No one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech asshole, says Shannon, a character in Yesteryear, the buzzy new novel about a tradwife influencer by Caro Claire Burke.
Brittany Antoinette Wilson's dad has been a collector for over 30 years, starting with comics and expanding to baseball caps and sneakers. His sneaker collection, now around 500 pairs, reflects his passion for fashion and appearance.
Embroidery is a historic mainstay of traditional clothing in Asia or the Middle East, as well as Western Haute Couture, but it is increasingly present in Paris, Milan or New York on modern men's shirts, bomber jackets or blazers. Designers at Dior, Dolce Gabbana, Kenzo or Gucci have adopted it in recent runway shows, while Louis Vuitton's celebrity rapper-designer Pharell Williams dedicated his entire June collection to India after visiting the country.
Travelling for art can be incredibly virtuous and culturally rewarding, like collecting souvenirs for your eyes (and from the post card rail in the gift shop). Remembering to research what is on before I book flights is a lesson I learnt all too well after I missed the Metropolitan Museum's fashion exhibition in 2016 by one day. As a fashion obsessed 20 something, I did not take this well and have since improved my itinerary planning and exhibition calendar checking.
In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed.
The end of the show did not mark the end of the trip. Back at the Le Grand Bellevue the group divided between fireside hot chocolates and the hotel's spa. The hotel's Le Grand Spa is over 3,000 square metres and has eight different types of saunas, several ice showers, foot baths and an outdoor bubble pool (named thus as it's bigger than your standard jacuzzi).