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Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which gives people an entire day to ask what you’re going as. I haven’t decided. With everything happening, I’m finding it difficult to choose a fictional source of terror.

But I’ve done some shopping. Below is a selection of costumes inspired by fashion, beauty, wellness, and other industries that have made a very good living suggesting something is wrong with us. Shoes are your own, and none of the costumes come with a comfortable bra.

The Brand Community

You wanted a cashmere sweater. Unfortunately, the sweater is the least developed part of the business.

Wear a cardigan and carry a tote containing the founder’s divorce story. Approach guests and ask what belonging means to them. If they say “being allowed into my own apartment,” explain that you’re building something much bigger than clothes. In fact, it’s more than clothes.

Includes: A panel discussion, a ceramics collaboration, and a founder who refers to selling knitwear as “this work.” The sweater is $385, dry-clean only, and available in one size called Everyone.

.The Effortless Woman

Preparation begins the previous Tuesday. By Saturday, you should have undergone enough maintenance to qualify as a small European aircraft.

You’ll need a facial, a blowout, a manicure, a pedicure, a brow appointment, and a pair of trousers hemmed to a height achievable only while standing perfectly still. Arrive eleven minutes late and say you almost didn’t come because you were gardening.

Includes: $4,600 of looking like this and a husband who thinks you’re naturally blonde. When photographed, put one hand in your pocket so nobody sees the invoice.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Guest Bathroom

Wear cream and smell faintly of something that used to be a tree. Place a dry brush, a very heavy jar, and an object of uncertain jurisdiction on a marble tray.

Guests may wash their hands, but the water is by subscription only. If someone asks where you keep the Advil, explain that pain is often the body’s way of remembering wheat.

Includes: A $240 hand towel folded by a woman who isn’t allowed to use it.

The Restaurant You Can’t Get Into

Stand in front of eight empty chairs holding an iPad. When a guest asks to sit down, look at the screen as though you’re checking whether their father survived the operation.

You can accommodate two people at 5:10 or one person at 11:40. The reservation requires a credit card, a blood type, and cancellation notice before the friendship began. Guests are welcome to wait at the bar, which is also fully committed despite having nobody in it.

Includes: A hostess disappointed in you, one martini at forehead temperature, and a $29 celery stalk. The stalk is described as “an exploration.”

The Personal Brand

Come as yourself, as long as you can explain who you are in three pillars. One should be curiosity; another should imply that you own a home.

Ask guests what they’re working on before deciding how warmly to greet them. If someone tells you something moving about their mother, say, “That would make an incredible post.” During dinner, announce that you’ve been taking a step back, then describe the six channels on which you’ll be documenting it.

Includes: A photograph of you laughing at your laptop and a bio that says “formerly” four times. Your husband has been asked to develop a stronger point of view.

A Billionaire Being Relatable

Wear a plain gray T-shirt selected by a team. Mention that you, too, enjoy toast. Attempt a hobby in public, a hydrofoil, a barbecue, a sport you purchased last month, and have it photographed as though it happened by accident.

Tell guests you’re just a regular person building the future. If anyone brings up the layoffs, say you’re focused on the mission and offer them a chip.

Includes: A gray T-shirt, a publicist introduced as a close friend, and a surfboard holding a small flag. Your relatability has a valuation.

A Celebrity’s No-Makeup Face

Apply foundation, concealer, bronzer, blush, highlighter, brow pencil, brow gel, mascara, individual lashes, and three lip products. Sit beside a window and write “Just me.”

Your makeup artist must crouch below the sill until the photograph is approved. Once it’s posted, thank your followers for allowing you to be vulnerable. Your publicist will confirm that the vulnerability is exclusive to Vogue through Monday.

Includes: A ring light, a retoucher, and 14,000 comments from women apologizing for their own faces. Hair by somebody named Chris. He’s the best.

The Wellness Retreat

Welcome guests with a small bowl of tepid disappointment. Explain that the weekend is an opportunity to listen to their bodies, unless their bodies request lunch.

At 6 a.m., lead a silent walk to a place where everyone can talk about themselves. Ask what they’re releasing. Anyone who says “$7,000” will be invited to examine their scarcity mindset.

Includes: A journal, a woman named Sky, and a photograph of everyone crying in matching linen. Checkout is at ten, but your room must be emotionally vacated by nine.

The Tasteful Halloween Decoration

Place one white pumpkin outside your house. It should suggest that a child once lived nearby.

Wear oatmeal cashmere and tell trick-or-treaters that you’ve moved away from orange. Offer them a single square of chocolate so dark it qualifies as punishment. Ask the youngest child whether they’ve considered a costume with less branding.

Includes: A skeleton facing the wall because its expression was too commercial. The cobwebs are Belgian.

Before you leave the house

Bring identification, a credit card, and a small bag for everything you’ll be asked to unpack. If you’re going as the Personal Brand, you’ll also need a charger.

I’ll wear black and refuse to explain what I do. It’s a fantasy costume, but I think I can pull it off for one night. 🖤

In the last post, I made the case for black. But today is a new day, and I want to talk about a dress everyone's eyes are on: a gold skirt with feathered shoulders my grandmother would have appreciated.

