Remember when all the best television shows of the ‘90s and ‘00s would have an L.A. arc where, for a few episodes, the cast would travel across the country and everything would be magically dreamlike and miraculously different? There was the ep of The Nanny where Fran goes house hunting and almost buys Beverly Hillbillies star Donna Douglas’s house, the time Jerry and George try to track down Kramer, who has become prime suspect in a serial killer investigation on Seinfeld, and then of course there were the L.A. episodes of Sex and the City, two of the best of the entire series, in which the gals are seduced - and ultimately repelled by a city of dildo models, fake Fendis and tit soup. Today I come to you just having returned from the hotel they stayed in, which used to be The Standard, and just reopened as the Public West Hollywood. More on that later this week, but safe to say my October moodboard is just as weird and wonderful and at times bad as those eps.

What follows is part nostalgia trend report, part random musings, and part city guide despite me acting like this for most of my trip.

1. Planes for dogs are the new Angel Air.

Did you know there are airplanes just for d-o-double-gs? Well, now you do. In one of the more ridiculous experiences of my life, I flew cross-country with Maggie, the angel bulldog I’d been watching for two months. She was on her way to Australia to reunite with her daddies, Cliff and Leszek, who’d recently moved down unda. Our leg of the journey was aboard something called RetrieveAir, a charter plane that made stops in New York, Atlanta, Denver, L.A. and later Seattle, flying its babies across the country like they were Victoria’s Secret Angels on Angel Air in the year 2000.

It was adorable and totally absurd, and there were so many treats I’m surprised the dogs didn’t take over the plane in a salt-fueled coup. But we survived, and 12 hours later, we made it to Cali with stories to tell and new pals to piss on sidewalks with.

2. Clowning is in.

This summer, at Mother Disco at Three Dollar Bill in Bushwick, I took a wrong turn looking for the bathroom and wound up in a sea of clown pirates. I filed it away as a one-off fever dream until clowns kept coming up on my trip to L.A. Apparently Connor Storrie, of nakie Heated Rivalry fame, is one of ’em and had a hand in making it cool. I asked if we were talking honk-honk clowning. Turns out it’s more about the ancient art of playing the fool in discordant times.

There was plenty of that at the quite epic Eckhaus Latta/Public West Hollywood Halloween party, where Kate Berlant (dressed as a pharmacy receipt) and John Early (a salami) hosted a costume contest. The contestants included a drag Carrie Bradshaw in her “Le French Fry” era, a maid serving c*nt, and the woman above who is giving mystical oompa loompa ape. When I asked her what she was, she said, “I dunno.” Diva.

If you’re so inclined, the Elysian Theater teaches clowning, and then there’s always Jumbo’s Clown Room, which is a whole different kind of clowning. Meanwhile, I’d really like to meet another clown soon, if only so I can say this.

3. Rattails have made an inexplicable comeback.

According to my raver cousin, this is old news, but I was shaken to my core to see three men and one dog with teeny little braids sprouting from their heads in L.A.’s Echo Park neighbourhood. I used to carpool with a boy who had a mullet’s little brother and even then, it felt crazy to me. We were already years removed from Jordan Knight’s NKOTB rattail heyday. Apparently we have the disgusting Tedros from the 2023 flop The Idol to thank for its return.

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4. Celebrity auctions are the height of glamour even when they’re not.

The amount of times Pee-wee Herman gets brought up in this Substack is coming as a shock even to me (exhibit A and B), but hey, the heart wants what the heart wants. I’ve participated in a few celebrity auctions in the past and I always get outbid pretty immediately on things I have no business bidding on in the first place, like one of Elizabeth Taylor’s caftans and Leonard Cohen’s topless vacation photos, but I’ve never witnessed one IRL. Lucky for me, Julien’s was doing Pee-Wee a.k.a. Paul Rubens’ personal collection of artifacts while I was in town and so obviously I went!

The auction itself was at The Groundlings, a theatre and school where the character of Pee-wee first originated in the late ‘70s. The auction scene itself was kind of underwhelming - it wasn’t super busy and the paddles were actually just pieces of paper, but it was a thrill to hear the auctioneer, in perfect auction chant, rhyme off the details of this Elvis lamp and signed yearbooks before some buyer scooped ‘em for thousands.

A fabulously cheeky Memphis pop art lamp from the ‘80s.

5. L.A. furniture and decor vintage remain supreme.

If you’re not already on estate sales, what are you doing with your life? I love to hit them when I’m in L.A., and usually follow the guidance of Quinn Fiona Garvey who shares the best ones on a weekly basis. We got lunch and we’re going to dream up a collab together, but meanwhile check out her Substack for great guides.

More to come on the L.A. vintage scene generally, but one of my fav stops this trip was to the Pasadena Antiques Centre, specifically a booth called Object Lesson, which had so many incredible ‘80s pieces I wished I could fit in my suitcase like the peen lamp above.

A few last random observations:

1. Barney’s Beanery, a legendary ‘70s hangout constantly referenced by Eve Babitz and where Jim Morrison once apparently peed on the bar, has an extremely uggo looking LAX outpost complete with hideous green signage. I also had no idea that it’s been reprised as a Gen Z hotspot? I guess we’re not in Eve’s Hollywood anymore.

2. The little robot delivery carts roaming around the sidewalks are L.A. are equal parts cute and disconcerting. I stopped to photograph one coming my way on Melrose, and could not believe its name was… Randi!

2. I had dinner with my pal Jocelyn Silver, who grew up in San Diego with Billy Evans, husb to Elizabeth Holmes and the subject of the only film anyone is talking about, You Can See Everything. (I saw it after hitting the Cheesecake Factory at the Americana. Highly recommend.) They were friendly growing up and even did a history competition together and now I cannot stop picturing this scene god help me. These days, Jocelyn catches up with Billy via his AMAs on X.

3. Everyone likes to hate on touristy activities when you’re a local, but I thank my lucky stars that I was able to hike up to the Griffith Park Observatory for the first time in ages with my friend Tyler just as this full moon in Taurus was rising over the San Gabriel Mountains. Next time you’re somewhere you really wanna be, have no shame about doing the things you really wanna do.

4. On that note, the brand new spaceshippy Lucas Museum is worth checking out if you love the idea of pulp, comics, costume and VFX being treated as high art.

Does anyone remember the high school yearbook “last will and testaments,” where you’d bequeath your fellow students something in a fictitious will? Anyways, the gift from my fellow graduating class was a “sense of style,” which I didn’t realize until years later was a diss. So nasty and so rude, but also… looking back at what I was wearing at the time, as a burgeoning fashion icon with hideously bad missteps, I cannot blame them.

Anything to distinguish myself from the UGG-wearing masses was the goal, with a vision somewhere between Season 5 Carrie Bradshaw and Gwen Stefani circa her first solo album. The execution went something like leg warmers made of chopped-up sweater sleeves with pinned-on army patches, a woven red fedora (my first vintage purchase ever) and a bejewelled Gap denim midi skirt.

My style “becoming” was full of wrong and right turns (including getting sucked into the tyranny of Phoebe Philo-era Céline, which, while extremely chic, is not me) until around 29, when I rewatched Showgirls for the first time since seeing it illicitly in my friend’s basement on VHS in the ’90s, and everything changed. Hardcore ’90s hoochie in sheer slip dresses, XL hoops, and animal print was the wave I’d ride for the next decade.

Dressing like I live in Miami has been so fun, except for the fact that it can’t be a full-time gig. Come summer, my closet is chock-full of sheer, barely-there, and bright things that feel right for any and all occasions. When the weather turns, though, I stare blankly into my closet before choosing a combination that almost never feels like the full expression of me. The ultra-chic fall women everyone admires - CBK in a sensible trench, Jlaw in The Row - just aren’t my vibe. I also generally hate pants, which are required for bum bum covering. Add to that a glut of freebies from brands that, while lovely, have pushed my fall style into a more conservative direction of button-downs and jeans that I reluctantly wear. When it gets really cold, my laziness crystallizes into what I call the Winter Urchin (leggings, big sweaters), a far cry from my ideal, the Summer Slut.

Relocating to New York, where people look good just to walk the dog, has been the perfect opportunity to rethink what happens when the weather gets cold. So has The RealReal’s new book, Real Style: The RealReal Guide to Dressing and Expressing Yourself Through Style (available through TRR or wherever you buy books!), released this week by Abrams Books, which might be the coolest version of a self-help book ever to exist.

Unlike the classic magazine guide promising that buying X, Y, and Z will transform you into some idealized version of yourself, Real Style asks you to look inward. There are personality quizzes a la Cosmo in 1997, except instead of finding out if you’re sex goddess at the age of 12, they encourage you to look inward to understand how your formative influences, your feelings about your body, and even your astrology plays a role. There’s also plenty of practical advice for developing a relationship with your wardrobe beyond what the algo spits out. For Kristen Naiman, The RealReal’s Chief Brand Officer and one of the minds behind the book, the relentless scroll makes this an especially good time to tune into your own taste: “Knowing what you like and why you like it,” she says, and “being both, like, open minded and open hearted about what you’re looking for, but from a place of really knowing who you are and what you’re all about.”

What follows is a condensed version of our yenta fest, edited for clarity.

The book is filled with incredibly fun personality quizzes that feel so catnippy and retro, but some of the methodologies are surprisingly deep. It almost reminds me of therapy, looking at your formative influences and the things you absorbed growing up. Was that intentional?

I think that style should be fun. It should be joyous, it should be playful, and what level of depth and sort of soul searching and soul mining you decide to apply to your relationship with your own style is, I think, entirely up to the person.

So to me, both can be true and all are valid. We’ve been joking that it’s The Artist’s Way for style.

For me, style is a language, and it’s a way that we communicate, and it’s a nonverbal cue about how both we feel about ourselves and how we want to be seen in the world. I go back to it over and over again as a way to learn about myself.

Given that Capsule 98 was born from my childhood time capsule, I always love asking people about their formative objects. Are there things you’ve kept that tell the story of your life?

I have a personal writing project that I’ve been doing for a long time, where I picked 15 people in my life, and I chose an object for each of them that somehow played a part in our story.

So for my mom, it was this vintage Ralph Lauren Navajo shawl collar sweater that I begged her to buy me at Loman’s when I was 16. And still wear it now. It’s moth ridden and gross, and I garden in it, and it’s a disaster, but it’s a great metaphor for us.

I grew up in a Jewish family in a super WASPy place. I was really aware of the way that my parents used clothes and aesthetics in general to cue belonging, but they were doing it from a place of really studying it from the outside.

How do these objects show up in our stories, and what do they mean to us? Whether we keep them or not, you know?

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I have a story attached to practically everything I own, and lately I’ve been rediscovering clothes I saved years ago that suddenly feel relevant again. Where’s the balance between holding onto things and knowing when to let them go?

I used to really love to wear super short skirts. I liked my legs, I felt like that was a good silhouette for me. And now I don’t feel like super short skirts suit me, even if I could pull them off. It’s not the woman I feel like I am right this very second, the moment in my life that I’m in, the way I want to show up in the world.

And so I can let that thing go and think to myself, I hope somebody has the time of their life in that dress.

I have a navy blue Junya Watanabe cape that was the first really fancy thing I ever bought at the Bon Marché when I was first going to Paris for work. And I go five, ten years without wearing that thing, but it’s a navy blue Junya Watanabe cape, and it means something to me, and I’m not gonna sell it.

The advice I would give is, there are things that are time and moment in your life specific, milestone specific, period of your life specific. And then there are things that transcend time and place, but may come in and out of favour.

But I think trying to look at it through that lens, like, what are the things that you feel like still feel like you, but don’t feel like this moment, versus the things that no longer feel like you?

You also mentioned that you’ve actually rebought things you’ve sold, which I find fascinating as someone who gets very sentimental about objects.

I love Dries [Van Noten]. He’s one of my all-time favourite designers. And I had this kind of stripy, boat-necky, multicoloured top, and I wore it for a while and I felt done with it. And then a couple years later, I was like, “Oh, I wish I had that top.” And I went on The RealReal, and I found not only the top but the skirt that went with it.

I bought them together, I wore them for another couple years. I felt finished with it again, and I resold it for a lot more money as a suit. Holding stuff is holding energy. So you let the energy go out and you let it come back in.

The RealReal speaks to a pretty fashion-savvy audience, people who already know their designers and have a strong sense of taste. Is this book for them, or for people who feel like fashion isn’t really their thing?

I don’t subscribe to the idea that people either have it or they don’t. They either have good style or they don’t have good style. I think we all show up every day and have to put clothes on. And the choices we make are a communication we have to the world before we’ve ever even opened our mouths.

Having a relationship with your style is having a relationship with yourself, and it’s a practice, and it’s something that you get better with and develop more and more as you do it. Your relationship with your own personal style, and having good, rich style, and a good relationship with it, isn’t that contingent on being able to consume what you’re being told to consume.

And then for those who have a distinct personal style, how might you evolve when you almost feel trapped by it?

When you are struggling, go back to the source. What are the other things that I always love? Certain things flex at different moments as more influential than others.

And then the other thing that I think is really important is this idea of style as a practice.

What does that actually look like?

One of the other things I love in the book, and this is in the shopping section, is this idea of, like, go on a no-buying shopping trip.

I’m gonna walk into somewhere that I think makes beautiful pants and I’m not actually gonna buy anything. I’m gonna try on like 10 pairs of pants in the dressing room. And just look. I’m just gonna notice, you know?

Another thing is this practice of being out in the world and noticing, like, who do you notice and think, wow, they are really stylish? And how do you pause for a minute? Be like, why do I think that?

Finally, my biggest challenge is winter. I call it Summer Slut, Winter Urchin: I go from sheer dresses and barely-there clothes to sweatpants and sweaters that don’t feel like me. Any advice for making the latter feel more like the former?

I’ve started playing with this thing of wearing my sweatpants with a velvet loafer and styling it. Big earrings and being like, it looks kind of great, you know? So rather than fighting it, you’re like, how do you lean into it?

