a reality show. Love may be blind but the watching data sure isn’t.

Lest you think it is all fan service and showcasing different immigrant groups being absorbed into the wider national identities of their former colonial governments, you do see the occasional fusion of sanded off styles meant to appeal across strange niches.

I love watching the style of the country doing offs as it is both globo-homo any and everywhere while still targeting very identity driven and place specific people.

Some make no sense. Who doesn’t love seeing a bizarre fashion choice like a Prada bolo ties at a French wedding? Unless you are an Italian getting married to a Texan girl at Marfa, it’s odd to pick 2020’s most viral celebrity accessory to get married in France on a 2025 reality show.

Sure still see some aesthetic choices you expect for both local and global reasons. Like the Italian party planner with the Gucci bee broach. That seems culturally appropriate with a cast that was variably actually Italian despite their their aesthetics

Long burgundy blazers and Gothic Bulgarian girls could work in any country this year. That’s simply globally appealing in the now in any country. Warner Brothers should be taking note.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1794 and What We Expect From The Wives

I’ve been intermittently online (as opposed to extremely online) this week what with the travel and the holidays. So I decided to use the Twitter algorithm to catch up on what the “Everything Platform” thinks I should see.

Which I realize is a bit like saying I’ll just have a little bump to see what is driving the rest of the club insane. I knew it was a bad decision and I fully endorse only using social media without algorithms. I generally use my following list in a chronological feed and stay away from image or video driven social networks.

But I am in many information flows that are built to grab attention and normalize information outside our Overton Window of current civil society consensus.

I was taught this was a good thing as a child. Reading and reconciling conflicting arguments was an important democratic norm required of all responsible citizens. I also understand as an adult that this exposes me to propaganda made by any number of sources.

Now you can judge my information sources but I value both of them and they had a common theme. Women, and in particular the wives of powerful men, are the keeper of m civilizational standards and used for this power. This message came from two very different places.

One is widely known indie founder who writes about doing business in Europe and the other is a publisher of books outside polite discourse messages as well as my neighbor in Montana.

Both accounts took me down different uses of the matter. Though both have share other accounts I’d consider right conservative populists. One was about an interview with Nicole Shanahan the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr.

She discusses how the wives of wealthy startup founders are finding causes that are not actually helpful to their intended purpose and are perhaps even actively harmful. It uses some language that is tied to a number of conspiracy adjacent words like the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

It is still fair game as a civic polity might ask about the responsibility of the wealthy pretty regularly. I do think Silicon Valley wives are a new vector to watch as a pressure point though. I better watch it as if the tech billionaires’s ex wives are under watch, I can’t wait to see how their less powerful (but much more numerous), Girlbosses will be scrutinized.

This video sent me right into an interview Jonathan Keeperman aka Lomez doing an interview with right populist pressure researcher Christopher Ruffo. He who made critical theory and Critical Marxism a household issue in Republican America.

Lomez has an essay about the feminization expressed in the longhouse. I won’t do it justify by doing a synopsis but Vikings had longhouses and so do plenty of other cultures. This is not all together a positive portrayal of women’s role in civilization but certainly as its driving force.

The video I was served after LevelsIO’s retweet of a video clip of Nicole Shanahan was certainly further down a worldview. But it was also a more positive view of the role of women could be if the Karen was not viewed as a villain but as a hero of social norms.

Algorithms refine down to clearer distillations. Smoothing functions are revealing of form after all. And I think it is interesting that Silicon Valley liberal ex-wives are being shown against the backdrop of norms enforcing regular mothers, wives and guardians of the good life the Karen.

The Karen was once a liberal nightmare and it is an interesting space to replace for the culturally conservative, especially as the Zoomer incel nihilist view is raging across the internet like a prairie fire. So that was an interesting gradient from a European founder to my neighbor.

I’d also say it’s exactly why I don’t read from the algorithm. I fundamentally agree with different positions expressed here but mane not in ways you’d expect. I’ve seen the pressure we place on women in certain social contexts and we make them feel crazy for being the balance of norms but also being hated for it if we don’t chose the ones our clique or social context prefers. My algorithm wants me to understand the narrow band I walk on. Fucking dicks.