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Getting dressed up has always felt a little odd to me. I love clothes and spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about them, but an invitation with a dress code can make me feel as though I’ve been assigned a part. I’m expected to arrive as a woman, and I’m not sure I like her clothes.

“Cocktail” is particularly unhelpful. I like cocktails. I’m less certain about the dress category that has grown up around them, with its promise of being appropriate for an evening nobody has adequately described. I can look at a perfectly nice dress and know it will satisfy the invitation while doing absolutely nothing for me.

My taste tends toward two extremes. I want something very simple and black, or something wild enough to make me excited to go. I have very little appetite for the middle, where so much occasion dressing seems to live.

At 56, I know this about myself. I also know that a neckline I admire on someone else may be a terrible idea on me, that I don’t enjoy feeling tightly packaged, and that I’m unlikely to have a good evening if I spend it monitoring my cleavage. These are useful things to have learned. I’d like to put them to work.

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Happy Fall y’all.

I’ve been looking through my screenshots, which is a good way to discover what’s occupying your brain. Apparently mine is mostly brown suede, a sofa, and dogs. I'd also happily wear a camel outfit in its entirety like Linda in Max Mara above, though the haircut may be doing some of the work. Astounding how perfect it all still feels to me.

And speaking of lingering feelings, here’s what I’m still thinking about this week.

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I’ve been wondering whether the world already ended and nobody told us. There was probably an email, but it went to Promotions, where I also keep important correspondence from a company I bought a bath mat from in 2019.

I’d assumed we’d notice. I figured someone would come on television and take off their glasses, and we’d all call our families. It hadn’t occurred to me that we might just keep going to the dentist with a vague feeling that something was wrong.

The state of the world alone is worth looking into. I’ll read a headline so deranged that I have to put the phone down and stare at the wall for a while. Then I pick it up, and someone asks whether I’ve had a chance to look at the deck. I have, although I’m having trouble with slide nine. I was trying to work out whether everything will hold, and now I’m being asked to make the headline more playful. I’ll give it a go, but you may need to allow for a second round.

“Can they even do that?” has become a regular part of adult conversation. I used to ask it about someone parking in front of a hydrant. Now I ask it about the news in general, and nobody at the table seems confident about the answer. Someone says there will probably be a lawsuit, and we go back to eating Skinny Pop and watching the Housewives.

I don’t know how much of this we’re really meant to absorb. I check the news in the morning, then sometimes again in the middle of the night, as though my supervision might help.

What makes me suspicious is how much of ordinary life now seems designed to test whether we’ll put up with it. I’ve been going along with each new arrangement one at a time, usually because I’m trying to get something done. A password to park the car seemed like a lot, but I made one. I needed to park.

Recently, while ordering shampoo, I was asked to prove I was human. It was Oribe, so I was already a little tender about the whole transaction. The website showed me nine photographs and told me to select the squares with bicycles in them. A little piece of a wheel stuck into the next square, and I lost some time I will never get back deciding whether that counted. My answer was rejected. More bicycles appeared. I’m 56, standing in my kitchen in my sports bra, increasingly unsure what a bicycle looks like.

If this is an intake procedure, I’d rather speak to someone. I could explain why I still have the cable to a Discman I no longer own, afraid to throw it away in case the Discman comes back and needs me. I feel that would establish my humanity fairly quickly.

Buying things used to be the end of an errand. You paid, you took the thing home, you got on with your life. The bath mat company sees our arrangement differently. It welcomed me to the family. I hadn’t realized there was an opening, but apparently my purchase qualified me. Since then I’ve been kept informed about new colors, the founder’s thoughts, and a bathroom styled by someone named Madison, who keeps a collection of vintage perfume bottles and a few dahlias within reach of the tub. I know less about several of my cousins.

When I don’t respond, the subject lines get wounded. WE MISS YOU. DID YOU FORGET SOMETHING? I did not forget something. I bought it, and I’ve been standing on it after my shower ever since.

Shopping in person doesn’t necessarily help. At the drugstore, the toothpaste is locked up, so you press a button and wait for someone with keys. While you wait an eternity, you can study the other toothpastes you’re also not allowed to touch. When an employee finally arrives, you suddenly can’t remember which one you wanted. There’s something about having a witness that makes considering your enamel feel indulgent, so you reach for the Crest, because you don’t want to keep them from the essential business of restocking something pumpkin-spice-flavored Werther’s in July. Then you remember you meant to try the Aquafresh, out of nostalgia, to settle once and for all whether it’s as minty fresh as you recall. You will not settle it. A person, and a pallet of pumpkin caramel, are waiting.

I once bought toothpaste without assistance. I’d like to think I could still manage it.

Then comes the survey. How likely am I to recommend this pharmacy to a friend? I keep trying to picture bringing it up over dinner, maybe when someone mentions she’s been unhappy with her current toothpaste custodian. The paper towels want a rating too. They arrived. I was pleased to see them. I don’t have an anecdote.

