The World is on Fire, Let's Go Shopping

I have been absent -- mostly due to things like family illnesses and my mother's death, and associated travel and mute heartbreak. I won't even talk about the current political events because there is no talking there but only screaming. And yet: no matter what is going on, those of us who continue living carry on with the mundane stuff. We eat, we sleep, we create art, we write blogs. We work out, we tend to the young and the elderly, we feed cats and let them outside. And we shop.

Today I want to give a shoutout to my favorite city, Moscow. And to two favorite shopping destinations there: one old, one new. But first, some street views.

Incidentally, this puffer coat by The Eight Senses saw me beautifully through most of January in Moscow. Respect! The only time I needed something more insulated was during a -20 freeze, which lasted three days and seriously hampered my walking time.

And here's this coat again, in SVMoscow. I wrote about them before, and I keep going back year after year. It's not just the amazing selection and the beautifully curated space, it's not just the fresh collections by The Row, Ann Demeuleemester, Yohji Yamamoto, and Vetements. It's this mirror, it's the quiet interior. It is its sense of sanctuary. I am not the one for churches, but I do find a degree of spiritual contentment trailing my fingers along their racks of black Japanese and Belgian avant garde, drinking tea in the spacious front area, walking around with the wooden floors whispering underfoot.

The greatest treasure of this space and my favorite salesperson in the world is Roman. He is a friend and a confidant, and a person who saved me from myself more times than I can count. Some Roman quotes which always make me laugh:

"No. NO. Take this off IMMEDIATELY."

"I will not let you try this on -- it's too big, it'll swallow you whole and your broad shoulders won't save you."

"I feel I would be doing you a disservice if I let you buy another black dress."

(He is always right, by the way.)

And it is also thanks to Roman that I visited the showroom of two Russian brands, Ruban and Pe for Girls. Both are the brainchildren of Alisa and Yulia Ruban, designer sisters. Pe for Girls is their younger line, much less expensive than their main one, but still exhibiting the same quality -- structured cashmere tops lined in silk, velvet track suits, simple timeless dresses:

I knew about their main line, RUBAN, which is always exquisitely and inventively constructed, but it took Roman's tip to send me looking at the Pe and its wearable and deceptively simple silhouettes, the sort of thing you can wear to work or to lounge on the couch, and always be secretly delighted by the sweep of the hem or the substantial and smooth hand of the fabric.

It took me a second visit to venture a look at the main line -- elaborate clothes with couture sensibilities require a certain state of mind. There is always a special energy in designer showspaces -- they tend to be quieter and sparcer than retail, and I especially enjoy the ones that reflect the aesthetics of their creators not only in clothes but in decor. I loved the RUBAN showroom so much -- it is so open and straw-colored, and the clothes are exquisite. 

Also they are not exactly cheap, but I lucked out and walked right into their biggest season sale. I am a sucker for structured and tailored clothes as much as I am for Belgian avant garde, and I do firmly believe in supporting domestic manufacturing (both Russian and US -- this is what happens with two homes.) The look below caught my eye right away, and after trying on the skirt I took it home.

And wore it for the first day of the Spring semester, with my trusty Protagonist made in NYC shirt. 

I dress up for my classes because they are important to me, and by dressing up I convey my sense of excitement and respect for the occasion. Or at least I hope I do! I like to wear things made by people I admire and respect. It is importantfor me to support those who are truly creative, who invest in ethical practices, who care about sustainable manufacturing while creating beauty that keeps people warm.

Because we are alive, we must leave our houses, and we must wear clothes. They tell the world of who we are and where we are coming from, of our aesthetics and desires. We chose our clothes because they matter. And we wear these clothes to honor the people who dreamed them up and made them, who put them onto shelves and racks for us to find, and those who showed them to us and talked us into trying them on.

Because even as the world falls apart, we carry on with shopping, dressing, and looking after one another.

New Luxury

(Photo by Soumountha Keophilavong)

A few months ago I stepped my foot inside Bergdorf Goodman's for the first time. You know the mythology surrounding it: a legendary luxury department store, spanning a whole 5th Avenue block and gazillion floors (or so it seems), that carries every conceivable designer and bag and shoe, and is also home of the inimitable Betty Halbreich whom I adore for her books and for stealing that Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf flick. It is the most luxurious, excuisite, discerning and just the mostest of all department stores. Its clientelle is also the richest, most sophisticated, hardest to cater to... I was curious to see it in the flesh.