Stop the presses, Capsule 98’s erotic thriller guide is back! I’m tickled by how much you little pervs loved part one. Losing yourself in a world of intrigue, satin and lust feels right in any season, but especially the colder months, so what better time for part two? This will probably become a three or four parter, so hit subscribe if you haven’t already.

Today’s grouping is really focused on wickedly talented femme fatales á la MVP of the genre, Sharon Stone, but I’m also releasing this in celebration of erotic thriller co-MVP Michael Douglas’s just-published autobiography, One Helluva Ride, which I’m making my way through right now. I haven’t yet reached the parts where he talks about having an affair with Kathleen Turner (who makes an appearance below) or falling asleep with a coke straw up his nose. I reaaaally hope he revisits attributing his throat cancer to oral sex!

Without further ado, the deep cuts continue.

A Perfect Murder (1998)

One sentence synopsis: Michael Douglas plays another villainous Wall Street titan, Steven Taylor, who keeps Gwyneth Paltrow, as his turtlenecked trophy wife Emily, on a tight leash until he finds out that she’s having an affair with Viggo Mortensen as artist David Shaw and tries to blackmail him to kill her.

Watch for: So many Sex and the City actors in minor roles, like Steve (David Eigenberg) as one of Michael’s office boys and Seema (Sarita Choudhury) as Gwynie’s friend. Also, the delivery guy who tells Samantha she’s got a nice ass, the lesbian Miranda’s firm tries to set her up with in the first season, and more!

Body Heat (1981)

One(ish) sentence synopsis: Remember when everyone used to incessantly quote the “it’s the heat” scene from Portlandia? That’s the entire plot of this film, plus a lot of sweaty sex scenes between William Hurt as a questionably ethical lawyer, Ned Racine, and the stunning Kathleen Turner as the fabulously coiffed Matty Walker, who obviously wants him to kill her husband.

Watch for: Everyone is so sweaty for the entirety of this film that I really wonder if the hair and makeup department were working overtime with Crisco or Vaseline or whatever else would give the sheen. In one scene, a too-young relative of Kathleen’s character catches her mid blowie, and later when the girl is called into the police office for questioning after the husband invariably winds up dead, she identifies Hurt’s character because he has “very greasy hair.” Also, a very young Ted Danson is in this and he has BROWN hair. So is Mickey Rourke in apparently what was his breakthrough role.

*You’re in luck because the full thing is on YouTube!

Diabolique (1996)

One sentence synopsis: In this very, very bad (but in a way that means you must watch) remake of the scandalous 1955 French original, Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani play Nicole and Mia, the mistress and wife of a poisonous headmaster played by Chazz Palminteri. They team up to murder him, and things go awry, obvi.

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Watch for: Sharon’s neo Hitchcock fashions in this are everything I’ve ever dreamed of - leopard print sweater sets, transparent cherry red pantyhose, oversized black sunnies, blocky ‘90s skirt suits when she’s trying to be serious… looks that could literally kill (me)!

Side note, Roger Ebert’s original review of this is so funny: “Film lovers should study the two “Diaboliques” side by side, in order to see how the Hollywood assembly line trashed its treasure from the past.”

The Last Seduction (1994)

One(ish) sentence synopsis: Linda Fiorentino plays Bridget Gregory, a scammer who seduces a series of losers using her spectacular sex appeal after ditching her husband (Bill Pullman) with the money from his drug deal. Later, she tries to use her last seduction for murder.

Watch for: Linda’s performance in scenes like this won her an Indie spirit and garnered much praise for her ability to pull off a slut with no conscience and a dream mop of femme fatale hair.

Bound (1996)

One(ish) sentence synopsis: Bound has developed a major cult following for the luscious lesbian love story at the centre of its mafia double cross plotline whereby RHOBH extraordinaire Jennifer Tilly (Violet) and queen icon legend of my heart and soul Gina Gershon (Corky, lol) plan to outwit Jennifer’s mobster husband (Ralph from The Sopranos!) for his life and all of his cash.

Watch for: I would watch these two do anything in any era, but especially become queer sex symbols in the ‘90s while wearing slip dresses and Perfectos. Also, important to note that Bound was written and directed by Lily and Lana Wachowski, the trailblazing trans sisters who also helmed The Matrix.

Ok, onto the latest pull from my alarmingly large collection of coffee table books, which is currently hovering just over the 100 mark (actually when I say it like that, it seems I could stand for more…). I’m sharing my favourites as a friendly reminder to all of us that the best inspo is often found offline and in physical media, but also because this is giving some purpose to my addiction. Otherwise, I bring these babies home, add them to one of my mammoth stacks (this one is from my old Toronto apartment. I used to light my menorah on top of it for Chanukah which was as dangerous as it was spellbinding) and then kind of forget to open them for a few weeks.

The Isaac Mizrahi Pictures (New York City 1989–93) is permanently displayed on my coffee table for obvious reasons: it’s full of my exact preferred palette (pink, pastel, candy and bright, but also see-through), ’90s eleganza and Isaac, in all his curly-haired glory, flitting about his fittings with a sparkling energy you can practically feel off the page.

There’s no one like Isaac, the Yiddishe aesthete from New Yawk of my fantasies, the IRL counterpart to the flashy girl from Flushing, and as I mentioned in last week’s roundup, I was so, so lucky to be in his presence at The RealReal’s screening of the remastered Unzipped. I have obviously been thinking of nothing but him ever since.

The Isaac Mizrahi Pictures were shot by Nick Waplington, the British photographer, who, via his friendship with Richard Avedon (!) was introduced to Isaac, who at the time was a rising star on the New York scene. By day, Waplington would photograph the dart breaks, the coifs, the Supers, the fittings, and the truly delectable vibes. By night, he’d go fly-on-the-wall style at Save the Robots and The Sound Factory, party spots that peaked during the Club Kid era (pretty sure Michael Alig is the one in the apron below?).

“The studio had a rhythm. Things would start slow in the morning – late morning. There’d be music – Doris Day instrumentals – so Isaac could sing the Doris Day parts, and his assistant would sing the male parts. Sometimes it would be classical music. It was quite something. Then things would wrap up around eight or nine in the evening. That was when the second part of the day started for me – I’d go out clubbing and take pictures. From Wednesday to Sunday, I’d be out every night.

- Waplington on the images, via Another Magazine.

The images captured here, partly in hopes of making one into an ad, which he did for Bergdorf Goodman in 1991, are precursors to Waplington’s other work behind the scenes at some of fashion’s most revered ateliers, and some of nightlife’s most delicious dens of iniquity. (As an aside, I just filed a story for ELLE Canada about the death of partying, so these are really hitting the spot.)

The juxtapositional magic speaks for itself, so I’m actually just going to leave you with all my scans. Why don’t YOU tell me what the snaps evoke in you?

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Thought this entry would be about the John Cassavetes film starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk? You thought wrong… sort of. This one’s not about a fictional crazy woman, it’s about a real one: me!

Weaning off SSRIs is not for the faint of heart, which means that my September moodboard leans toward someone in a fugue state or on a cocktail of Seconals, Nembutals or other glamorous numbing agents of days gone by. Sharon Tate’s final scene in Valley of the Dolls Allison drinking her tears in Cry-Baby - these are just a few of the refs that made three unsuccessful weeks on antibiotics trying to cure my chronic sinus issues, and a lot on the couch with Maggie, the bulldog I’ve been babysitting for months, seem chic.

There’s glamour in losing your mind, as long as you look good doing it - just take a gander at Terry O’Connor’s IG stories lately. Here’s a deranged collection of what I experienced, saw, watched and bought (still, there’s always that) that made the month feel worthwhile.

1. I rewatched Mad Men

September’s blueprint for a loopy retro damsel was surely rooted in my rewatch of Mad Men, which I hadn’t seen since it was on TV. There’s Betty in her nightie, smoking a ciggie as she hunts down her neighbours birds with a shotgun, Roger’s second wife, Jane, on an LSD trip accidentally talking herself into a divorce, and then of course there’s Don, the ultimate wounded bird, making mess upon mess out of his life because he can’t get over that he grew up in a whorehouse (jkjklol).

Upon second watch, I still loved flawed, flippant Pete the most, I newly discovered my crush on Stan Rizzo, and really got a kick out of everyone just telling each other to “go lay down” when they got too worked up instead of actually working through any problems using words.

2. I went to Charli XCX’s “Music, Fashion, Film” show

I almost didn’t make it to the Charli show at Barclays - I had been scheduled for a work trip to L.A. and sold my tickets to the show, only for the trip to be cancelled at the last minute. Thank god I was able to rebuy and witness another epic night with the coolest woman on earth. Last tour, I lost my hoop earrings from hairography-ing too hard. This time, I was ill for a week after taking a bite of mushroom chocolate and drinking Diet Pepsi. No one - in any form - lasts forever, is what Charli was trying to tell me.

3. I got Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger

I’ve been searching forever for a vintage copy of counterculture film king Kenneth Anger’s legendary bible of falsehoods.

The book is full of urban legends, and in it, the filmmaker alleges that Clara Bow had sex with the entire USC football team, that Rudolph Valentino’s marriages were of the lavender variety, Jayne Mansfield was cursed by the Church of Satan, amongst other things. Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast did two whole seasons fact checking Anger’s claims, which I highly recco as a compendium to the hard copy.

Babylon is not the kind of thing you want to buy off Amazon, so I was tickled to find it care of Geoff Snack. What was even better was that I found the name of its original owner inside, and turns out it belonged to Ann Eugenia Volkes, a pioneering feminist video artist, who passed away a few years ago. Kismet!

Side note, I was today years old when I learned that Hollywood Babylon was made into a ‘90s TV show starring Tony Curtis as narrator and a bunch of one hit wonders reenacting the supposed scenarios.

4. Spring 2027 reminded me of Louis Vuitton Spring 2008

Remember Louis Vuitton’s collab with Richard Prince for Spring 2008? Organza nurse fits, old-timey nurse hats, and bags featuring Prince’s “Man Crazy” jokes that went something like:

“Every time I meet a girl who can cook like my Mother… She looks like my Father.”

“My wife went to the beauty shop and got a mud pack. For two days she looked beautiful. Then the mud fell off.”

Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, but I feel like I saw chic Nurse Ratched re-emerge at Dries Van Noten, where creative director Julian Klausner took inspiration from Hollywood starlets and their in-between moments. At Prada, which I already discussed last week, those same transparent layers felt, to me, like ways to keep your femme caged. At Ferragamo, the suggestion was more literal: lots of gorgeous latex. At August Barron, she was a perfectly unhinged starlet in the style of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.

5. Found Edie Sedgwick on Merv Griffith

I recently came across this clip of Edie and Andy on the Merv Griffith show in 1965 and it’s really so lovely to be able to see the original poor little rich girl’s “amphetamines and her pearls” in action.

6. Skirt suits and historical empties

I’ve become extremely obsessed with accounts like @vintage_dusties and, of course, Erin Parsons, who just launched The Makeup Archive. They allow you to fade off into a world of old glamour, where lead, arsenic and mercury could poison you but, more importantly, make you beautiful. In the same spirit, I’ve been thinking about skirt suits: also outmoded, considerably less lethal. They’re not exactly conducive to my everyday life in 2026, but could I become someone who wears one in my new era of old-timey woman on the edge?

7. I witnessed Isaac Mizrahi at Film Forum

I was so BLESSED to be invited to The RealReal’s screening of the remastered, rereleased Unzipped documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, with the icon himself in presence. The 1995 film is one of my all-time fave and you must see it if you care a lick about the ‘90s, about fashion, about joie de vivre etc. I’m going to do a whole post on him soon because I want to share a really incredible photo book I have of his work, but for now I’ll leave you with my fav line of his from after the screening, which was that today when he sees someone looking crazy and making every fashion faux pas imaginable, he thinks, “Stylish!”

Twenty years ago this week, I was screaming crying throwing up in the computer lab of Ryerson (now TMU) School of Fashion, furiously clicking through images of the turbaned flapper girls with no bottoms at Prada Spring 2007 on Style.com. That season, there was no time for elaborate skirts. It was puss out to the wind simply because, as Miuccia Prada told Sarah Mower, “I just didn’t like anything I did below the waist.”

In the interview after the show, she seemed to resist any attempt to overintellectualize the missing bottoms. Which is funny, because around the same time she had a travelling exhibition and book, Waist Down, devoted entirely to the concept of a Prada skirt. The hits were all there: the Spring 2000 lipstick skirt Charlotte wore when she fell into Trey’s arms on Sex and the City, Spring 2005’s highly coveted feather pleats, and decades of evidence that Miuccia could fit an entire worldview below the waist.

“For me, a skirt is like a T-shirt, I put all my ideas for each collection and season there,” she told Ingrid Sischy on Charlie Rose in 2006. Twenty years later, she and Raf Simons have made the skirt the whole show. Prada Spring 2027, which showed Tuesday in Milan, offered every variation on a woman Miuccia might imagine: the housewife, the hot prof, the girl with the fuck-ass bob.

These days, Prada is the only show I make sure to watch live. I love that Miuccia can be v serious about clothes (and robots), but completely uninterested in explaining every decision. Mostly, I love how comfortable she seems with the perverse contradictions of being a woman. Case in point: a tiny-titted model clomping down the runway while Lords of Acid sang, “darling come here and fuck me in the ass.” Perverse!

I’m a skirt person myself. A few inches can take me from hooker to Orthodox Jew while the garment stays essentially the same. They also do fabulous things for my big-bootied bottom, which is one reason you’ll very rarely catch me in jeans. So, after the show, I went into my closet to see which of Miuccia’s skirt characters I could already play. Three outfits and one mid-shoot meltdown later, here’s what I found.

On the Prada Spring 2027 runway: A low slung red skirt with a lacey black bra and curved call-back pumps to Fall 2007.

From my closet: A Burberry satin quilted number that always felt more Prada to me, paired with a bra top from my friends Tania and Mona’s now-defunct but incredible Toronto line, Markoo. Vintage slingbacks I think I got at Martini Fashions.