Dinner takes considerably more effort. You set three alarms for when reservations open, then make yourself free at that exact minute, ready to fight other people for the same roast chicken. I moved to New York in 1993, back when you could still call a restaurant and a human being would answer. I’m the kind of regular who knows exactly where the chef grew up, why he refuses to use metal knives on fresh herbs, and what his nonna did to a tomato on a Sunday morning that fundamentally altered his worldview. He won’t shut up about it, and frankly, neither would I. Now I’m on a waitlist while getting promotional emails from the restaurant that won’t let me eat there. I’d like to know whether he can feed me at seven.

Meanwhile, my phone has things it wants to show me. I’m looking for directions, and suddenly it’s HERE’S A MEMORY, which turns out to be my former jawline in Port Antonio in 2019. I hadn’t asked to see it. I was trying to find the Holland Tunnel. There’s music, and the photographs move slowly enough for me to examine exactly what’s changed. I don’t need a device I’m still paying off to remind me how well-rested I looked before I owned it.

It can, however, follow a sandwich beautifully across Brooklyn. I know who has it, whether he’s on a bicycle, and how many minutes until lunch. For almost everything consequential, I’m told the situation is developing. I wish the sandwich people would take over a few other departments.

We have AI now, which is making humans seem more useless than usual. Meanwhile, the fitted sheet keeps defeating us. I would have appreciated a little attention there before we moved on to replacing the creative class.

I’ll admit my theory has holes. I’m still having a good time with quite a lot of things, most of them stubbornly analog. I can walk down Court Street with Gidget, who considers an old napkin worth a thorough investigation. I can buy a banana without creating an account, read something printed on actual paper, or fall into a long sidewalk conversation that nobody scheduled. I’m not entirely innocent, though. If the world has, in fact, ended, I’d want the afterlife to have a good vintage store, and I’d want to be told the moment new things came in. That exact appetite is how I got myself into the bath mat situation in the first place.

Gidget seems satisfied with where we’ve landed. Nobody has asked her to create a password with a symbol, and nobody sends her a weekly summary of how much time she spent looking at things. She goes outside, sees who’s around, and comes home when she’s finished. I’d like a little more of that myself. I’m happy to walk, browse, eat something, talk to someone, and go home. If I enjoyed the sandwich, I’ll probably order it again. You don’t have to check.

For now, I’m proceeding as though we’re still alive. I have deadlines, and it seems unwise to miss them on the strength of a theory. If anyone received the official announcement, please forward it.

I’d look myself, but the bath mat people have launched a podcast, and there’s been some follow-up.

A friend sent me pictures of herself at a bat mitzvah this weekend, dancing with a glow stick in a fluffy dress, surrounded by kids and having an absolute ball. I wrote her back immediately. She and I are similar in a very important way: we love to have a good time. I could practically hear her laughing through the pictures.

It reminded me of something Howard Stern said recently. His wife, Beth, tells him he’s funny but not fun, and he seemed a little stunned by it, then stunned again that a trip to Italy with Jimmy Kimmel and their wives turned out to be a surprisingly good time. The distinction stuck with me, because it’s real and it’s bigger than it sounds. You can be the wittiest person at the table and still be no fun at all, because fun means getting on the dance floor, not narrating it from the edge.

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My grandmother had a saying: “Good is good.”

My mother’s mother loved beautiful things and saw no reason to explain herself. She bought good clothes and had them tailored, chose her furniture carefully, and used expensive skincare in little jars with satisfyingly heavy lids. She shopped at Philadelphia’s Nan Duskin and believed that if something was well made and you loved it, you bought it, cared for it, and eventually handed it down. I still hear “good is good” whenever I find something I want that costs more than I’d planned to spend.

So I come by this honestly. The women I’ve always admired had very particular tastes and took real pleasure in indulging them. My grandmother and her little jars. Lee Radziwill in a caftan beside a Francis Bacon, perfectly pleased with herself. Helene Rochas lounging above the fog of New York as though she’d arranged the weather.

Audrey getting away with it in Charade. None of them pretended not to care, and the caring was the whole charm.

There’s a cold kind of fancy too, the expensive stuff that’s all status and no joke, but that’s Thursday’s problem, and I’ll bring knives. Today is strictly the delightful.

One thing before the list. The economy is frightening, the job market is brutal, and nobody needs another haul video telling them to buy more. This isn’t that. Most of what delights me costs nothing, the expensive things are here to dream about, and the point is paying attention rather than paying up. A little delight is not the enemy of a hard year. Some years it’s the only thing getting you through.

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I went to see Unzipped at Film Forum this week and was immediately distracted by Isaac Mizrahi’s trousers. High-waisted, a little old-man-ish, worn by someone barely into his thirties who already seemed capable of telling you what was wrong with the world over a very long lunch. I loved how completely he was already himself.

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A J. Press email arrived on a Tuesday, and I lost ten minutes to it. The Harriman Cup, their annual polo thing, with a navy blazer here, a rep tie there, an orange antique car parked on the grass like it had opinions. I didn’t need a single item, and I read the whole thing twice.

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I saw the words on Instagram over a video of an old Suzuki: It’s to be old and cool. Bad grammar, excellent idea. it did follow up the thought of the goal is not to be young and hot…you get it.

