hot people eat...and cook apperently

plus fashion week as an outsider and how many brand newsstands is too many newsstands

Having recently come into a lot of free time (I’ve updated my website and am open to freelance projects and brand marketing roles!) and done a lot of thinking about what’s next (I might have looked at film schools), I’ve been also diving head first into a lot of new stuff. So, I thought this week I could try out this thing where instead of letting all that marinate in my head and my notes app for weeks, I would share a couple of half-baked mini-essays on extremely important time-sensitive topics, like hot people eat and brand newsstands, with you today. Enjoy!

Hot people eat…and cook apparently.

It’s the summer of chefs for me. I am subletting an apartment from a chef with a chef’s kitchen, fig vinegar and gluten free flour. There is a restaurant in my building and it seems like the restaurant week is everlasting in NYC’s Little Italy.

I’ve never really been a Bon Appetit type of girl. My mom is the one who is into and really good at cooking. She writes down recipes on random pieces of paper, follows a bunch of food bloggers, and interrogates farmers at the market about how they grow produce. In my mind, all food bloggers and home chefs look like my mom - homy beautiful women making food for their loved ones - the Martha Stewart type.

Not to take points away from Martha Stewart (she is a badass), but I’ve recently discovered that you can make videos about spinach dips and also be hot. Not farmer hot, Dior gifting list hot, or all expenses paid influencer trip hot but editorial photoshoot hot and runway model hot. Look, I know Antoni Porowski is literally right there but does he even post food anymore?

I read Highsnobiety’s cover story about Pierce Abernathy - a 29-year-old content creator, foodie, and Troye Sivan’s public crush - and I have been coming across IG accounts, like Gabbriette’s, where appetizing pictures of food and recipes are competing for attention with high fashion photoshoots and runway pics ever since. The reason why I’m so baffled by and obsessed with these people is because well…high fashion and butter have a long history of not going together. I am used to the smoothie for breakfast and chicken and veggies for dinner model diet, and Bella Hadid occasionally dropping the fact that she actually loves pizza. Gabbriette’s donuts may be grain free but everything she cooks, just like her, looks elevated and has a little caviar on it.

Brands are eating this up as well - instead of simply starring hot social media people in their content which has gotten boring, they get to do fun things, like host specially curated dinners and shoot avant-garde cooking videos. It’s cool to be hot but in today’s oversaturated influencer economy it’s even cooler if you are hot and have a hobby. It’s also refreshing to see content creators care about something more than the likes and comments they get.

Anyways, I’ve been going to the farmer’s market, paying attention to the food and wine section at the bookstore, and finally came around to watching season 2 of The Bear (because of Ayo Edebiri, divorced Jeremy Allen White has nothing to do with this).

Has it always been this hard to have your own opinions?

I am staying in SoHo which means I found myself right in the middle of this past NYFW. Every day on my morning coffee stroll, I’d pass by girls giggling as they change into a different outfit in the streets for a photo (cute) and girls taking up the whole sidewalk during lunch time for a Miu Miu fit pic (slightly annoying). After a couple of years in NYC, this time around I’ve been really trying to keep up with what’s going on. One of the most anticipated shows this season was Helmut Lang as they just appointed a new creative director Peter Do. I learned about Peter and the news earlier this summer but I didn’t know how big of a deal Helmut Lang is to fashion and New York until after the show. It seemed like every single reporter I follow was there based on my IG feed, so I was really curious to read the reviews. At first, it seemed like everyone loved it - the taxi and seatbelt symbolism, Ocean Vuong’s poems, and Peter hugging his mom at the end of the show. The reviews felt hopeful, everyone seemed to be touched and proclaimed Peter “a new fashion star”. And then hours later the more skeptical reviews started to roll out and all I could see on Twitter was “did they really just put a Vietnamese poem on a white shirt?”.

It’s quite an experience to try and learn about something new in a world where we are bombarded with opinions, criticism, and social media trends. It’s natural to look to people who you think have deeper understanding of something you are new to as a radar for opinions because you don’t have enough context to form your own just yet. But there are so many opinions out there - subjective, objective, conservative, and deeply uninformed but loud - and so many things that aren’t said out loud that sometimes I feel like a kid in the coming of age movie that somehow made it to the popular kid’s house party and is afraid to say anything that will reveal they aren’t cool enough to be there. Out of all possible interests too - to me, fashion feels like the one that’s interconnected with how we move and present ourselves in the world the most. No one knows what books are on your shelf or what song are in your playlist within the first seconds of meeting you but they see what you are wearing. When you buy clothes, you buy into brands, silhouettes, and stereotypes and assumptions connected to them, so the stakes for having opinions and making personal choices can feel pretty high. Other than that, I thought it was funny that Soho Bloomingdale's pulled Helmut Lang onto the first floor even though it’s the pre-Peter pieces that everyone seems to agree are not it. Hype is hype.

It’s also been especially interesting to see people who came up outside of the fashion world but are dipping their toes into it, like influencers and young tv and movie stars, these past few weeks. It’s been also interesting to see which influencers and young celebrities fashion brands choose to be associated with. Why was Chris Briney at Target fashion x Rowing Blazers event but the only picture that made it on his feed was from Hermes? How much were Victoria Secret’s fashion week checks? What’s the difference between how the industry sees Emma Chamberlain and Alix Earle, and why is one of them hosting the Met two years in a row and the other one is posting pictures from Chanel’s Williamsburg diner and getting hate comments? Do high fashion brands not approach Alix? Why is her team letting her take what feels like every brand deal with a big check under the sun? I am fascinated by how these people make a transition from working with American Eagle and Amazon to working with Coach, Dior and Hermes. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in these industry conversations.

How many brand newsstands is too many newsstands?

Fashion week is also a huge week for brands, many of which don’t even have anything to do with fashion. They are sending out PR packages, hosting events, and taking over high traffic areas to get exposure among flown in guests. It’s like you have to plan posts for Christmas, Women’s Day and fashion week.

There were not one, not two but three brands who worked with Iconic Magazines this fall: Nike x Homme Girl distributing their zine, Bloom turning Lafayette’s IM location into a popup market, and Tezza App decking out IM Mulberry Street location in their magazine. I never got to see inside the Tezza magazine despite walking but the Mulberry location many times, but I did pick up a copy of the Homme Girl x Nike zine just to find some really odd copy and watched the Lafayette location get repainted from green back into white in pouring rain. Look, making something physical, especially a newspaper, a zine, or a magazine, is every brand marketer’s rite of passage but there are more tasteful and meaningful ways to do so - with content that doesn’t feel like a hand out booklet with your brand’s name on it.