Can you guess? It was disappointing. Too many people, the overall department store atmosphere, owing no doubt to prominent perfume counters, and racks and racks of dresses (expensive dresses, mind, stuffed almost obscenely on a sales rack!)... Add to this indifferent salespeople, and it all amounted to "THIS is what luxury is?" sense. But of course it is not.

We live in the age of this ultimate oxymoron, mass market luxury, where every airport in the world has a Louis Vuitton store as if it were McDonald's, and where every Chanel/Dior/Saint Laurent boutique looks the same no matter where in the world you are. The experience is homogenized in the very opposition to the notion of luxury as something special, unique, something that is just for you - custom, bespoke, made to measure and to order. BG may be better than most department stores because there is only one of it, but the insides of it are as homogenous as elsewhere.

Of course, the truly rich are taken into some secret compartment of the store where they are waited on by personal shoppers and are offered complimentary champagne. But for the rest of us, BG offers only an illusion of luxury. Department stores are to luxury what heavily logoed Vuitton wallets are to wealth: a hollow symbol that functions only because of its mystique propped by advertizing. Brands that once signified quality now only signify themselves.

I suspect that nowadays the experience of true luxury - that is, attentive service, personalized help, custom goods, and above all quality - can be found by regular people but not at the self-designated luxury brands and stores. It exists in smaller spaces - boutiques, online stores, Etsy even - and it is not called "luxury". But the experience of finding true quality, in clothes as well as service, is what luxury is, really - and I thank all the smaller brands and designers who answer my emails and invite me to their spaces. I thank all salespeople in the stores I frequent who email me to let me know when something I might like comes in or give me heads up for new collections or sample sales. And I am happy to pay a bit more for this, and I would much rather do it there than at some mass luxury designation where unless you are super rich you will get a distinct experience of shopping at Macy's but the one you can only afford a scarf and maybe some perfume, which Target also carries. 

That was a long lead in to a shout out to such a place - Another Garde, a cool online space founded and helmed by the amazing Soumountha Keophilavong. It seems like the past few months have been so generous in letting me meet great women who are clever, passionate, and committed to making a difference in the fashion world. I met Soumountha last week, and really enjoyed hearing about her philosophy of promoting and supporting women designers, as well as getting to ogle her very tightly curated selection of beautiful and functional clothing.

Here are some pictures from Another Garde's pop up in NYC:

Zero Waste Fashion and NYC Shopping

(Disclaimer: Reusing old clothing and upcycling are environmentally friendly and decrease waste and consumption, but here I am more interested in discussing impact of NEW clothing.)

"Ethical fashion" and "sustainable fashion" have become common notions, although often conversations about the future of fashion don't bother differentiating between, or defining the two. Definitions do tend to evolve and shift meanings with the times, but it is useful occasionally to talk about them. Currently it seems "ethical" definitions focus mostly on labor justice issues, such as fair pay for the workers and factory safety, while "sustainable" deals with environmental impacts of textile manufacturing, pesticide and fertilizer use, pollution, waste, and fuel comsumption. One can also argue that "sustainable" should really be subsumed in "ethical", since environmental protection is an issue of ethics.

In my last post I wrote about Greenpeace and its definition of green manufacturing so narrowly focused on avoiding toxic chemicals as to be completely meaningless; on the other end of the spectrum, others tend toward very broad views, setting the bar high enough to include both fair labor practices and minimal environmental impact. Not impossible but challenging, and of course costs will go up. Textiles sourced from sustainable operations and made in mills that pay fair wages, local production, fair labor practices for pattern-makers, cutters, sewers... It adds up. Throw in distribution, warehousing etc etc and the price differential between fast fashion and ethical/sustainable becomes a real hurdle for consumers.

So it is always refreshing to see novel approaches. Zero-waste fashion, for one, focuses on minimizing textile waste, and Tabii Just (by Trinidad-born designer Tabitha St Bernard) takes this concept even further, cutting her garments without leaving any scraps AND using deadstock fabrics, further minimizing impact (and keeping the cost at a low end of the soectrum). Everything is manufactured in NYC, ticking off boxes of fair wages and minimal fossil fuel consumption.

Of course I had to visit! Tabitha was kind and thoughtful, and generous enough to share some professional pictures of her studio. It's a beautiful space filled with gorgeous clothes, and I appreciated Tabitha showing me around!

Her pieces are mostly dresses, with a few tops and skirts and vests, most of them patterned in bright colors. 

If you know me at all, you can guess I opted for black and white. It's a print (I know, so adventurous of me) - a lovely snake print, worn here  with Alexander Wang mules from a few years back, and a family heirloom bone necklace.