I saved it and kept thinking about it. I’m 56. I don’t want to be mistaken for 46, and I’m not interested in being told I look good “for my age”; a compliment with a small funeral folded inside it. Old and cool is the whole ambition.

This is not the same as aging gracefully, a phrase I have never trusted. It always seems to involve excellent posture, expensive oatmeal-colored knits, and accepting a gradual fade as evidence of good character. You can still be beautiful, apparently, but please turn it down.

I have nothing against good posture or oatmeal. I simply don’t want to lower the volume.

The things I saved this week made that clear. Céline Dion was outside her hotel in Paris, singing with fans and dressed as though the sidewalk had been waiting all day for her arrival. Erin O’Connor appeared in the back of a cab wearing leopard print with an acid-green collar. Then came an old photograph of Mick Jagger in an outfit I would put on right now, exactly as it was.

At Arcade, three vintage dresses sat: the red, the crimson, and the gold Geoffrey Beene. None of them wanted to appear timeless. They were too specific for that, which is probably why they still looked so good.

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My camera roll is absurd. Dogs, the Pink Panther (no idea why), dresses, screenshots of things I might buy, screenshots of things I will never buy, outfits I want to remember, and the occasional word I have apparently decided to research at 10:37 in the morning.

I took enough screenshots last week to realize they had accidentally become a post. There’s no official theme here, but there is a very clear point of view: clothes with nerve, women with presence, neighborhood people making excellent things, jewelry that looks a little superstitious, and a cat living far better than the rest of us.

Carroll Gardens c’est chic

I am not even kidding. The neighborhood fair in Carroll Park had patched military shirts, drawings of local storefronts and brownstones, quilts, clothes, books, and people selling things they had actually made.

This is becoming one of my favorite things about living here. You walk over expecting a pleasant little neighborhood situation, possibly buy a lemonade, and instead find something so good you start circling the table and texting people. Paris has the flea markets, yes. Carroll Gardens now has Catherine Flon on the front of a military shirt, and I’m calling that a draw.

Three dresses at Arcade

Then there were the three vintage dresses at Arcade I was looking at for my niece’s wedding in January: the red, the crimson, and the gold Geoffrey Beene. Red and crimson are technically members of the same family, but these were not doing the same job. Plus, they were three different eras which was very cool.

All three had that thing vintage dresses sometimes have that new ones almost never do. The color, the line, the proportion, the amount of drama allowed into the room: decided. No focus group appears to have been consulted.

The Geoffrey Beene was especially good because Geoffrey Beene is always especially good. His clothes understood the body without feeling obliged to explain it, and the gold dress looked like it had been waiting patiently for the rest of us to catch up.

I’m not going to give you a sermon about sustainability here. Sometimes the best argument for vintage is simply that the dresses are better.

Céline, obviously

Céline Dion singing with fans outside her hotel in Paris is the best thing I saw all week. She climbed onto a car, took off her slippers, and sang “Pour que tu m’aimes encore” with the crowd after one of her shows. Of course she did. I will admit I’ve never been a huge fan of her music, but after watching the fantastic documentary about her and her illness, I was transformed.

There is something so deeply Céline about turning the sidewalk outside the Royal Monceau into another performance. It isn’t managed intimacy or a star attempting to look relatable. She genuinely cannot help giving people the full thing.

The outfits have been outrageous in the best possible way, too. The black dress with the great feathery business happening at the bottom. The fur jacket with enormous trousers. The hats, the glasses, the general refusal to exit a hotel looking as though she is on her way to buy an oat milk.

This is what a world-class star looks like. Not perfect and not tasteful in the bloodless sense. Céline has scale. Even standing on a sidewalk, she understands that the people came to see Céline Dion.

Her return to performing after six years away and everything she has endured with stiff-person syndrome makes it emotional, but not maudlin. She’s back, she’s singing, and she’s dressed for the occasion. Thank God. It’s beyond fun to watch.

Erin O’Connor’s face

I am also newly obsessed, or possibly re-obsessed, with Erin O’Connor. That face. The short hair, the long neck, the severity, the complete absence of any request to find her adorable.

She posted a picture from the back of a cab wearing leopard with an acid-green collar, and I have thought about it ever since. On paper, leopard and acid green could tip into eccentric aunt at a regional theater opening. On Erin O’Connor, it looks not only correct but inevitable.

Some models show you the clothes. Erin gives the clothes a backstory and possibly an alibi

The Mick Jagger outfit

I saved a photograph of Mick Jagger in 1972 because the outfit is perfect and I would wear it right now. Not an updated version, not “inspired by,” and not softened for a woman of 56. The outfit itself.

This is what the best archive pictures do. They make you realize how much of what gets presented as a new idea is merely a worse version of something Mick Jagger wore fifty years ago. The proportions still work. The attitude still works. Nothing needs fixing. I would wear this entire outfit and that’s a fact. The cut of those trousers and the undone shirt with a great striped blazer and sneakers. Plus the hair. Slam dunk to this day. If I’ve had a style brief all these years, it’s British androgynous male rock star. This wasn’t an outfit I wanted to reinterpret. I wanted his actual clothes.