The verdict: The runway version alludes to what might be under a sensible skirt suit after a long day, whilst mine is just slut at the ready (sorry mom). I’ve worn this lewk a lot, I must say.

On the Prada Spring 2027 runway: A gorgeously embroidered inset, a ragged blue sweater a la intellectual who is too busy to care.

From my closet: The blue and green embroidered top is actually an old fav mini dress from Opening Ceremony that has been recently introduced into my closet. Skirt is from J.W. Anderson’s first Uniqlo collab. Shoes are Maguire and so are they butterfly clips!

The verdict: Is this hot prof? Actually, is it anything? Quickly realizing why I’m not an outfit forward blogga…

On the Prada Spring 2027 runway: A tie dye effect (?) leather skirt suit.

From my closet: Vintage leather biker vest from Martini Fashions and a vintage Prince tennis skirt I got at Value Village probably in 2011. Shoes are a fabulous but painful pair of Yves Saint Laurent vintage slides I got at Manhattan Vintage last year.

The verdict: A combo that does not work in real life because of the weights of the garments, but works really well here in theory. Girl who doesn’t know whether she’s going to a drag race with cars or to watch Drag Race at a suburban bar.

Thus commences the experiment, but before I go, one more lewk I rocked at my local cafe yesterday for fun (skirt is vintage Prada from 2001, top is Cleo Camp!). Bye.

It’s impossible, in the year 2026, to put on a Hole track and not feel like it was written exactly for me, stomping through the New York subway on days when I’m particularly PISSED. Nothing releases the simmering rage quite like scream-singing “GO ON, TAKE EVERYTHING” into the hollow of a subway platform (in truth, “Violet” was written about Courtney Love’s ex, Billy Corgan, but it works). It’s so scorched earth, which is intermittently my vibe right now (my other one is faking it so real I am beyond fake).

When Hole released Live Through This in 1994, it was exactly the worst time - one week after the death of Courtney’s husband, grunge Jesus, Kurt Cobain, and two months before the fatal overdose of its bassist, Kristen Pfaff. And into the eye of that shitstorm walked Melissa Auf der Maur, a 22-year-old photographer fresh out of arts school in Montreal as the band’s new bassist. Two months later, she was performing in front of 65,000 fans at the UK’s Reading Festival - only her sixth performance ever.

Melissa’s five-year stint with Hole, followed by a year with The Smashing Pumpkins, is the stuff of legend: plucked from obscurity and thrust onto the world stage. But joining Hole was also a conscious move to put more women onstage in an overwhelmingly male rock scene - and she chronicled it all through more than 10,000 photographs. This was pre-digital, pre-iPhone: just rolls and rolls of film, developed on the road at one-hour photo labs around the world.

Melissa has been storing her enormous archive in Hudson, New York, where she lives. And for decades it sat there until she started excavating it all as a way to process the pain and glory of her Gen X becoming. The photos were the starting reference point for her memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, released earlier this year, her new release of old demos, Bass Womb Room: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings, and her coinciding photography book and exhibit, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, My ‘90s Rock Photographs.

I was sooo lucky to be home in Toronto for the opening last week and catch the immersive time capsule IRL. As a fierce documenter of the ’90s myself, I was particularly thrilled by the wall of candids featuring seemingly every important figure in ’90s pop culture: bad-girl, bleached-pixie-era Drew Barrymore, Chris Farley, Beck, Chloë Sevigny, Adam Yauch, my queen Gaby Hoffman and her onetime paramour Dave Grohl (that part’s in the book).

The morning after last week’s exhibit opening, I chatted with Melissa about it all. Here’s an abridged version of our conversation. Meanwhile, if you’re in Toronto, do check out the exhibit - it’s on until June of next year, so you’ve got time!

You’ve said that you ran from the 1990s for two decades before going back into your archives to create your memoir and photo book. Why were you running?

A lot of it is simple: it was a lot of extreme drama, pain, grief, death, [and] loss. Not just on a personal level, like my father’s death or all the addiction, but the loss of innocence of our music scene and the loss of analog culture. The glorious world I had in traveling the world and music and the power of connection with the audience and the legacy that now lives in my photos. It’s profound glory, but also tragedy on a personal, but also, I believe, generational level.

Like I said in the opening page of my memoir, this is a love letter to the last analog decade and the decade that defined me and my generation. I would never wish for another time to come into my womanhood. But it was very extreme because we witnessed a lot change and a lot be lost. And I think we live now, a quarter century later, in the proof that that was the tipping point, the turning of the page. Y2K, 9/11 - it changed from that moment on. And now we live in a new world.

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Has this moment been cathartic for you?

Oh, it most certainly is cathartic and outrageously visceral time travel. Like I’m right back there, you know? I’m shape-shifting, metamorphic, merging the past and present and future. It’s almost—it’s no less than a massive psychedelic trip.

Being in a corporate giant rock band with the pressures of that level of hit-making sabotaged my relationship to my own voice in music. Which is why, even with this incredible multimedia mania, it’s not just my book and the two books and the exhibit, but it’s also the four-track demos of my music, my home recordings. All of this is sort of reclaiming where I left off.

I loved discovering that photography was your first love. Since you were so deep in it at the time, did you sense that joining Hole would be history and do it for preservation? Or was it more, “I’m going on trips and this is fun for me”?

Oh, no. No, no. Nothing is light and casual for me. Nothing. It was capturing history, and it was a deep, deep spiritual relationship to my deepest inner voice and the young girl that I left back home. It was very intentional, deeply personal esoteric artistic practice and deeply aware cultural commentary, documentation that I knew we would need to unpack later to see what the relevance was.

I can relate to that so much. Capsule 98 started when I found my childhood time capsule and started posting the contents online. Even though I was young, I did have that thought of, “This is going to be important one day,” and documented my stuff for history. The difference is I wasn’t in Hole; I was a 13-year-old in Toronto. But it’s interesting to have a prescient vision that a lot of people don’t have.

My parents [journalist and politician, Nick Auf der Maur, and literary translator and dramaturg, Linda Gaboriau] were and are massive thinkers and journalists, and very engaged with their generation’s movements. It’s all in the act of how my parents lived their lives. That’s where I learned it. It wasn’t something I learned in school. It was something I watched my parents do, which was to devote themselves to be fully engaged with the avenue that they traveled in, the place they lived, the time that they lived and the culture that they lived.

You said that the ‘90s were the last analogue era, but also the last tactile one. Alongside your photos, there’s so much ephemera, from a Hole teddy bear to your Nokia from 1998, and the actual photo books you stored your pictures in. How do you document your life now?

Those photo albums were my art practice at the time. That’s how I practiced photography. I went from being a fine art photography student who worked in dark rooms and processed all my film and printed all of them and framed them and presented them in a fine art way. And then I joined a rock band and had no more access to the dark room.

So I had to shift my practice to a one-hour photo, snapshot medium, and then I would, on the road, pick up albums. All those albums that they reproduced there and that were showing in the [exhibition] case, those were my frozen-in-time art projects. That’s how I was making art on the road. I was also making letter packages, and basically my friends were getting photos, drawing, patchwork, kind of like mini zines. That’s just how I shifted from art school to on-the-road art.

Everything in the [exhibition] cases are literally my tools. My Dictaphone, where I would capture cool sounds or melodies or ideas I had that are featured in my four-track demos, was my daily sound device for creation. All of the cameras that are in the cases are the ones I documented all the shows with, and myself in hotel rooms. And then the photo albums were just a sample of how I created art at the time.

My photography practice stopped when film was harder and harder to process. I’m picking it back up now because of the exhibit, but you can’t buy film easily. You can’t process it easily. You have to ship things away. In terms of my practice now - I really have been working on this archive for five to 10 years: editing 15,000 photos down to 200.

That must have been a fun process.

Fun, yes. Harder, though, strangely, than I thought, and harder than writing my memoir. It was easier for me to write a 450-page memoir than it was for me to edit those photos down, to be very honest. It was actually quite difficult. And I’m still kind of dubious that we made the right decisions. It’s too much. It’s too much to actually whittle down to one essence.

My next project in my mind is: how do I have my archive, which is still over 10,000 [photos], available for some other kinds of interactions and ways of working with them? Not just blown up and selected on walls. I think the archive can have its own life of its own, maybe with other people. I don’t know.

Is there part of the exhibition and/or photo book that resonates most to you?

The last part of the book and the last part of the exhibit is an ode to the crowds and my practice of taking a picture of every crowd I played in front of in order to honour them and honour the receiver that is receiving what we are creating and offering. That’s generally one of my favourite categories, because without them, there is no us.

You included a few faxes from Courtney in the exhibit where she is riding you for not exploring your full artistic potential. How collaborative was your relationship and how much was student-teacher? And what’s the story behind those faxes in particular?

Well, they’re all in the memoir, so people who really want to get the full context should be in the memoir. I publish both of them in full and I give much more context.

I really do give her the floor because, in the course of this book, I explain the true warts-and-all, glory-and-all version of her. And then I get towards the end, I allow those two letters to speak for her, and you see the brilliance and the honour that she is, and that she saw parts of me that I couldn’t even see yet.

It was obviously her band. She was a band leader. But what was interesting is that when I found those faxes 20 years later, when I was going through my archive, I realized that I didn’t even see the power of them then. That she really saw me and parts of me that I hadn’t yet seen that took me 20 years.

That’s why, when I publish them in the context of my full story and my full relationship with her, my goal was to show people how really astute she was. It’s amazing.

You’ve spoken about the crowds at Hole shows versus the larger grunge festivals you were part of, and how those larger shows were very misogynistic. What were your fans like, by contrast?

We played giant festivals where we were just one of many bands, and we did an unfortunate bunch of tours with Marilyn Manson and those kinds of super dudes. [In] general, Hole fans at the time were incredibly confident, excited females looking to be expressed and be seen, or alternative, nerdy, queer, cool freaks. That was the Hole crowd.

There’s a video that keeps showing up for me lately of you guys at the 1998 VMAs, and Courtney is essentially defending a woman’s right to fashion. It’s so impressive to me that you were all so wild and really pushing the limits in terms of your lifestyle, and then at the same time coming out with these brilliant takes that are so important 30 years later. How conscious were you and Courtney of what you wanted Hole to represent?

After I left the band, [Courtney and I] fell out of touch for well over a decade, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been now in our lives. She could have been dead a thousand times and isn’t, and she’s done a lot, a lot of healing, self-care work.

That VMA in particular - she was at her peak togetherness at that time because she had cleaned up. She manifested that success we have with Celebrity Skin based on her brilliance and ambition of clarity of, like, “We are going to be the biggest female rock band of the ’90s.” And not for ego necessarily at all—for making change. She fucking helped do it.

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We now realize just how perfectly suited we were in our oppositeness. We were very, very polar opposite, but we both were very, very clear about our intentions.

Even though I knew it was drama and I knew it was pain and I knew it was dangerous, I was committed to bring women onto a male-dominated landscape, and Hole was going to be the way I did it.

We were very conscious of what we were doing. We were not just phoning it in or tripping balls. We were seriously serious.

Hole has obviously gotten its due, but it’s amazing to see a new generation realizing your legacy…

No, it hasn’t actually. It’s been very overlooked. I say all the time, the Hole legacy lives in the gutters of YouTube. No way. Nirvana rules, and the wife that got fucking vilified and accused of killing a very tortured person? No, her legacy is in the garbage. Are you kidding?

Yes, the people who were there, who know, or the younger people who are discovering it are like, “What? They were doing that? She was saying that?” She called out Harvey Weinstein and lost her entire fucking Hollywood career because of it. Like, excuse me, people are seeing it now, but believe me, they have not been seeing it.

Ok, well now feels like the moment. There’s something in the air and I’m so excited for you guys to rule.

I’m grateful. I think it’s helpful. We did it for women, and we did it for women of the future too. And hopefully this is the moment where the new generation gets to really benefit.

This exhibit will leave people very nostalgic for the ‘90s. What is your feeling about nostalgia? Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it both?

I’m a romantic person, but I’m not obsessed with the past. I am not doing this for nostalgia. I’m doing this for intentional learning and intentional contextualizing of how we got here, so we can learn from the past to make a better future. I am a futurist, and I think Courtney and I share that. I don’t live in the past.

I used to think, when I was in art school and when I was in the band, that I was 400 years, 300 years too late. That I was a Renaissance person and that I should have lived in some other time, and that I never wanted to choose between photography and music. I was a multimedia artist.

The ’90s were much more like, pick one or the other. And here I am, literally, we’re releasing a multimedia memoir with I can’t even tell you how many components, and I realize now, I’m like, “Oh, I was just 30 years too early.” This is the only time I could be doing this layer of meta, meta, meta, dream within a dream, multiple universes at the same time.

September is the new January now apparently, according to someone on TikTok or something (Jews have known this for years, btw… Shana Tova, my people!). Back to school, back to life, back to reality, back to an alleged routine.

So, in the spirit of highly unserious self-improvement, let’s revisit an extremely important experiment from the Capsule 98 archive: the time my friend Tiyana Grulovic and I tried five iconic and somewhat forgotten celebrity workout videos from a moment in time when watching hour-long VHS tapes of your fav icon in a leotard was all the rage.

Jane Fonda, the madre of it all, bounced in a belted leotard in her late fourties. Cher thrusted in rhinestones to the words “I pony, you pony, we all pony!” Meanwhile, Carmen Electra taught us to strip and suck on our own fingies for sex appeal.

During the beginning of the pandemic and separated by coasts (Tiyana in L.A., me in Toronto at the time), we sweated through all five to determine which ones still constitute an actual workout, and which are better treated as important pieces of cultural history. Please note, because we were limited to our homes at the time, we skipped anything that required gym equipment. This meant skipping my fave soft-core porn, The Marky Mark Workout.

Grab your ankle warmers, your ballet socks and/or your Vibrams!