I strongly suggest listening to Tabitha and a few other zero-waste designers on American Fashion Podcast - fascinating conversation. 

Personally, I feel that a stumbling block to much of ethical consumption is the unfortunate tendency to put onus on the consumers - having them learn about each clothing brand, research their supply chain, etc etc. This is not a reasonable expectation: I feel that the responsibility should lie with the manufacturers and lawmakers, so that we can go to a store, pick up a pair of shoes and be readonably certain that no children were exploited in their making. Until the day comes, we often resort to shortcuts: rather than performing exhaustive research on each product, we have our criteria. For me, domestically made product suggests 1) fair labor practices, especially if made in NYC; 2) low fuel consumption; 3) compliance with the US environmental regulations, which are not perfect but are at least somewhat enforced. European- made textiles do have a higher fuel component but are manufactured under stricter environmental controls, so it's an all right trade-off.

Anyway! It is nice to find small-scale designers who manufacture in the US; even better to find a bunch of them brought together in a cool retail space. I found such in Coterre, a great little pop-up in SoHo. 

They carry my favorite SCHAI, as well as a few other smallish indie domestically manufactured labels. Of course I had to stop by and try on a few things!

Meet my new blazer, made by Alchemy Detroit. Love the tailoring of their pieces, and their t-shirts are the softest I ever touched. (The pants are by ADAY, and yes, I am coming from the gym.)

There is also jewelry, shoes, cosmetics... And what I found really thrilling while browsing and chatting with Hilary, the woman behind the project, was that I did not have to constantly wonder where and how everything was made. I hope that soon enough it will be the norm: walking into the store and assuming that everything in it was made ethically. Or at least that no one died as a result of making of our clothes - and really, this is not too much to ask!

Bodily Geometries

It's an interesting thing, our relationship with our bodies; even this construction implies them as separate entities our cerebral selves have some uneasy and often tenuous discourse with. And yet of course we are corporeal - the reminder often unpleasant to academics. Is it why they are so often dismissive of fashion, because fashion is so obviously embodied, and thus stands in opposition of intellect and art? It is certainly not artful by the Kantian standards, for it is entirely too immediate, corporeal and female (Kant's aesthetics, on the other hand, sees art as exclusively cerebral, appreciated only by remote senses of vision and hearing, and unambiguously male.) So contempt for fashion, often couched in language of triviality of such pursuits, seem to stem more often than not from the contempt for the feminine and the embodied, illustrating how entwined the two are to this day in collective psyche.

So anyway, bodies. I wrote before about how we present, highlight, conceal our bodies through dress; I wrote about flattering and not-sexy dressing. But I don't think I ever talked about my perceptions of my own body and how the idea of it shapes much of what I wear and how I wear it.

However, first things first: another designer I recently fell in love with is Lara Khoury who hails from Beirut, Lebanon.  Her latest collection is beautiful, softly draped with an occasional punctuation of deconstructed elements and structured shapes. The collection speaks to and of a multitude of experiences - softness and rawness, immigration and staying behind, severity and excess. The pleated dresses juxtaposed against heavy coats, wide woolen pants next to tulle, the plurality of shapes and hemlines. High necks and exposed backs, sweeping and draping, this collection is about cleaving, in both senses of the world: the designer's  description speaks of the experiences of the Lebanese diaspora and their families who stayed behind, of tearing away and hugging close. The collection miraculously hangs together (cleaving again) despite its seeming contradictions of pastels and stark black and whites, modest necklines and exposed skin. Leaving and staying, torn raw and sealed in a beautiful lantern of pleated tulle.

As I said, in love.

Contrary to my instinct, I didn't go for the structured pieces - partly because I wanted to try something new, partly due to my realization that I might have more than a reasonable number of sculpted white tops. Instead, I went for a different shape altogether, softly draped and voluminous. 

The piece is beautifully made and constructed, in cotton gauze with subtly arresting unraveling edges and interesting shape. And yet, my first reaction was, "Is it supposed to fit like this?" (The designer was kind enough to reassure me that it was indeed the right fit).

I am no stranger to oversized fits. Figure flattery is not high on the list of my dressing priorities. The top is gorgeous and I love it to bits, but seeing it on myself was an interesting if unfamiliar experience. It felt different somehow. I had to wonder what's  going on.

Of course, most of my oversized pieces are quite sculptural, often in stiff woven fabrics like this Cin+Oko top and Litkovskaya pants:

(Shoes are rag&bone mules)

The volume these clothes create is a separate  space in which my body exists without filling it.