The genius of Widow’s Bay

Widow’s Bay is so good because it knows exactly what it is, even though what it is should not work. It’s a New England civic comedy, a horror story, a tourist-board disaster, a little Jaws, a little Stephen King, and somehow still emotionally real.

Matthew Rhys plays the mayor of a town everyone insists is cursed, while he remains determined to turn it into a tourist destination. The show can be frightening and ridiculous within the same scene without elbowing you to make sure you noticed the tonal shift.

It just won 14 Emmys, the most ever for a comedy in a single season, which sounds excessive until you watch it. Then it feels about right. The writing is sharp, the town is fully populated with oddballs rather than “quirky characters,” and nobody involved seems afraid of making a very specific thing.

That may be the running theme here after all. Specificity wins.

Socrate has the right idea

Socrate is the resident cat at Le Bristol Paris. He sits on upholstered chairs, poses with red luggage, and wanders around one of the grandest hotels in the city with the confidence of someone who has never once been asked for a credit card at check-in.

A hotel cat is already an excellent idea. A hotel cat named Socrate, photographed like a minor royal and apparently free to receive guests as he sees fit, is an institution. Gidget would love this gig.

Made for mature eyes

An ad for Ogee liquid eyeshadow stopped me because it used the words made for mature eyes. No “ageless,” no woman with silver hair laughing alone in a linen shirt, and no suggestion that we are all on an empowering journey toward accepting our eyelids.

I haven’t tried it yet, so this is not an endorsement of the product, but I was pleased to see a beauty company acknowledge that mature eyelids might require something different. That shouldn’t feel revolutionary, but here we are.

The colors are good, too. Smoky, useful, and not remotely interested in making anyone sparkle like a baked good.

A little jewelry superstition

The Jane Win malachite moon-and-star earrings are hearts, celestial symbols, pearls, green stone, and gold all happening at once. Ordinarily I might remove one of those elements, but these are not interested in restraint, and I respect that.

They look like something you would buy because you decided they meant something. Protection, luck, love, a dramatic change in fortune by Thursday. Jewelry is more fun when it carries at least the possibility of supernatural assistance.

Kesselgarden

I came across the word Kesselgarden, an old term for a noisy, crowded, chaotic situation. It grew from the way Yiddish-speaking immigrants pronounced Castle Garden, the immigration station at the southern tip of Manhattan before Ellis Island opened. My mother used to use it all the time and I never understood what its origin was, but I knew what it meant.

It’s a good word. You can hear the commotion in it, and I like that a piece of New York history survived by becoming slang for any place where everyone is talking and nobody knows what is happening.

Which brings us neatly to the Feast of San Gennaro, now celebrating its hundredth anniversary. Food, bands, religious processions, tourists, New Yorkers complaining about the tourists, and enough people packed into Mulberry Street to make Kesselgarden feel entirely current.

Old and cool

One of the things I saved this week was a simple reply to the idea that the assignment is to be "young and hot": "It's to be old and cool." The grammar may not be perfect, but the objective is. Trending on an Instagram feed near you.

This list makes no sense as a conventional roundup. A cursed television town, three vintage dresses, Céline Dion, an aristocratic hotel cat, mature eyeshadow, Mick Jagger, malachite earrings, and a word inherited from nineteenth-century New York should not necessarily belong together.

To me, they are completely related. They all know what they are. Nothing is flattened, overly explained, or trying to appeal to everybody.

That may be the real pleasure of getting older. You stop asking whether the things you like go together and start noticing that liking them is what makes them go together. The quote was on this account and you can fight me if you don’t think the Suzuki Samurai loving chick who runs it is not super fucking cool.

Oh and is it me, or are red sweaters having a moment for Fall? Do we blame Michael Rider at Celine? I’m into it regardless. Ok, bye. 🦞

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Before we begin, GQ has kindly provided a visual aid for what is not sexy now. Tom Cruise is 64, which is not the problem. The problem is the open shirt, the hand in the hair, the other hand hovering near the belt, and the sense that every muscle received a separate call sheet.

To be fair, it is entirely possible Tom is taking the piss. GQ apparently pitched him a “batshit” concept and he was thrilled, so perhaps everyone involved knows exactly how ridiculous this is. The whole thing may be a send-up of TOM CRUISE, MOVIE STAR, which makes me enjoy it more. It does not make it sexy.

Nothing has been left for us to discover. This is a man working extremely hard to communicate sex, which proves yesterday’s point: trying to look sexy and being sexy are two different things. The woman at dinner has forgotten what she’s wearing. Tom is adjusting everything.

This week, after writing about what sexy means to me now, I asked a few friends what currently makes them aflutter. Person, place, thing, behavior, shoe. I gave them a wide berth because the minute you make rules around sexy, you have misunderstood the assignment.

What came back was much more interesting than abs. Almost nobody mentioned exposed skin. Most answers had something to do with knowing what you’re doing, taking your time or keeping a few things private. Also, one extremely shiny red shoe.

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Before we get to sexy:

A late addition, because how could I write about sexy today without mentioning Bob Mackie, who died Monday at 87. Mackie gave us Cher in feathers, sequins, strategic transparency, and very little else, and understood that sexy didn’t have to be tasteful.