Jane Fonda’s New Workout (Advanced), 1986
Tested by: Randi

I have this tendency of choosing the advanced option for every fitness or dance class, which makes little sense since I am not advanced nor am I pro dancer. But alas, I start the retro celebrity workout videos journey with Jane Fonda’s New Workout, Advanced circa 1986, assuming that no one knew how to work out the past. And for the first five minutes, I am kind of right – the video begins with a series of quickly paced movements that are meant to be stretches but look more like a game of extreme bending one might play with a Barbie. Arms flailing, waist swaying – everything is so extremely fast that it’s hard to tell what the moves accomplish. But things are about to change.

This being Jane’s second round of supremely successful workout videos—she released her first, Jane Fonda’s Workout, in 1982, sold over a million copies and even prompted people to invest in VCRs, a relatively new technology at the time—things get sweaty, bouncy and hella exhausting. I pause the video many times to get water, open my window, check my phone, anything to slow the pace of incessant jumping. My ankles hurt! (It’s worth noting that Jane is 49-years-old in this video and bops around with a luscious head of eighties perm curls without so much as a brief pause.)

As Jane cycles through the aerobic portion, she introduces a woman named Leslie Lilien, who, from the second row, very obviously lip-syncs lyrics that go a little something like, “There’s so much more to you than meets the eye,” while we continue the class. Everyone is yelping at various points, which is fun and flirty. Jane keeps telling us to make sure our pelvis is tucked, which means a lot of pointing at her crotch.

Everything in this video invented the phrase “doing the most.” The moves are fast, the outfits are extra… I love it, but I’m also slightly irritated maybe that I can’t keep up? Or maybe I don’t want to?

Ankle warmer rating: 7/10

Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease, 2003
Tested by: Tiyana

Tramp stamps. Pastel leisurewear from VS PINK. Incessant counting to eight. Welcome, friends, to Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease!

“A Striptease is a dance,” an authoritative, windowsill-perched Carmen says at the beginning of this video, before launching into a 20-minute warmup—“a workout in itself!”—that makes stripping look legitimately boring.

The two subsequent routines—meant to “tone your body like a dancer and definitely spice up your personal life” in a five-six-seveeeeeen-eight—are definitely more dynamic in the movement department, mostly due to hips dips, body rolls, and some slow, sexual walking in circles while self-groping. Admittedly, all of the outfits are fire.

The third routine was probably my favourite, and the most challenging. The floor work — kind of like a feeling-urself low boat pose while opening and closing your legs repeatedly — actually winded me. I have also been self-isolating during a pandemic, so fitness has been shamefully low priority until I did this striptease workout alone, in my home, with no one reaping its benefits except for my butt, which got pretty red from all the slapping.

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On that note, the choreography that urges you to put a finger in your mouth is not great Coronavirus protocol, guys. Instead, maybe wave it around your face area sexually and you can still heed Carmen’s advice to “not underestimate a finger in your mouth” while maintaining good hygiene in these trying times.

Workout rating: 4/10 (But like, 11/10 for the outfits.)

Cher Fitness: Hot Dance (1992)
Tested by: Randi

If Cher’s general being is any indication, one can assume that her fitness videos are great. But boy, does the goddess of bod come through in “Hot Dance,” a segment from her second workout video, Body Confidence, released in 1992.

Clad in a supremely sexy sheer black bodysuit with many rhinestones á la the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video, Cher joins choreographer Dorian Sanchez and a bevy of fit babes on a set that feels like Twin Peaks meets the Witches Council on Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Together, they run through a few rounds of simple choreography, teaching those of us at home how to pony, double pony and thrust into the air like there’s no tomorrow (is there?) to covers of classics like “Dancin’ in the Street.” (A true queen knows it’s tacky to do a workout class to your own music.) They keep adding to the same routine, and while the choreo never becomes difficult, you get an awesome workout with all the dancing. You also get to stare at Cher for 38 minutes, which made me smile the entire time.

I want to say that Cher is at the height of her gorgeousness in this video, but we all know better: there has never been a peak to her beauty… it begins anew each day.

Fierceness rating: 10/10 (I love this video!)

Alyssa Milano’s Teen Steam Workout, 1988
Tested by: Tiyana

“Steam! Teen Steam. Gotta let it out!” This is the original theme song that Alyssa Milano actually sings in the opening, which quickly serves to establish that we are about to watch a teen blowing off steam in workout video and not something wholly inappropriate. Anyway, the production value here is as insane as the concept.

Our “film” opens in a perfect teenage bedroom complete with a rattan vanity from Pier 1 Imports, a messy chair closet, and a Laura Ashley festooned daybed. This is also the set of the ENTIRE WORKOUT.

Highlight #1: Alyssa’s friends literally apparate into her surprisingly large carpeted bedroom for a warmup that includes some awkward lunged pushups. I hope a trainer was consulted for this?

Highlight #2: There is an instructive fitness rap about 12 mins in.

Highlight #3: Alyssa Milano walks through her bedroom mirror and into a black and white street set that is 84% fog machine. This was actually super fun to watch and dance to, just skip to this part! Also, they play the song again and Alyssa is legitimately an ok dancer.

Difficulty rating: Admittedly I got a bit bored and drank some wine 20 minutes in, then resumed dancing. 6/10. Clearly a 12/10 for establishing theme song clarity.

Paula Abdul’s Get Up and Dance, 1995
Tested by: Randi

I polished off a jar of applesauce before starting this workout (desperate times call for desperate snacking), which in retrospect was a less than ideal considering this one is very hard work. Paula Abdul, legend of early nineties pop, Idol, and hat weaponry, puts her dance prowess into Get Up and Dance, the first of her three subsequent workout videos that she released at the time (a.k.a. the golden era of retro celebrity workout videos).

Paula begins this 20-minute segment by saying that even those with “two left feet” will be able to handle the choreo, but tbh, she is lying. The moves are fast. A crew of aspiring Gap models follows along without missing a beat, though.

The moves in this vid are actually pretty slick, but in the spirit of transparency, I will say that instead of finishing this video, I returned to snacking. You win some you lose some.

Workout rating: 8/10 assuming you actually do it.

One thing about me is that I love a silly little activity, something New York provides in spades. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve attended a book-reading party aboard an 1885 sailboat, a Dolly Parton-themed dance class and an extremely meta bus tour of a bus tour.

Led by Melissa Rich, a comedian who spent 8 years guiding Sex and the City tours around Manhattan, Sex and the Bus Tour is part one-woman comedy show, part ironic city tour. It takes psychopathic superfans such as myself around town while dunking on Carrie’s apartment, spilling completely unverified tea (like the rumour that Darren Star, Kim Cattrall and Patricia Field held a weekly Zoom to discuss the train wreckage of And Just Like That…) and ending with ceremonial cosmos at Onieal’s, a.k.a. Aidan and Steve’s bar, Scout.

“Sign me the fuck up!!!!!!!,” I thought, immediately buying two tickets after a mere spotting of the headline of a Vanity Fair story about Melissa’s first go.

Like zillions of other women, I was led to New York by a fool’s-gold Bradshaw fantasy. When I first moved here in 2007 (resumes printed on pink paper, in tow) I was convinced my life was destined to resemble hers. While living the rat-infested dream, I collected the similarities between our stories like badges of honour: I too was just like K-K-Katie (with a blog to prove it); I too would one day be a woman living in a shoe.

At my awful PR job on Grand Street, I passed Onieal’s every day on my way to the train. Outside, gaggles of girlies drank cosmos after completing their own Sex and the City bus tours. I sniggered, believing I was on the inside, never to be caught dead on such a plebeian excursion. I didn’t need a guide - I could get rejected from Bungalow 8 myself!

Nearly two decades later, there I was, locked and loaded on Melissa’s bus alongside my pal Aliza, who lovingly obliged me by showing up in a sparkly floral dress for the occasion. We started our ride in front of The Plaza, the site of several iconic SATC moments: the post-Big and Natasha engagement-party “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell” exchange (borrowed from Streisand and Redford) and the time Samantha met a geriatric sugar daddy in the Oak Room after he dined with Tr*mp..

From there, we hit Friar Fuck’s church, the park where Charlotte’s dog got gangbanged and, of course, Carrie’s apartment on Perry Street in the West Village - famously not her address on the show, which was 245 East 73rd Street on the Upper East Side. There, we were forced to behave like tourists against our better New Yorker judgement, posing for photos as the owner of the house rolled his eyes and took out the trash. We all borrowed complimentary cigs for the occasion - even a pregnant attendee, which felt just crazy enough to work in this parallel cosplay universe.

Still reeling from the humiliation ritual of smoking an entire cig as a heehee, I called Melissa to debrief. Here, she tells me how she first got into this fabulously absurd line of work, shares her essential spots on the tour, and more.

If you want to join in on the fun, Melissa’s next ride is October 3. Grab tickets HERE or follow her on IG for more.

How did you become a Sex and the City tour guide?

I moved to New York and had been doing stand-up. I think I was performing at Upright Citizens Brigade when one of the Sopranos tour guides came up to me after the show and said, “You were so funny. I think you’d be great for the Sex and the City tour.”

I had just moved here and didn’t even know that existed. It was basically doing stand-up for my ideal audience of women and gay guys who love Sex and the City.

I would do a tour on a Friday and then go host my weekly stand-up show, “Bitches Brew,” which I hosted for four years at Halyards in Gowanus. It was a hilarious dichotomy: doing the Sex and the City fantasy during the day and then performing in grungy bar basements at night. It was a perfect complementary job for someone in entertainment.

Who typically took the tour?

It varied a lot. There are definitely people who are new to New York and say, “This is New York to me and this is what I’m here to see.” Then there are people who have visited New York many times and have always wanted to do it, or it’s part of a girls’ trip. We also did private tours in limos for bachelorette parties and 40th birthdays.

What was the wildest thing that happened during your years as a guide?

Nothing tops the time everybody took their boobs out. A woman on the tour had recently gotten hers done. It happened to be an all-female tour, the driver stepped off the bus and it suddenly went Girls Gone Wild. I was like, “There’s no way this is my job.”

How does your show differ from the original tour?

You still want the hot spots and the information, even if you’re not a tourist. You want to experience me pointing things out and seeing them. Those will always be staples. But the show is more about my experience doing the tour, almost my dissertation on it.

Because it takes place on a bus, it will be different every time. You hit traffic at different points. You hit a red light or you don’t, and that changes the timing of everything. Audiences really love an in-the-moment experience that only their particular group has had. It’s like crowd work: you form inside jokes with the audience. This format allows for that because you’re seeing random people and things on the street. It creates a really unique experience.

One of the funniest moments was arriving at Carrie’s apartment with an enormous busload of New Yorkers. Why was that an essential part of the show?

To me, it’s like Sleep No More or immersive theatre. Anybody who lives here can go to 66 Perry Street, take a picture and feel whatever they feel. But it’s entirely different to pull up in a massive tour bus on Bleecker Street, walk with a group of 50 people to a private residence and take a photo on the steps.

We saw the owner come home while we were there. I’m still ethically like, “Oh, wow, I’m contributing to this.” Obviously, I’m doing it less than monthly, rather than a few times a week, but it brings up a conversation. People ask: Did he know when he bought the house? Is he making money from it?

New Yorkers have a different perspective than tourists who might be more focused on getting the photo. People who live here think, “Oh my God, imagine living in that house, on that street or next door.”

What feelings does it bring up? Are you embarrassed? Is it fun and silly? Do you feel ethically challenged? Do you want the photo and not care? Everybody will feel something different.

Do you know how the owner of Carrie’s apartment feels about it?

As far as I’m aware, he would be paid when they use it for filming. When they used the front steps for And Just Like That…, I assume he was paid. The interiors of Carrie’s apartment were filmed at Silvercup Studios, so they were only using his facade.

For people who own houses used that way, it could be a great moneymaker - or it could draw tourism that isn’t worth it. But there’s no way he didn’t know when he bought it. If the information I was given is correct, he purchased it after the second movie.

I do feel for him. It’s never easy to have a group of people outside your home. But it’s also listed as Carrie’s apartment on Google Maps. You can say the bus tours are evil, but it doesn’t matter: people are going to be there taking pictures almost 24 hours a day.

That kind of pop-culture tourism isn’t unique to Sex and the City. When Love Story came out, there was a huge spike in interest around Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Her bookstore, pharmacy and other places got an uptick in business. That can be great, but it can also challenge business owners: Do we stock more because girls are obsessed with this? Are they going to be over it soon? Pop-culture obsession affects businesses and neighbourhoods across the board.

What are some of the tour’s essential locations?

The Church of the Transfiguration is a really fun one. That’s Friar Fuck’s church. It’s on 29th Street, between all these buildings, and has a gorgeous courtyard. It’s also funny that the church apparently allowed them to film a show in which one of the characters is trying to have sex with a priest. I never heard the tea on whether they knew the context, and this was pre-internet, so there wasn’t the same outrage culture.

Madison Square Park is where Charlotte’s dog got gangbanged, which is a fun scene to revisit. Miranda tells Carrie she’s pregnant there. Carrie gets on the train at the 23rd Street station to go to the Stock Exchange. There are locations with scenes layered on top of scenes.

Buddakan is another great one. It was - and still is - a stop on the original tour. You can go inside and see the long table where Carrie and Big had their rehearsal dinner. So much happens in that scene. They also used the restaurant in the first movie’s New Year’s Eve montage. Big is eating alone, Samantha and Smith Jerrod are wearing matching pajamas (my joke was always that nobody has sex in matching pajamas) and Anthony and Stanford have their first kiss.

Then there’s Onieal’s, which played Scout and is where the tour ends. I love that place. It’s my neighbourhood bar, and it’s almost entirely unchanged. The ceiling and woodwork are part of why they chose the location, given Aidan’s profession. You can see where everyone walks in during the opening party and the side door where Carrie and Aidan reunite. It has a real wow factor because it looks so much like it did onscreen.