 It is a carapace, an exoskeleton, a shell that does not suggest softness. And this angularity is actually what I am used to projecting by the way I dress, and I think it is rooted in self-perception. Conflating femininity and softness is a cliche; I do wonder about it though, only because I perceive my body as fairly sharp, fairly angular, with bone and muscle defining its shape to me rather than breasts or hips. In my self-image, I am never soft (even when I am).

I can do slouchy as well:

Even though this cashmere sweater by Protagonist is fairly soft, it has enough weight to create its own shape, with my body maintaining its separate distinct identity  underneath. The skirt is a nice counterpoint in another substantial knit (merino wool, Iris&Ink). Proenza Schouler boots work here, I think, instead of more expected pumps. They feel more grounded against the shades of white, heavy and flat.

And finally, here's the Lara Khoury top: it is oversized and yet drapes close to my body, neither following its shape precisely as a tailored fit would nor making a shell for it. Instead, it imposes its softness over my contour, and I suspect that this is why it felt so alien at first. 

(I'm wearing Lara Khoury blouse with Isabel Marant pants and Carin Wester shoes.)

I love it, and it does something different from my usual clothes. I wanted to try something  new but didn't expect the novelty to be so conceptual, so dizzying at first. This single piece made me realize that even though I think of dressing in terms of silhouettes,  I have failed to recognize the importance I've assigned to angularity and stiff shapes, basing my entire wardrobe on it. Even the strictly feminine pieces I wear tend to be sharp (such as high heels in the otherwise masculine look) rather than floppy and soft. But now I think I  am ready to play a bit with softer versions of femininity.

Inaisce and Things That Matter

So let's talk about what matters in fashion. It will of course be different things for everyone, but to me it's the following: beauty, functionality, imagination, ethics, fair labor, natural textiles and fibers. Not in that order.

As I get older, I find that I rarely get tempted by famous brands and almost never by fast fashion. I want fewer things, but I want them to be exceptional. And I do like meeting people who make these exceptional clothes. 

This is all to say that I was slow in finding INAISCE but once I did I fell in love: the subdued palette of charcoal greys, black and whisper-whites, the nubby wools, the cuts that are tailored and relaxed, luxe yet austere, spoke to me on the emotional, aesthetic, and tactile levels. The fact that the clothes are made in NYC from luxurious fabrics from Italy and Japan locked me into the obsession mode: I had to see these clothes in person; and I had to meet the person who made them.

Lucky for me, Jona Sees - the designer and mastermind of Inaisce - was kind and available. His atelier space is located in a renovated church building in Brooklyn, and it is gorgeous: hardwood floors and wooden beams, soft light, the smell of clean pine... I mean, perfection. And this is before I even saw the clothes! 

Most recent collection is a great amalgamation of past and new silhouettes and fabrications - cozy knits and structured jackets and pants in textured wools and high-tech cupro, gorgeous capes... I could go on. The past collections were also there, spread throughout the closets. It was basically a fairyland. If there was Narnia in one of those closets, I would not go and stay with the leather skirts and swishy woolen dresses.

Anyway, see for yourself! 

And what of Jona? It is always a pleasure meeting a creative mind; sense of humor is a bonus, as well as a warm personality. I also appreciate the designers who wear their own clothes. Jona is pretty far from a typical fashion person, but similar to my favorite designers: passion and conviction and curiosity about the world is something they all have in common. They also design for themselves, which I think is important: most of my favorite designers are women for that reason. They design with bodies and bra straps and humans sitting down in mind. Male designers that I do like usually skew unisex (JW Anderson, Haider Ackerman). Jona ' s clothes are definitely in this category.

He also has an almost Zoran - like understanding of fabrics: good textile speaks for itself, something I appreciate greatly. I saw the same understanding in Izumi Hongo of VanHongo, Titania Inglis, Daria Razumikhina, Kate Wendelborn of Protagonist, Lilia Litkovskaya. It is not coincidental then that all of these designers choose mostly natural fibers, ethically made textiles. I see a theme developing.

So yes, I bought a gorgeous piece from a previous collection (grey wool dress - sleeveless jacket) and pre-ordered another. Here're some pics of my new acquisition, worn with VanHongo velvet pants and basic black turtleneck. I tried for a few different angles to show the geometric complexity of the cut that results in a beautifully streamlined silhouette. Basically, magic!

It is always exciting for me to find another clothing brand I love; it is doubly so when it embodies all the things that matter in fashion so well.