His women weren’t hoping someone might notice them. They had arrived to be seen, and Mackie made sure no one looked anywhere else. Hello, Cher

The Buck Mason men’s white shirt is back in stock, which I mention mostly because I have been going on about it since the spring and also because I recently decided, entirely on my own and with no outside pressure, that I do not need another white shirt, a decision that has produced the wholly predictable result of my thinking about this particular white shirt more or less constantly since Tuesday. Get the men’s one. It’s better than the women’s one, and I’m not going to argue about it.

I also fell into a hole this week looking at old DKNY ads and got emotional about the typeface, which I understand is a very specific problem to have. Meanwhile it’s actually Fashion Week here and it’s now just selfies and influencers and everyone being too much at each other in the street outside a venue. Give me a DKNY ad from 1994 and a quiet afternoon. Right?

Anyway. Sex-ayyy.

I was talking to a friend this weekend about what we consider sexy now (she’s a stylist, her Instagram is pretty voluptuous, sexy is genuinely part of her job and she’s very good at it), and I said the diplomatic thing first, which was “confidence over sexy for me,” and then I said the real thing, which is that sexy has started to feel slightly cringe to me.

To me. I am not saying cleavage is cringe. I have boobs, I like boobs, I’m not out here suggesting we button ourselves to the throat the minute we turn 50. I just don’t want to look like I’m trying to be sexy, and there is a difference, and I think you know exactly what it is.

She felt more or less the same way, as it turned out. We’d just been using different words.

Sexy, circa 1995

I knew how to do sexy at 25, and I can still hand you the outfit: an ice-blue silk button-down that I had decided was very Tom Ford-era Gucci, a lavender bra showing through it on purpose, black flat-front Katayone Adeli pants or Levi’s depending on the night, an enormous faux-fur coat, high-heeled boots and short hair. I have no notes for that girl on the outfit.

I also thought not wearing underwear was sexy, for reasons I can no longer defend.

David caught the tail end of all of it. The night I met him, I had on a ribbed tank and a slip skirt with a black bra underneath, which was admittedly a little Carrie Bradshaw, though at the time I was certain I had invented it myself, possibly that evening.

I was living in the best city on Earth; I was 25, and I had a young body. I liked clothes that showed it off. I’d love to say I was only dressing for myself, but I’m sure that wasn’t true. Possibly because I spent years dressing for attention and then going rigid the second I got it.

Because what’s funny is I’ve always been shy. I don’t particularly like having all eyes on me, even though some of the things I wore back then would suggest otherwise. See: lavender bra and giant faux-fur coat.

The missing years

Somewhere in my forties, sexy dropped out of my vernacular entirely. I didn’t reject it or decide I had evolved beyond it. It simply wasn’t a word I used about myself anymore. Not even a little bit. I’m not sure I noticed it disappearing at the time.

In retrospect, I’m sure perimenopause had a lot to do with it, followed by menopause itself. I was having such an aggressively in-body experience that most days I wanted to jump straight out of mine. Everything felt newly noticeable and not in a fun way: the heat, the softness, the shifting weight, the moods, the sense that I had been handed a body with revised operating instructions and no manual. Sexy was not exactly top of mind.

That’s what makes feeling good now different from feeling good at 25. It isn’t simply a more tasteful, grown-up version of the same thing. There were years when I didn’t feel sexy and didn’t particularly care whether I ever did again. Finding my way back to my body, and wanting to dress it rather than escape it, has been its own kind of return.

Sexy at 56

I still want to walk into a restaurant and feel fantastic, and I still want my husband to look at me and think, well. I am not above a single bit of this.

But skin-tight does nothing for me now, and neither does a lot of cleavage, and neither does hair that’s been sat on and worked over until it looks like an achievement. When I want to feel hot, I want something silky, or a very sharp suit, or a button-down and good pants with the shirt not open quite as low as it used to be. What I actually love is the masculine/feminine thing: a man’s shirt with a delicate necklace, a mannish trouser with a kitten heel, a proper dress with a chunky boot. All of which is, I notice with some embarrassment, the identical formula I was running at 25. It’s just grown up alongside me. And yes, it most often comes back to what Jenna (fucking) Lyons does so well.

And a slip dress is still the best thing. Give me a John Patrick Organic black bias cut. The Nili Lotan animal print silks. I’ve worn them to dinner, to a wedding, and to walk Gidget, and I will still be wearing them in ten years, which is the argument for spending the money once. You don’t have to throw everything out just because you’ve changed. Skin matters more to me now, which is funny given how much less of it I’m showing. More foundation on the days my face is red or sallow, and body oil on the limbs, the kind that actually sinks in instead of sitting there.

Then there’s confidence, a word so thoroughly wrung out by now that I almost can’t type it, since every brand in the country would like to sell it back to me. But what I mean is the woman at dinner who has forgotten what she has on, as in this pic of a Pierre Cardin from 1970’s L’Officiel. She got dressed, she left the house, and now she is eating and laughing and arguing about something and has not touched her neckline once all evening. Nothing about it is being performed for anyone. I find it almost unbearably attractive, possibly because I spent fifteen years wanting the attention and then going rigid the second I got it.