There are also locations that appear repeatedly throughout the series…

There’s also so much in the West Village because Perry Street was probably used in almost every episode. The park where Miranda meets Steve’s girlfriend Debbie is at Bleecker and Hudson. Abingdon Square and many of the locations in that area were likely chosen because the production was already filming on Perry Street and could easily walk to another spot.

How did you accumulate all the gossip and behind-the-scenes information you share?

Honestly, just from running my goddamn mouth around this town. I’ve heard so much fun gossip and so many facts. I’ve read books. I truly talk about the show a lot, and when people know my history with it, they come up and give me information. I’m keeping a running Rolodex.

The nice thing about doing my own show is that I can share something unverified as long as I make it clear that it’s alleged and might not be true. It’s fun to envision some of these stories, and people can run with them or not.

I recently heard that Sex and the City and The Sopranos filmed at Silvercup Studios at the same time, but The Sopranos cast wouldn’t share their food.

They had all the noodles and fucking lasagna in the world, and they wouldn’t give it to the girls!

It’s crazy to think about those two shows existing in each other’s universe. Tony walks by in his bathrobe while Carrie’s on her computer. I can’t.

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Apparently, the Sex and the City lunches were very bland, while everyone could smell the Sopranos meatballs. The actors were also supposed to use spit buckets when filming scenes that required them to eat, but the buckets on The Sopranos were allegedly always empty.

They were actually eating. That’s so good. We rarely see food during the “chat-and-chews,” which is what they called the restaurant scenes on Sex and the City. It was like “walk-and-talk,” but “chat-and-chew.”

You eventually appeared in And Just Like That... How did that happen?

It was just as crazy as it sounds. A woman I knew from Pennsylvania was working at Grant Wilfley Casting and told me she could put my name in for featured background work. It wasn’t good for my ego at the time. There’s nothing wrong with background work, but it’s a full day for not much money. Then I started thinking about it. I can’t explain what the buildup to And Just Like That… was like for me. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was curious and scared. The second movie hadn’t been well received, and we were hearing that Kim Cattrall wasn’t going to be involved.

I treated it as an investigative, anthropological experience. I wanted to go in, see what the storylines would be and find out what was happening.

What did you film first?

Melissa: The first scene was Seema joining the women for drinks. I’m not featured in it because I was staring at them and listening instead of acting or pretending to talk to the other people at my table.

Later that day, we filmed a walk-and-talk scene with Carrie and Miranda. They walked past me, and I twisted around to get my face on camera. I thought, “This was amazing. This was so cool.”

They later emailed me about playing a widow at a widows’ convention in season two. I was like, “Okay, this is getting insulting and rude. I do not want to play a widow, thank you so much,” so I didn’t respond.

Then they contacted me about a Halloween scene. At the time, I had written something slightly critical of the show for Gawker, so I wondered if they recognized my name. But I decided to do it.

What was the Halloween shoot like?

It was the scene where Carrie is dressed as Helen Gurley Brown. We were at the Boathouse in Prospect Park, and it was freezing. Some people were put in these huge costumes and wigs.

They had asked us to send pictures of our costumes. I knew it would be cold, so I wore a full cheetah-print turtleneck bodysuit with a fur coat and said, “I’m a cat.” They kind of rolled their eyes at me. But, true to form, they told me it would be featured background. I kept asking, “Is there a line? Do I have a line?” They said no.

In between takes, Sarah Jessica Parker was playing music on her phone and everyone was excited. Michael Patrick King was directing. He got on a megaphone and gave a little speech about it being cold but everyone looking hot. He said, “This is classic Sex and the City,” and ended with, “Welcome to the legacy!!!”

Everyone erupted. It felt like, “Oh my God, we’re part of it!” It fuelled the energy of the whole scene.

The end of summer smells distinctly of trash to me.

Not hot, stinky garbage, but deep-fried Oreos, sweat laced vaguely with body glitter, cigarettes and public-pool chlorine. Things we shouldn’t love, but do.

In previous Augusts, I’ve gained upwards of 10 pounds through decadent consumption, dated men who lived in basements, gone to demolition derbies and been pushed into a mud pile while performing as Miss Piggy-meets-Orville-Peck in my Dolly Parton cowboy hat.

Extremely John Waters behaviour is the goal (a few Augusts ago, the Pope of Trash held a five-course fundraiser at the town dump in Provincetown).

As we discussed last week, “trashy” and “freaky” mean different things to different people. Here, trash is sparkly, synthetic, sleazy and fabulously excessive - the kind of reckless pleasure September symbolically takes from us when it tells us to go back to school and get our heads out of the gutter..

This August was considerably less hedonistic than most, but the telltale signs still found me. Here’s the moodboard:

1. Everyone is saying, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

I don’t know what there is to say that hasn’t already been said in the last few days about the passing of our dearest Dolly Parton. And I’m actually touched by how little there is left to say; there seems to be nothing about the rhinestone cowgirl that wasn’t appreciated or uncovered during her lifetime. We knew how good we had it.

Dollyisms have been on everyone’s lips this week, especially my favourite: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Its origin story says everything you need to know about Dolly’s ability to deify what others look down on:

“I make jokes about it, but it’s the truth that I kind of patterned my look after the town tramp. I didn’t know what she was, just this woman who was blond and piled her hair up, wore high heels and tight skirts, and, boy, she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Momma used to say, ‘Aw, she’s just trash,’ and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.’”

I’ve always lived somewhere within the Dolly aura. For the past 10 years, that has been through my diamanted pink cowboy hat, purchased at her concert in Toronto and worn through many of my own trashiest August moments—including the aforementioned Miss Piggy-meets-Orville-Peck mud incident.

I’ll be wearing it this weekend in Dolly’s honour. In the meantime, tie one on with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the gloriously tacky 1982 musical about the Chicken Ranch, a beloved brothel in small-town Texas. Come for Dolly as a madam in rhinestones; stay for one of the most devastating renditions of “I Will Always Love You” ever committed to film.

2. Vanna Youngstein baby tanks

I wore my rhinestoned Vanna Youngstein tank tops approximately three times a week this summer. They could obviously also be labelled cutesy, but to me, they resemble what the queens in Spring Breakers (2013) wore while robbing and cosplaying Florida drug lords.

Vanna’s shirts are done on deadstock children’s tank tops in super small runs and/or made to order, so following her on IG is probably your best bet for nabbing one.

3. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)

Perhaps no one writes better about being a reckless slut than Eve Babitz, the patron saint of literary fashion girlies who lust after her sixties LA oeuvre, her ability to bed the likes of Jim Morrison and Harrison Ford and her electric prose about all of the above.

I started Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), a new collection of letters she wrote to famous friends, paramours and family members, then tucked away in boxes instead of sending. Even in correspondence about the mundane everyday, she’s unabashed:

I heard a cute thing about Elizabeth Taylor. Someone said, “Why doesn’t she get a divorce and settle down?”

That blond-girl-idiot that hangs around with Lydia—what’s her name, Candy or Namby? You know, the one with the orange make-up? She accidentally struck up a conversation with me the other night at the Chez, but I gave her such a snub it suddenly dawned on her who I was. There’s about 50 people hanging around L.A. who hate me cause I’m your sister. It used to be the other way around, didn’t it? I must be getting old.

I’ve decided that your abortion is too boring and depressing so I’m going to do a story on Kuelli Anton instead.

You can get a copy here or at any indie bookstore, I’m sure!

4. Polyester pants and disposable faces

Did you know that “Polyester” is an insult now? Which is funny, because Gen Z’s, who apparently hate plastic fibres, are now putting instantly disposable shimmer stickers all over their faces. Anyway, I happen to love when I find a polyester piece of trash while thrifting, and I also love this stupid new sticker face trend. It’ll be gone in a flash, just like August.

My stance: There’s nothing wrong with shopping for polyester that has already survived 20 summers. I’m currently contemplating these polyester seventies sparkly flares and this sexy little lingerie number.

Side note, I saw this poster for John Waters’s Polyester (1981) for sale once in an antiques store and I can’t stop thinking about it.

5. Steff Eleoff’s “engagement” ring

My friend Steff is an incredible Toronto jewellery designer known for her goopy silver creations (including the tech ring covers the girls are going wild for). More on her later, but in the meantime, I’m obsessed with the ginormous “engagement” ring she gifted me - made from pink tourmaline and sterling silver, and substantial enough to weigh down my entire hand. I wouldn’t call Steff’s work “trashy” in the bad-taste sense, but the glorious oversizedness of this ring—which looks to me like the greatest gumball-machine prize of all time—fits right in with my August M.O. Shop her stuff here!

6. The Pee-wee Herman Universe Lookalike Contest

The way I know God is real is because my friend Sam and I decided to go to Coney Island on a whim last weekend and immediately happened upon (the second annual?) Pee-wee Herman Universe Lookalike Contest at the Sideshow. I was so excited that I dropped my digi cam directly on its lens trying to take a picture of the woman dressed as Jambi, Pee-wee’s glittery turquoise genie. INCREDIBLE!

Pee-wee’s whole universe fits the brief: plastic, perverse, childlike, deeply artificial and committed to exquisite bad taste. Continue the spiral with Big Top Pee-Wee (1988), in which Pee-wee joins the circus, becomes entangled in a truly disturbing love triangle and delivers one of the longest kisses in cinematic history.

Also, now that we know the contest happens every year, make a plan to join me there next year!

7. Shae Studio’s lava lamps

Lava lamps are the domain of teenage bedrooms, or they were until Brooklyn artist Shae Studio turned them into works of art. Her incredible “groove lamps” look like psychedelic aliens moonlighting as lighting sources, and one would look incredible in my apartment. She takes custom commissions, but slots are released only occasionally, so follow her here if you’re into it.

By next week, we’ll all be pretending to enjoy structure again. The face stickers will fall off, the polyester will remain on this earth forever and I’ll put away the rhinestoned cowboy hat (or at least consider it). Until then, there are still a few days left to take your mind off school and put it back in the gutter.

Hate the term “kinda chic”? Take a number, babes.

The internet has turned myriad phrases into easy hooks for insert vacation content/hot take here, only for us to collectively declare them insufferable shortly thereafter. On and on it goes until we die!

Chic is over. Freak is in. Or maybe that’s just my extremely online fashun algo?

Personally, not a day goes by lately when I don’t see the word “freaky” (alts include “freaky little” and “freaky deaky”) used to describe everything from plants to dogs. It’s become the nomenclature du jour for anything a little strange, singular or uncategorizable.

Shoes, in particular, have gotten extremely freaky - or at least the way they’re described has. But what does that actually mean?

“In order to define freaky footwear, we have to define what’s not freaky first,” says Isabel Slone, an amazing writer pal in Toronto who, among other things, is behind the aptly named Substack Freak Palace. “You have to imagine this concept of really sleek elegance in a shoe, like a Roger Vivier heel or a Christian Louboutin. There’s a whole genre of shoes that are meant to look attractive and flattering, and a freaky shoe is something that completely upends the idea of what a shoe should look like. A freaky shoe is something that you look at and you’re like, ‘Hmm, this is unsettling.’”

The term has been extremely for the girls over the past few years, particularly since Mandy Lee, aka @oldloserinbrooklyn, helped popularize it through posts featuring her Tabis, Cecilie Bahnsen Asics and other challenging footwear beneath the freaky shoe banner.

Clompy, toe-exposing, low-to-the-ground and/or platformed are among the counterintuitive qualities grouped beneath the freaky-shoe umbrella. Vibram FiveFingers? Weird af. In they go. And yet Matthieu Blazy’s barefoot shoe for Chanel Resort 2027, worn on the red carpet last night by Margaret Qualley, seems far more elegant - and far less functional - than most of the shoes that have received the designation. Still, in it goes.

The shoes most often grouped into the trend - perhaps because they reflect Lee’s personal favourites - are generally the ones I’m least drawn to. I’ve never been a Tabi girl, and I hate a clunky flat. But maybe freaky is just another word for silly. Or ugly. Or somehow wrong (cue the “wrong-shoe theory,” which argues that an unexpected shoe can introduce just enough friction to make an outfit feel more intentional).

Personally, I feel freakiest in my signature shoe, the silver Fendi kitten-heel platforms I bought for $5 in 2010. Freaky, just more the Miami stripper kind. Does it qualify?

Freakiness, pre feed!

When I think of freaky shoes, I think of the ones I learned about in fashion-history class: chopines, the towering platforms worn in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, whose extreme height showcased the wealth - and, in some cases, marriageability - of their wearers, sometimes requiring them to enlist help walking; or poulaines, medieval shoes with wildly elongated toes that signalled status and (at least to me) symbolically big-dick energy.

Speaking of dicks and strippers, what about freaky fetish shoes?

“Shoes that become sort of extraordinarily shaped, and sort of become identified with fetish, start in the late 19th century, with very extended heels, where somebody’s just barely able to touch the ground with the forepart of the shoe,” says Elizabeth Semmelhack, Director and Senior Curator at the Bata Shoe Museum (yes, I brought the big guns for Substack!). “Oftentimes, there is an exaggerated overemphasis on the curve of the heel, the tightness of the ankle.”

In the above example, the shoe’s construction is so unstable that walking in it was basically beside the point (which also made me think of Louboutin’s extreme stilettos from 2007). Today’s freaky shoes often do the opposite. Instead of lifting and constricting the foot, they flatten it, spread it out or expose its anatomy. Fetish footwear made the body unnaturally erotic and physically restricted (read: bottom-y). Today’s freaky footwear is like… “hello I’m a foot with a purpose!”

There are so many places you could trace a modern “freak shoe” to, from 1970s disco platforms to most of what the Spice Girls wore (minus Posh, a conventional sex goddess). There’s also a whole thread of animalistic aesthetics here, like McQueen’s armadillos, which maybe I’ll get into another time.

“To me, freaky means unapologetic individuality,” says Slone. “I guess the easiest way of saying that is just being a nonconformist, essentially.” Semmelhack similarly sees an element of authenticity in the freaky-shoe impulse: “It’s like, I’m doing what I want.” But she points out the inherent contradiction: “Even though ultimately it’s still signaling to in-group affiliation - you know, like, I’m doing the same thing you’re doing.”

Of course, once everyone buys the same symbol of nonconformity, freakiness starts looking suspiciously like a uniform. Perhaps the freakiest shoe is simply the one you choose without needing the internet to explain what it says about you. As for me, I’ll be over here in my $5 slutty Fendis.

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A friend once asked me to name an unproblematic celebrity, convinced one didn’t exist. Easy. Miss Piggy. A Gemini with the ass of an angel and lashes perfect for batting at the camera, she has never been anything other than unapologetically outrageous and insane, making her an infallible character all these decades after she first appeared on our screens on a June 14, 1974 episode of The Muppet Show. Miss Piggy is, of course, a diva for the ages - up there with the likes of Cher, at least for me (if “snap out of it!” was a karate chop) - whether pulling focus from Babe the ’lil piglet at the 1996 Oscars, giving Dolly Parton a tour of her camptastic tour bus during one of her multiple appearances on Dolly’s variety show during the ’80s, or shilling for Baked Lays with Antonio Sabato Jr. She’s just… It.

Our supreme porcine superstar is about to sweep the nation once more, with the first Hollywood spectacular completely centred on her in the works, with Cole Escola, the Broadway icon of Oh, Mary!, at the helm and Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone as producers. Heavenly!

Back in 1981, Jim Henson Press teamed up with National Lampoon writer Henry Beard to ghostwrite Piggy’s prose in the book Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life, an incredible advice book modelled on the self-help books popular at the time. Somehow, it spent 29 months on The New York Times Bestseller list, though, save for the images by photographer John E. Barrett, which live on in perpetuity in IG-land (partly because of the EPIC styling by Calista Hendrickson), I’d heard nothing about it. I came across it a few years ago totally by chance just after I’d packed the contents of my Toronto apartment and thought… What harm could one more itsy bitsy teeny weeny book do to a mountain of boxes that were already book-filled? Extremely Piggy behavior.

Chapters focus on diet, exercise, beauty (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye”), fashion and more, each written partly in Piggy’s fav franglais parlance (“I am in a restaurant, and I want a piece of the delicious chocolate cake I see displayed on a shelf. ‘Personnel, who bringulates les munchables,’ I call, summoning the waiter. When he arrives, I give my order: ‘If it does you please, transportez [trans-por-TAY] to moi’s tablette one gigantical smitherini de that chocolate caketation avec as immense a velocité [vee-luss-ee-TAY] as possible.’”).

Reading it 45 years later, it’s great to see how little her particular sense of self has aged. Delusion, self-worship, weaponized glamour, treating yourself like the most important person in every room - it’s basically the internet’s current manifestation obsession, before we were tapping it into foreheads.

You can find first-edition copies of Miss Piggy’s Guide To Life for around $30–$40 all over sites like ThriftBooks and AbeBooks, but in the meantime, I’ve compiled some of my favourite Piggy-isms below. Consider them words to live by.

On writing the guide:

“Plays, verses, epic poems, heroic couplets, and the shorter crosswords are my true métier, but when at last I had a few precious moments to give to my art, I thought first and foremost of my millions of fans. What, I asked moiself, do they need? The answer was as quick as it was speedy: a guide. And not just any guide, but a Guide to Life.

Oh, how often in those early, hard years, before I became the superstar I was destined to be, have I wished for a book exactly like the one you are holding in your hand—a simple, clear volume with lots of pictures of moi and all the right answers to every important question!

And I knew that if ever such a book came along, I would not merely thumb through it, as perhaps you are now doing, but instantly rush over to the counter and buy it for fear that such a treasure would slip from my grasp.”

On hair:

“Sometimes I just have to go incognito to get away from my millions of admirers. This appealing disguise preserves my anonymity from all but a few hundred of the most alert columnists, photographers, and truly dedicated fans.”

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Miss Piggy’s Petite Coiffure Style-and-Smile Hair Conditioning Recipe

2 tsp butter / 1 tbsp flour / 1 cup milk / 1 oz powdered chocolate / ⅓ cup sugar / 3 egg yolks / 1 tsp vanilla / 3 egg whites

Heat the milk, sugar, and chocolate, beat in the yolks, then whip in the vanilla and the egg whites. Place in the oven on very low heat. Go out and have your hair done. Come home, remove mixture from oven, cover lightly with whipped cream, and eat.

On body language:

“As an actress, I have no difficulty in conveying the whole range of emotions from A to high C, and I can employ my rich vocabulary of physical expression to touch people (quite hard, if necessary) in ways that mere language cannot. Peruse these (stunning) photographs of moi and note how effectively I can converse on a very personal level without saying a single word.”

On cooking:

“Dinner de Take-Out à la Belle Telephone: Smart chefs realize that the easiest cookbook to use is the Yellow Pages and the handiest appliance in the kitchen is the telephone. With it, you can turn out more delicious meals than with your oven, your broiler, your blender, and all your pots and pans combined. It’s a pleasure to use—it is just about impossible to burn yourself on it or cut yourself with it—and best of all, when you’re finished with it, it doesn’t need to be washed. Moi, I prefer the push-button models, but the old-fashioned dial types, though a teensy bit slower and a trifle hard on the fingers, work just as well.

Of course, Chinese food is not the only cuisine you can “cook” on your telephone. And in fact, if I have guests over, I like to call several different places and put together a “Snacks de Many Nations” feast, with the different courses eaten in the order they arrive. It adds a nice bit of suspense to an already festive occasion as everyone tries to guess what’s going to come through the door next!”

On parties:

“As with so much else in life, when it comes to guestology, planning is the quiche to success. You simply cannot take anything for granted, and that includes getting an invitation to a party in the first place. You see, moi is constantly sought after for soirées, moirés, openings, closings, and other fancy occasions, but vous, who may just be starting out on your way to le top, should not sit back and wait for an invitation. If you do, all sorts of unfortunate mishaps may occur, and the only invitations you’ll ever receive will be to join the Soup of the Month Club or buy a bunch of teensy medallions commemorating the Pets of the Vice Presidents. So many things can go wrong. An incorrect zip code could speed your invitation to some state you can’t even spell. A meteorite might demolish your mailbox. Spontaneous combustion in the postman’s mailbag could scorch your invitation so badly that the address is unreadable.

For this reason, whenever you hear about a party you would like to go to, you should make a point of letting the host know right away that you will be able to attend. People planning parties always appreciate your thoughtfulness in contacting them as early as possible.”

On fashion:

“One’s chapeau provides the perfect opportunity for a profound fashion statement. Your hat should not merely say, “here is my head,” but rather it should convey a sense of allure, mystery, even intrigue. Here moi’s chapeau is saying, ‘Oui, I have time for one quick chocolate malted in that cafe with the umbrellas that have tables on their handles, but then I must board the Oriental Express for a rendezvous with the Duke of Candelabra in the lovely, yet sinister, Kingdom of Rutabagia.’”

On exercise:

“When one is as busy with a career as moi, one has to rely on professionals to handle the more time-consuming aspects of one’s exercise program. I have a very nice man who operates this lovely machinery for me (he does let the things get a little dusty), and there is a perfectly charming young lady who comes in twice a week to do yoga for me. They are such a help.”

Late last month, I did as many Elder Millennials before me and flew to Las Vegas to see the Backstreet Boys at The Sphere with five of my childhood friends, Lori, Cindy, Ashley, Jen and Nofar. All of them are now moms to kids likely in the throes of their own weird obsessions, but first, they were girls describing having imaginary erections and plastering entire rooms with posters so they could pin liquorice you know where to mimic you know what. We were way too young back then to know what any of our words truly meant, but that couldn’t stop the sickness! We were a bunch of wannabe Jenny Briars (the Brat Mitzvah Beast Samantha contends with in one of my all-time fav Sex and the City eps, “Hot Child In The City”) despite having none of the actual experience to back up our oversexed dialogue.

In our fancy Wynn hotel suites, we instantly fell back into routines of piling onto each other’s beds in terry robes to eat stolen buffet Skittles and laugh sick while vaping pot. It felt so good, just like riding a bike with neon streamers flowing off its handlebars.

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Part futuristic amusement park simulation, part nostalgia extravaganza, the Sphere show was truly epic. The Backstreet Boys have aged, as have we all, BUT the moment Nick hit the stage to sing his horny solo ballad, “I Need You Tonight,” I was right back in ’99, fantasizing about our dalliance going something like the foggy-windowed sex crescendo near the end of Titanic VHS number one.

For context, I looked like this.

While in L.A. the week prior, I enlisted my friend Henna, an incredible stylist, photographer and designer, to help me transform the old BSB T-shirt I’d brought into something fantastically Y2K for the concert. Together, we created this slutty little halter dress, complete with a matching bandana made from the shirt’s backside - all the Boys’ names in a lavender bubble. It was a stroke of genius and example 346 as to why I favour hoarding over ever throwing anything out.

Back at the Wynn, after a few rounds of tossing Lori’s sticky bra cups onto the window to see how long they’d stay there, she whipped out a long-forgotten relic - a Scholastic fan paperback that I completely rewrote for her. The book was full of inside jokes, quite a prescient drag of their convict manager Lou Pearlman, who I called a “fat ass shithead” for some reason then unknown to me, a page where the Boys are recast as cast members of Dawson’s Creek, and fanfic where Nick, Brian, Howie, AJ and Kevin are actually in love with each other. I can’t remember how this started, but I do remember writing gay plots for the band being an early source of endless creativity for us.

Today, we have Wattpad and countless other corners of the internet where ultra-fandom and smut collide for girls who are more obsessed with BTS than they know what to do with. But back in the ’90s, we had notebooks, shimmer pens, glue and highlighters to build out mysterious little worlds of our own.

In my cursory research as to whether gay boyband fanfic was a thing for others at the time, it seems that it very much was. There’s even a distinction within the genre for it: “slashfic,” defined as stories of same gendered romantic relationships that originally centred on fictional characters like Kirk and Spock from Star Trek. There’s fascinating lore, but the funny thing is that we’d somehow arrived at this particular obsession entirely on our own.

Are fandoms inherently unhinged? Are tweens destined to explore their sexuality in the most peculiar ways, forever? All I know is that the Boys truly didn’t care who we were, where we were from or what we did - as long as we loved them.

A few Mondays ago, my girlie pal Rebecca and I got high, packed some risky salads and watched 1992’s Wayne’s World in Bryant Park (highly recco the park’s summer screening series, btw!). The film was a big childhood fav and the source of many inside jokes, so it hit the exact right spot of nostalgia and lols, as expected.

But it also hit us with something unexpected: intensely rich hues we both wanted to live inside forever, thanks to its 35mm cinematography and Technicolor processing. Both standard practices at the time, they’ve been lost to contemporary colour grading, which is what people have lamented about lately as today’s films skew increasingly pallid and desaturated in the name of realism. Sure, we were high, but those electric blue opening credits felt like the missing piece of an obsession that had been quietly brewing: the summer promise of pool blue.

Obviously, pool blue to July is a bit like florals to spring, but what I find endlessly consuming about it is that it’s existence is a physics magic trick: partly the reflection of modern-day pool liners, but also the refraction of the sun’s rays, which absorb every colour but blue, leaving it to bounce back to us. Its very being is unreal, a fantasy, something you activate by looking at it.

It’s also deeply tied to nostalgia for me (shocker!) - it feels so emblematic of ‘80s and ‘90s summers that I feel instantly transported just looking at it. If you were a kid then, summer kind of just meant neon blue zinc, Dylan and Kelly swimming while making out on Beverly Hills, 90210, Gwen Stefani’s blue hair, hitting Miami Subs pit stops on family vacations, transparent phones and the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium album cover (more on that next newsletter!). The saturation was always cranked tf up.

Pool blue is of course a defining hue of David Hockney, who passed away last month after spending a lifetime celebrating LA’s saturated light. His legendary pool paintings, the actual pool he painted at the Roosevelt Hotel and its match in his own home, loom large over this fantasy world.

They say once you start looking for something, you see it everywhere, and while it’s really not hard to imagine that this shade would be easily spottable in the middle of high summer, lately, pool blue has been finding me in the strangest little kismet moments. They’ve all been collected below alongside shopping picks to help you live in this fantasy for what's left of summer.

Ode to pool blue, commence!

1. Richie Shazam at Club Confessions a few weeks ago

I passed Richie while trying to find my friends after Madonna’s epic late-night club appearance, so I never got the chance to ask where their dress was from... but that’s what Google Image Search is for. It’s this incredibly saturated dress from Revolve that I consider an immediate buy.

2. La Piscine (1969)

On a rainy night, I watched the grandaddy of stylish pool inspiration: Jacques Deray’s 1969 thriller starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and a very young Jane Birkin. With costumes by Courrèges and a stunning Côte d’Azur pool serving as the backdrop for both steamy sex and something much darker. La Piscine is the stuff of mood-board dreams. It’s also a perennial designer reference, popping up in collections from Tory Burch and Simon Porte Jacquemus.

3. These Vuarnet wraparounds

My brother was obsessed with Vuarnet in the ‘90s, so coming across these perfect pool-blue wraparound shades immediately transported me. If you don’t buy them, I probably will.

Hayley Axelrad’s Pool Series

My pal Hayley is an incredibly talent artist in Toronto who just painted a whole series of heavenly pools, one of which was inspired by a recent trip I took to Morocco. Carrying Hockney’s legacy forward, for girlie pops!

5. Brooke Calahan’s perfect skirt

LA queen Brooke Callahan is really dominating my feed lately with her extremely saturated hues - they feel like the spiritual sister of Hockney and would be perfectly at home at Casa Lawa, the house I stayed at in Sicily for my birthday last year. Here’s her site!

5. The episode of S Club 7 where they play with dolphins (1999)

Highly recco finding random eps of S Club 7 and Breaker High on Youtube, like this episode with questionable subject matter that is exactly where my head goes when embodying this particular nostalgia. Fast forward to the 10 minute mark for a magical music video montage featuring so many dolphin flips.