I also just know my body now. I know where pants have to hit, I know within about four seconds of looking at a dress on a hanger whether I’ll feel good in it, and some of that is that I lost weight and feel better, which I’m not going to pretend isn’t part of it. What surprised me is that feeling better hasn’t made me want to show more. If anything, I want to prove less with it. I’d rather just meet myself where I am, which is a phrase I would have found insufferable at 25.

Because at 25 the clothes were doing something else entirely. They were going to make me into a particular version of myself. The dress would do it, or the shoes would, or the two of them together would tip the whole night in the direction I’d already decided it should go. I don’t need them working that hard now. I want to look like myself on a very good day, which is sometimes a man’s white shirt and sometimes a silk dress that makes my boobs look tremendous, and that is the entire framework; there isn’t more to it.

My friend calls it sexy. I call it confidence. Probably neither of us has the right word, and probably it doesn’t matter, because we’re describing the same woman at the same table, not adjusting anything. Maybe it’s simplicity, which is an extremely sexy thing to pair with a complicated personality, n’est-ce pas?

Now you.

What did sexy mean to you at 25, and how about now? Do you still use the word, or have you swapped it for something else?

xx

On Thursday, paid subscribers get my list of Ten Things That Are Sexy Now, with a little help from some very opinionated friends, if they’ll have me.

🦞

On Tuesday I wrote about being underestimated at a Pilates class, and how that is, for better or worse, my entire personality. It got me thinking about the clothes I feel the same way about. The ones that don’t announce anything. The ones a stranger would walk right past, the way that instructor walked right past whatever I’m apparently giving off in gym clothes.

These are not the pieces that make a scene. They’re the ones that do everything, all fall, without asking for credit or complaining when you throw them on a gillion times. Oh and a word: I genuinely enjoy style and writing about it. It’s like candy coating for me. So without further ado, here’s what I’ve got my eye on.

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The Pilates studio was on the second floor of an office building at the shore, with no air-conditioning and a view of the ocean. The view was lovely. The room was so hot that I immediately began to question several of my choices.

​The instructor was about my age and a little stern, which is funny, since I’m the New Yorker here, but Philly instructors can be like that. As soon as I walked in, she looked me over and said, in the accent I know very well, “You know this is Power Hour?”

​“Yes,” I said. She nodded and told me, “Only do what you can.”

​Class started, and a few minutes in I found myself trying to wedge one of those squishy Pilates balls behind my knee without letting it shoot across the room. The instructor came over, watched me wrestling with it, and asked, “Are you sure?”

​”Don’t underestimate me,” I said. I did every single thing in that class, and there was nothing I couldn’t do.

​This always seems to happen when I take a workout class at the beach, and I have no idea why. Perhaps I give off a vacation energy that suggests I’ve come directly from a large breakfast and wandered into the wrong room. It happened when I was fatter and when I was skinnier. It happened when I was younger, too, so I don’t think this is entirely about age. I’ve done Pilates religiously for three years and on and off for many years before that. I know what I’m walking into, even when the class has the word “power” in its name.

​You would think I’d be insulted by being sized up this way. I am, a little, but I also enjoy it more than I should. I’ve realized that I’m not especially motivated by “You can do it.” I’m much more motivated by “You can’t.”

​Tell me something isn’t possible, and I become extremely interested in making it happen. Tell me to “make good choices,” and I understand you mean well, but some part of me is already considering the other choices. This isn’t necessarily a quality I’m proud of. It has helped me enormously, but it has also led me to spend a fair amount of time proving points that perhaps did not need to be proven.

​As a child, I was told “you can’t” plenty of times, mostly by my mother. She was trying to protect me from getting hurt or making a mistake, which is one of the things mothers are supposed to do. The problem was that I was rebellious and did not like being told no. My mother meant, “I know how this could go wrong.” What I heard was, “I don’t think you can do it.”

​That dynamic continued for years. She would try to save me from the unpleasant outcome she could already see coming, and I would decide that the only acceptable response was to show her she was wrong. Sometimes I did. Sometimes the unpleasant outcome arrived right on schedule, though I wasn’t inclined to discuss it with her afterward.

​This quality turned out to be very useful when I became a producer. Producing involves hearing no all day long, often from people who have excellent reasons for saying it. The location isn’t available. The schedule doesn’t work. The idea costs more money than anyone actually has. By the time a producer hears all the reasons something cannot happen, everyone else has generally moved on to discussing lunch.

​I could never leave it there. My answer was usually, “No, but here are three other ways we can get it done.” That was how my brain worked. If the original plan was impossible, I wanted to know which part of it we could save and what we could change without ruining the whole thing. I could take an impossible request apart, move the pieces around, and find some version of yes inside it.

​I’m sure this is part of what made me good at producing. It is also why people kept bringing me impossible requests, but that is a separate issue. Recently, I interviewed Kim Alexis for AGEIST, and she talked about having an “I’ll show you” attitude. She had spent years explaining herself to people who had decided things about her, and she eventually realized that she didn’t have to keep making her case.

​I understood what she meant, although my version comes out differently. I don’t tend to explain myself for very long. I’m more likely to decide that I’ll show you by doing the thing and letting the result end the conversation.