6. The 2022 Jacquemus bathing suit that got away

I have this one in bright tangerine orange but I always regretted not buying the blue - it was sold out in my size! This one isn’t either, so someone should enjoy it while I continue the journey.

7. The Backstreet Boys Vegas Residency at the Sphere

I’m going to do a whole newsletter on this next week, but I basically lived inside this hue for an entire weekend in Vegas. Heaven!

8. Yves Saint Laurent brooch

This is literally a pool in a pin!

9. Samantha Jones consistently killing in this exact blue

I need not say much other than an SATC outfit watch guide:

• The outfit above in the LA eps: Season 3, episode 13 (Escape from New York) and 14 (Sex in Another City)! Two of my alltime favs!

• This Chanel headscarf and pool blue fit: Season 5, episode 8 (I Love a Charade).

• A flawless fit in the Fleet Week ep: The blue is somewhere in between pool and my other fav blue - iridescent baby. Season 5, episode 1 (Anchors Away).

• The Hamptons Hoedown sheer beach cover from when she foils Nina G. Season 2, episode 17 (Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women).

• Insane colour blocking perfection at the moment Carrie says “hello luverrr” Season 4, episode 18 (I Heart NY).

• The ep where she fucks the fireman then proceeds to embarrass herself in this 16/10 coat! Season 3, episode 1 (Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire).

10. This Chanel palette I bought mostly for the middle shadow

Pool blue eyeshadows are forever my fav and very hot at the mo, so part of me wants to try every single one out there (Exhibit A and B). Meanwhile, I treated to myself to Les 9 Ombres and wore it heavy to Club Confessions. Yes from me, dawg!

Last July, Madonna released Veronica Electronica, an electro remix album to her 1998 masterpiece Ray of Light. Originally intended as a companion CD but shelved because of Ray of Light‘s massive success, it had been hyped and speculated about by fans for years, so its release should have been explosive. I immediately quizzed my gays on where I could go dance to the remixes, assuming every club worth its tequila salt would be blasting them. One snootily replied: “Umm… one of those basic clubs in Chelsea?” To be fair, there wasn’t much that was actually new - most of the tracks had already trickled out over the years. BUT doesn’t anything even vaguely newish from one of Mother’s golden eras deserve respect? Adulation?

A month later, her birthday celebration at 3 Dollar Bill in Williamsburg was a tragic little gathering beside a packed Charli/Chappell party. We peered through the fence, realizing the people who still remembered the woman who once whipped out 15 squat jumps to the beat at age 43 were outnumbered.

How Fucking Dare Theys aside, this July paints a completely different picture. With the release of Confessions II, Mother has a number one album on the global charts and a promotional circuit that has included everything from a Times Square takeover to Club Confessions - a party you enter through a blow-up version of her puss before landing on a dance floor where she and god tier Confessions producer Stuart Price are playing the new album amidst throngs of sweaty bodies. I can’t believe I was lucky enough to witness both of those moments and fight my way onto platforms both times for optimal viewing (this time I was about half an inch away from falling off the bar, but I held it together).

Mother back on her throne as God intended has also sparked a renewed interest in her archive, both from those who weren’t around the first time (acceptable) and those who simply forgot (side eye). Case in point: “Thief of Hearts,” a song off Erotica, which picked up steam on TikTok this spring sparking the biggest streams since its release in ‘92. She played it at Club Confessions on Saturday and I truly ascended.

Anyways, it’s safe to say the superfans are healing, and we’re more than thrilled to talk your ear off about Mother’s deep cuts any chance we get. Since her career is in its fifth decade, there are too many for one, let alone several posts. Just ask my Madonna group chat, which has been alive for almost a decade with a constant stream of shares, unconsciousness and lols that you’d only get if you shared our one brain cell (actually you might…).

Here, I’ve compiled a few of my fav deep cuts, which I hope you’ll get into on your journey of Madonna appreciation.

“Impressive Instant” (2000)

I’m honestly not sure if this one is considered a deep cut anymore because of how much it is still lauded as one of Mother’s ultimate dance bops, produced of course by acid bass legend Mirwais Ahmadzaï. The song’s long tail is partially due to it being given to club DJs around the time of Music’s release, but also because of its lyrics, which could rival Shakespeare: I like to singy, singy, singy / Like a bird on a wingy, wingy, wingy / I like to rhumba, rhumba, rhumba / Dance to a samba, samba, samba…

“To be or not to be” found dead in a ditch….

Madonna has called this one of her “fuck it” songs, but the way she’s performing it during the Drowned World tour really belies any intended silliness. (Also, the smoke coming out of her puss is some magnificent foreshadowing.)

“Up Down Suite” (1992)

Originally released as a B-side on the “Rain” single, “Up Down Suite” is an incredible 12-minute ode to deep house that just HITS you right in that spot (you know what I mean). She paid tribute to it during 2024’s Celebration Tour by using it as an interlude while dancers vogued on stage during an outfit change.

The Next Best Thing (2000)

My Madonna group chat is not happy with me for including this because it is simply not good (unfortunately Mother’s filmography is riddled with bombs). But I personally love seeing her through the lens of a would-be romcom heroine. She plays Abbie, a perpetually unlucky-in-love single gal who becomes impregnated by her gay best friend Rupert Everett after a night of martinis and dancing to Fred Astaire, as one does. The Next Best Thing came out around the time LGBTQ plotlines were starting to hit the Hollywood mainstream - from In & Out to The Object of My Affection - and the film is a perfect snapshot of Mother’s friendship with Everett, her one-time GBF, who later called her a “whiny old barmaid” in his memoir after their relationship soured (linked a great Vanity Fair story about them below).

The movie flops by trying to make Madonna relatable (her magic is in being extraordinary). Still, it’s worth a watch for her peak ashtanga-yoga-arms, her flirty strawberry blonde curls and their undeniable chemistry.

Read the story HERE.

Body of Evidence (1993)

I already wrote about this one in my erotic thrillers guide, so you can jump on over to read all about Mother pouring hot candle wax on Willem Defoe, or better yet you can just find yourself a stream!

“Nothing Fails” (2003)

It’s not news to say that American Life is Madonna’s most slept-on album. Despite debuting at number one, it quickly fell off because of its critique of American politics during the Iraq War. Released today, it would be a lightning rod in a divisive moment, and songs like “Nothing Fails” would get the praise they deserve. The above MTV performance is so iconic to me, and not only because Mother is the only person alive who looks good in a flat cap.

If you’ve somehow skipped American Life altogether, stop what you’re doing immediately and go listen. Another award-winning lyric - I’m drinking a soy latte / I get a double shotte / It goes right through my body / And you know I’m satisfied - awaits!

Her cameo in Spike Lee’s Girl 6 (1996)

Screengrabs from Spike Lee’s cult flick Girl 6, about a struggling actress turned phone sex operator (Theresa Randle), are always showing up on the algo. But because it’s so hard to find the movie online, Madonna’s appearance has become a bit mythic. Alongside a star-studded cast including queen Debi Mazar, Halle Berry, Quentin Tarantino, Naomi Campbell, Jennifer Lewis and a young Michael Imperioli (plus an insane Prince soundtrack!), Mother plays one of Judy’s bosses, delivering a monologue about foot fetishes, butt plugs and bisexuality that’s one step away from an “absolutely no regrets.” Consider locking down a torrent your new summer assignment.

M by Madonna for H&M (2007)

Remember when Mother designed a collection of office siren garb for H&M and then made this iconic, Devil Wears Prada coded ad for it? Heaven! If you want to own a piece of this history while we’re in the midst of obsessing, I found a few incredible pieces from the original collection on sale:

A tight fitting shirt dress with pointed shoulder puffs

The white dress she wore to the launch collab party!

I would kill for these mid rise bootcut pants if they were my size

A satin track jacket you know she was wearing backstage at the Confessions tour

Off white Fuck Me pumps

“I Want You” ft. Massive Attack (1995)

I see now that this list is really favouring the deep house and electronica Mother was into in the mid ‘90s to early 2000s, but I’ll get to other genres next time (that’s the beauty of Mother’s catalogue, there’s an endless supply!). This cover of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” in collab with trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack is so sexy and cool, and while it was never released as a single due to legal disagreements between Motown and Madonna’s label, Maverick, it’s gotten its flowers in the years since.

Which Madonna deep cuts should I include next time? Comment below!

I finally moved into my very own Brooklyn apartment a few months ago and, after an endless carousel of sublets and temporary homes, getting to fill it with postmodern furniture mostly found on Facebook Marketplace has become an extremely fun and fulfilling obsession. The spot is a brand new concrete box in the sky with gallery-white walls, which I think (maybe this is controversial?) is the perfect backdrop for loading up with brights, endless books and the ‘lil trinkets I’ve collected over the years.

I think it could be weirder, though, which is probably why I’ve become so fixated on No Place Like Home, a 1986 interiors book I stumbled across a few years ago and tracked down on online for $10 (it’s a bit pricier now but still avail).

With images by Amy Arbus (yes, Diane’s daughter!), the book features Americans at home in spaces rich with colour, oddities and origin stories. There are huts, synagogues and Frank Gehry-designed lifeguard stations, all transformed into homes for some very idiosyncratic people including icon Dennis Hopper, artist Kenny Scharf (who if you weren’t already familiar with, was recently name-checked in Madonna’s latest single, “Danceteria”) and cabaret performer John Sex. It’s also heavy on OTT ‘80s style, Memphis, Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright. Fun fact: a few of these homes are right on the Venice Beach boardwalk in L.A. If you’ve ever passed them and stopped to stare like I have, the book offers a peek inside.

Flipping through its pages makes me feel a little like I’m a character in Amélie, nosily wandering through my eccentric neighbours’ apartments and inviting myself over to watch them paint endless versions of the same Renoir.

Like her mother, Arbus’s photographs often celebrate weirdos, oddballs and the kind of individuality the mainstream would rather smooth over. She’s made so many great books, including The Fourth Wall, which captured Broadway and Off-Broadway performers in costume but stripped of the stage’s context, and On the Street, an original street style compendium of New Yorkers shot for her monthly column in The Village Voice.

Here are some of my fav spaces from the book with accompanying captions I pulled from its pages. I need to spend a week just researching and stalking these people!

“In New York you couldn’t do what I did here,” said Miriam Wosk. She collaborated with architect Frank Gehry in renovating her penthouse in Beverly Hills. It sits perched atop a pink plaster apartment building and overlooks Century City. “It’s like being on a cruise ship up here,” she said.

Gaudí was a major influence in the tile work Miriam designed for herself. Her kitchen is under a dome and has been described as an “Aztec Deco temple.” She has a commercial range, industrial cabinets, and a double-door glass refrigerator. She wanted “the sophisticated, cool look” of the industrial equipment against “the warm, primitive, primary colors.”

Grocers Julia and Raymond Gee live in a house in Piney Point Village, Texas, that Bruce Goff designed for another family in 1958. The Gees wanted Goff to extend and remodel it, but after waiting five years for him to be available, they gave up and furnished the house themselves. Shortly thereafter, Goff came through with the plans. They adored his designs, but they found them too extravagant.

The plans for the house included a six-car garage, and at that time they had only one car. “Raymond’s from China,” said Julia, “and I’m just a little ol’ hillbilly from Arkansas, so we were doing good to get what we had.” They redid the house on a smaller scale, clearing all the changes with Goff. Now that their three children have almost grown up, they are beginning to feel the need for more cars.

Anne Ramis lives with her daughter Violet in Santa Monica, California. They moved into their house on Halloween. “The kitchen was the original impetus to change the house,” said Anne. “It was like a dungeon. It had really low fluorescent lighting and it was a harvest-gold color. It was real ugly. I thought maybe I should keep it ugly so I wouldn’t want to go in it.” When she hired Brian A. Murphy to do the interior design, she asked him to put shades that could be pulled down over the refrigerator and the stove so she could pretend it wasn’t really a kitchen. Then she commissioned Lisa Lombardi, a furniture designer, to make the “vegetable kingdom.” “I’m really afraid of food,” Anne said. “The kitchen was always a pretty scary place to me. Now it’s such a great room to be in, and it’s just a step away from the refrigerator.”

Suzanne Lipschutz is the owner of Second Hand Rose, a twentieth-century decorative-art gallery in the West Village of Manhattan. She lives a few blocks away with her son Luke. “I always have to tell my maid,” said Suzanne, “if you break a good piece of china, don’t throw it away. Tell me; it’s okay.” Suzanne calls them “bits and pieces.” She has boxes of them. She glues them onto furniture, jewelry boxes, kitchen counters, and dining-room walls. She says, “People see them more on the wall than they do on the table anyway.”

Clovis Ruffin, a clothing designer, lives in the Ansonia Hotel in New York City. His floors were painted by Jack Kelly, a set designer for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. “I’ve been through Japanese, I’ve been through Deco, I’ve been through chintz,” said Clovis. “I’ve been through everything. I wanted something very formal. I think people get very dumb and sloppy sitting around banquettes at night. I like everyone sitting up in chairs and making conversation. I think Louis XVI is the living end.”

Dan Friedman lives in a high-rise apartment building in Greenwich Village. He made his United States table after seeing The Day After, a film about the effects of a nuclear attack on this country. All his tables represent “various trouble spots in the world.” He has been doing a series of “postnuclear installations” in art galleries in New York, which include wall assemblages that incorporate debris, “mutant garbage cans,” and Three Mile Island lamps. His latest pieces include a “radiant energy source.” He thinks of them as “things that have been enhanced by disaster.”

Dorothy Dagne is a retired baker and lives in Duarte, California. Her husband collects movie sheet music, and she collects Shirley Temple memorabilia. A room in their house is devoted to Shirley Temple figurines, chairs, paper dolls, coloring books, mirrors, pins, jewelry, sewing kits, and baby buggies. Dorothy is a member of the “Shirley Temple Collectors by the Sea” doll club. Every year, they celebrate Shirley’s birthday with a party. Dorothy Dagne and Shirley Temple have never met. “She is very nice,” said Dorothy. “Every time I send her a new picture of something in my collection, she signs it Shirley Temple Black and sends it back.”

As we’ve discovered through the ongoing archival project that is Capsule 98, being a hoarding little freak in your youth can be very rewarding later in life. My multi-box time capsule from 1998 is, of course, what started this whole journey, but recently, I discovered even MORE mementos: heavily stuffed scrapbooks from 1999 through 2003, a box from my first years in NYC, and a Warhol Marilyn-covered box full of Y2K beauty treasures that had been sitting on my dresser for decades, relatively untouched.

I’ll be unboxing the rest in the coming months, but today’s my beauty box’s turn.

Let’s start with Stila, which was QUEEN at the time for me and all others who bowed at the feet of founder Jeanine Lobel for her blotted typewriter font, Daria-meets-Shoe Diva illustration style, and slew of celeb clients like Cameron Diaz, for whom the iconic clickable lip glaze gloss was invented.

In the ’00s, Stila had a counter at Holt Renfrew, the chicest, fanciest department store in Canada, and I discovered the loophole of booking an appointment with the Stila counter girls to do my full face for the cost of one of these incredible limited-edition palettes—around $50, an affordable luxury I could handle at the time (probably from my camp counselor salary). That’s how I nabbed most of these:

1. “Sweet…the look”: A quad with three eyeshadows (dahlia, chinois, and key) and one pinky blush named bloom. It’s surprising that the lilac is the least used - this is the kind of hue I still dream about and rebuy any chance I get.

1. “Feminine… the look”: I used this one to shit, it was my first successful smokey eye guide! Another quad with three shadows (storm, fog, cloud) and a soft pink blush I still sort of stick to.

1. Scented Stila bracelets! OMFG these still smell just like day one. The yellow one is creme bouquet (if anyone else remembers this one, it was the perfect mix of soft vanilla and lily of the valley) and the green is jade blossom, also floral and a little citrusy. Both of the bottles were decorated with dried flowers… Jeanine’s mind!

1. A pastel “picnic in the park” trio encased in gingham and inscribed with the quote, “Never look at the future with eyes of fear.” Sure! I think this one was a hand me down from my sister. Again, still the colours I look for.

1. Pretty sure the silver compact was a matte face powder - it’s completely done. A time frozen empty!

There are approximately seventeen thousand other relics in this box, and while I won’t subject you to every last one (unless you ask me to!), a few deserve a moment:

The most ideal baby blue fat eyeliner from the original Sephora brand that I still dream about. It’s the exact hue of Nomi’s Fall 1994 Versace suit in Showgirls, one I fantasize about replicating on the daily (I just bought this Chanel palette for its shimmering blues - darker but heavenly!). The other Sephora liners are incredible too - I used them religiously through high school. So easy!

M.A.C. lipstick in “Morange” from later in the 2000s - this paired with no prescription thick rimmed glasses was THE look during the hipster era and it’s still formulated today. I looked so fucking fash in this despite my colour theory professor insisting I was a Winter.

Lancome Le Rouge Absolu lipstick in “Proenza Pink.” In town on a March break visit, I took myself to Bergdorfs to buy this exclusive collab shade of pepto pink that I am now learning The New York Times called infantilizing and clownlike but I felt a Proenza Schouler lipstick was the coolest thing one could buy in 2007. This was back before limited editions had explosive Tiktok hype and multi-pronged marketing campaigns, and the fact that I knew about it and was able to secure one was all I needed to feel high off life for weeks. I obviously wore this one out all summer long, usually posing in deranged fashion like this photo from a night partying at Misshapes.

I need to go back and look at these shade names again (I left them in my parents’ basement!) but all I know is that I was truly obsessed with this Urban Decay colour, its OG packaging (this is not the original 1996 version, I’d guess somewhere around 2000). I swatched for a video that I’m still working on, so stay tuned!

The compact that looks like trash is actually the highlight for me! I can’t find too much about this online, but Diane Von Furstenberg launched a beauty line in 2003 and in Canada it was exclusively carried at Holts. As we know from my Stila tactic, booking a makeup appointment was always my way in, and Diane was in town to host what I now understand was a consumer event in store.

As I was getting my face done, I obsessed all over her about the original DVF wrap my mom had in the seventies (now nowhere to be found, ugh) and how obsessed I was with her as a fledgling fashion thing. She signed my blush, gave me some advice, and off I went, life made!

The Rocket City package is some mysterious glitter from the space-themed, nostalgic makeup brand best known during the early Y2K era - I remember opening and shutting this package constantly because it flew everywhere. I was obsessed but it simply was not high school apropos! I also play around with this one in the video.

Looking back at these relics, I am simultaneously struck by a renewed passion to bring back my gurls and to make Stila relevant again by doing what brands so rarely do: revisiting their own archives with very few changes!

I’m also struck by how special each of these products was to me, whether it was something I saved for, inherited via hand-me-down, or, best of all, acquired through someone I admired deeply (shout out to DVF for an unforgettable afternoon in the makeup chair). Looking at the way teens and tweens inhale beauty today as just another thing to play with until the next product drops, it makes me a bit bummed for them. Every compact felt precious. Every limited edition felt like a secret, not a ‘drop.’ Half the fun was the hunt.

I’m going to post a video version of this tomorrow too! If you’re not already following @capsule98 on Instagram, wtf are you waiting for?

Happy Mother’s Day, queens! This is the first time in years that my mom and I won’t spend the day together, which feels wrong for two people who are simply obsessed with saying ILYSM back and forth ad nauseam. This year, we’ll have to settle for exchanging emojis, progress photos of our respective peony bouquets and about thirty ILYSMs across the border.

Mother’s Day, of course, is not uncomplicated for everyone. For some, the person they want to call is no longer here, leaving behind photographs, habits, stories, maybe a few stained recipe cards if you’re lucky. Which is what makes my friend Nadia Pizzimenti’s cookbook Mangiasti?!, created to preserve her late mother Maryann’s recipes and memory, so instantly resonant (she’s already sold out following Thursday’s launch).

Nadia is a chic-as-hell stylist in Toronto whom I have known and admired for her elegance and her commitment to preserving Italian culture and family tradition in all its OTT glory, whether through her account Nonna & Gabanna, where she documents fabulous Italian signoras, or her birthday extravaganza in Puglia that inspired my own in Sicily the following year.

Mangiasti?! (which translates to the classic feeder greeting, “did you eat?!”) tells the the story of Nadia’s family through recipes and gorgeous imagery by the incredibly talented duo, Saty + Pratha (the same pals responsible for the images in my book, Toronto Makes!)

Recipes are among the few heirlooms that require reenactment. You can’t keep a plate of ragu forever, you chop, stir, taste and measure your way back toward someone. Which is just what Nadia did alongside her Nonna, Francis. The two met regularly to test, cook and bake, building a whole new set of memories around Nadia’s mother, whom she remembers as a fizzy, endlessly positive presence, alive again in these beautiful pages. The images capture that dreamy Italo vibe we all try to recreate each summer, while the notes bring out endless family quirks.

Below is our chat about the project. Bravo, girl!

What inspired you to make this book?

My mom made a cookbook about her family recipes, and that’s kind of what inspired all of this. After she passed away, that book became how we kept her memory going. We’d get together and cook her recipes, and while we were doing it, we realized we didn’t have any of my grandmother’s recipes written down. There were certain things where we were like, “If she doesn’t make this anymore, we’ll never have it again.” So we started documenting everything, and it kind of turned into this.

Can you talk a little bit about how cooking became part of the grief process for your family?

My mom was an amazing cook - one of my friends used to call her “the Italian Martha Stewart.” After she passed away, making her recipes became comforting. You make it, you eat it, you have a good time doing it, and it just feels like she’s there.

Right after everything happened, we were spending a lot of time together cleaning up her stuff and doing all of those things, but food was always tied to every event in our family. So we kept getting together and cooking her recipes, and then it kind of spawned into us wanting to know more, especially my grandmother’s recipes, which she’d often lie about.

What do you mean?

My grandmother would give me the full recipe - measurements, everything - and then I’d make it and it wouldn’t be right. I’d go make it with her and realize things were missing, or the measurements weren’t actually what she told me.

What were some of the recipes that felt really important to preserve?

The ragu was a big one. It’s this really meat-heavy sauce with meatballs, sausage and short ribs all cooked together for hours. We always had it at the cottage, so it’s directly tied to summertime memories for me.

My aunt’s rice balls are another huge family thing. Everyone’s obsessed with them. And then there are simpler things too, like my mom’s veal in olive oil, garlic and parsley. That was my birthday dinner every year. You’d just take bread and dunk it in the garlic oil.

What was your mom like in the kitchen?

She was a Gemini, so she was all over the place in the best way. Music on, back door open, doing a million things at once. Something baking downstairs, something on the stove upstairs. She loved to cook and she loved to entertain. She was a stay-at-home mom, but if she’d had a job, it would’ve been something in entertaining. She really, really showed her love through food.

What do you think this whole process taught you about food and memory?

That was really the whole point of the book. It wasn’t until months into us cooking together that I realized, “Oh, we’re actually using this to heal.”

It’s crazy how something that’s just a list of ingredients and instructions on a piece of paper can keep a person alive in your life, but it really can. It comforts you. It makes you feel okay. And that became the main message I wanted to get across with the book.

If you’ve simply been on the edge of your seat waiting for a new edition of Capsule 98 to drop, I am here to tell you that I’ve been busy interviewing Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway for a whole five minutes and then telling everyone I know about it. Also, it was my birthday on Tuesday!

Anyway, it’s been twenty years since I sat in theatre, willfully crafting an ED as I watched The Devil Wears Prada at Yorkdale Mall with my best friend Cliff (I asked him to give me the Miranda Priestley death stare if he saw me eating anything other than a cucumber and let’s just say he took his job very seriously). Like so many Mille**ial girlies, it was one of the inspirations that set me on a starry-eyed path to New York City—only to arrive a year later just in time for the financial crash to slowly detonate my dreams of expensing town cars, casually meeting Miuccia and never, ever tossing my phone into a fountain in Paris (Andy was crazy for that).

My ’00s fashion trauma is neither here nor there, because earlier this month, things came full circle at the most tricked-out press junket I’ve ever seen for The Devil Wears Prada 2 (in theatres tomorrow), complete with a fully realized Runway magazine office. Other than Meryl, the VIP of the day was Andy’s original chowder-stained cerulean sweater, displayed reverently in the closet like the relic it is.

There, I met costume designer Molly Rogers, and of course, Meryl and Anne for this ELLE Canada feature. I asked Molly about working with icon queen legend Pat Field on the first film at a time when the fashion world was terrified to participate for fear of Anna Wintour lashings. I wore vintage Prada for the occasion (a turquoise and black chevron tweed A-line dress from the incredibleeeee Fall 2013 collection), a fact that tickled Meryl and Anne—I believe there was a “that’s my girl!” emitted from Ms Streep, which sent me to the heavens.

In the sequel, Andy has returned to New York after 15 years reporting around the world. She’s frozen her eggs. “Same, exactly!” I shared with the duo, and I can confirm that they were just tickled pink. There were high fives for the potential, and it was a plot point Anne particularly wanted to highlight. We can have it all, would-be geriatric preggos!

You’ll have to read the full story over on ELLE’s site, but before you click on over, I must also say that I really enjoyed the movie and I’m eager to hear what you think of it. For as sponny as it is, it was quite aptly reflective of the issues that face fashion right now, from dire budget constraints, to vest-wearing tech bro billionaires that must be pandered to (the level of product placement is also a sign of the times… church and state begone in favour of whatever capital is available). I got swept up in the silly fun of it all, and the message that sometimes, powerful women do win it all. There’s also a cameo by Tina Brown, which feels the exclusive domain of magazine-heads.

Anyway, the interview was over in three seconds but it was a moment I’ll cherish forever.

Welcome back to my ‘lil corner of the nostalgiaverse! I know I’ve been a bit uneven with my newsletters, but a lot has been going on. I started a new job! I signed a lease on my first NYC apartment! Way more on that last one to come.

Meanwhile, I’m adding a bit more structure to my output here and plan on sharing more that brings us back to the origins: my impeccably preserved time capsule from 1998, alongside defined pillars that include interviews, vintage shopping focuses, and guides (feel free to share your requests in the comments!).

Childhood Randi could teach me a lot about focus and creativity. I was an obsessive documentarian in my early years, which I guess is what Instagram is for me in the present day. Every time I go into my childhood bedroom (which, according to this recent Architectural Digest story, is where the youths want to be), I seem to find more and more artifacts worthy of sharing, from a beauty box full of half-used products circa 2005 to this extremely serious sex “rules” list I have no idea why I felt the need to write and preserve.

27 years later, I’m impressed by my hypochondriac tendencies and their ability to protect me from dangerous situations (which, thankfully, still tracks!), but also lol at the last vestiges of ingrained puritanism on on display before high school horny brain took over.

I shan’t confirm or deny which if any of these rules stood the test of time. But I’m sure the torn out Cosmo ‘sex 411’ insert and photo of Tom Ford lurking behind this list gives you a teeny hint.

SEX
June, 19, 1999

My Rules

1. I will never even think about it before 17–18.

2. I will always bring a condom that is 100% trustworthy.

3. I will always take ALL precautions.

4. Even if I am taking birth control, or have another way of protection, I will always bring a condom to protect myself & my partner from STDs.

5. I will get tested frequently if I am sexually active.

6. I will make my partner get tested before we have sex.

7. I will never be pressured into doing anything that I don’t want to do.

8. I will (try to) to talk to Mom & Andrea about it.

9. I will only do it for love (if I am in love).

10. I will definitely rationalize before.

11. I will talk to my partner before.

12. I will try to research as much as I can, so I am aware of all diseases, protection etc.

13. I will never do it because I think it’s about time.