​Listening to Kim, I realized that I have much more of the “I’ll show you” impulse than I’d ever admitted. I had simply given it nicer names. I called it resourcefulness or determination, especially when I was putting it on a résumé.

​Maybe there’s a point when you’re supposed to stop needing other people’s doubt as fuel. I’m sure it would be very evolved of me to move through life powered entirely by inner conviction, but I’m not there yet.

​Back at the shore, the ocean was still sparkling outside the window while the rest of us sweated through Power Hour. I finished every exercise, including the deeply irritating business with the ball behind my knee. ​The instructor may have underestimated me, but in the end she gave me exactly what I needed. “Only do what you can” works much better on me than “You’ve got this.”

🦞

​

My mother called this week about nightgowns. Again.

Called about is generous. It was a command. She didn’t specify color or print, because she trusts me there. She knows I know.

Ours is a fairly transactional relationship at this point, and nightgowns are a standing item on the agenda. My mother is difficult. I’ve made some peace with that, although I wouldn’t recommend testing how much on any given day. She’s in a nursing home, which is sad, and she’s fairly healthy, considering. There’s a lot inside that “considering,” but today we’re talking about clothes.

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I moved to New York on my 23rd birthday in 1993, which now sounds almost offensively perfect. I was young enough to think the city was waiting for me and old enough to have a very specific idea of what I wanted it to look like.

It looked like DKNY.

Not only DKNY, obviously. It was that whole early-’90s New York thing, when fashion and advertising and music and magazines all seemed tangled up together. Soho could feel like an ad campaign you had somehow wandered into, and clothes told you things. Or at least I believed they did.

I think about that New York most in September. There’s something about fall starting here that still feels like la rentrée, even if nobody I know actually calls it that. Everyone comes back, suddenly getting dressed matters again, and the city gets a little faster. September has always felt much more like New Year’s to me than January ever has.

I get that back-to-school urge without wanting to go anywhere near a school. New loafers, clean white shirt, deal with the inbox, get my shit together. The minute the air changes, I want to move.

But September is complicated in New York now. It has been since 2001.

I was here. I was freelancing on Hudson Street, close to the World Trade Center, near the Holland Tunnel and Tribeca. I was in a cab on the way to work when I started seeing a ton of ambulances. My driver let me off at West Broadway and Houston, and that’s when I saw the hole in the first tower, on fire. We all thought it was an accident. Then I went upstairs, and the second plane hit.

It was strange to be at that particular job because I was freelance and barely knew the people I worked with. Suddenly that didn’t matter. I left and walked back to my apartment in Stuyvesant Town, past people gathered around car radios and people in suits covered in dust walking up Broadway like zombies. There were tanks going up First Avenue. People were everywhere with photographs of the people they couldn’t find.

I can still see the sky that day because it was unbelievably blue, one of those perfect September days that would normally make you happy to be alive. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate that beautiful weather from what happened underneath it.

The days after are harder to describe without sounding sentimental, but the city was different. People were incredibly kind to each other and we gave each other space yet came together. My local bar on 12th Street was passing out complimentary drinks while we struggled to make sense of what we experienced and comprehend our new normal.

David and I went out to Fire Island with friends for a few days because none of us knew what else to do with ourselves. But I never had the urge to leave New York for good. If anything, I felt more attached to it.

The city I had moved to in 1993 was gone after that. Obviously the buildings changed, but it was more than that, and anyone who was here knows what I mean. There was a before and there was an after.

So September still gives me both things. I get the old urge to start fresh, and right alongside it comes the remembering.

Before any of that, though, I was 23 and very interested in what New York looked like.

Around that time, I visited the Arnell Group, the advertising agency behind a lot of DKNY’s identity, and they had this enormous DKNY brand book. I remember it as almost comically impressive. Huge, graphic, taxis and streets and type and gorgeous photography shot by Peter Lindbergh. This was before everybody started talking about “brand worlds” as if they had invented the concept.

And I wanted it all. The clothes, obviously, but also the office, the city and whatever the women in those ads were doing after work. I loved that a photograph of Houston Street and the right typeface could somehow make a pair of pants feel like admission to something.

Brands didn’t explain themselves to death then. You saw the thing and either it got you or it didn’t.

Donna Karan’s New York got me. Black pants, tank, jacket, sneakers, maybe a cab if you were lucky. The women always seemed to be in motion, which was exactly how I wanted to feel because I had just arrived and I was going absolutely nowhere slowly.

I came from Philadelphia and, like most people who move to New York in their 20s, immediately became very concerned with becoming a New Yorker. Where you lived mattered. Where you went mattered. What you wore definitely mattered, particularly if you were trying to look as though you hadn’t thought about it.

Soho was full of galleries and stores you couldn’t find anywhere else, and you could spend an entire Saturday walking without buying anything and still feel like you’d found something. When I finally bought a little piece of DKNY, I remember feeling absurdly pleased. It wasn’t just a wrap sweater. I had bought my way a tiny bit further into New York.

Fashion was one of the ways I learned the place. You could tell a lot from what someone was wearing, or at least I thought you could. Uptown, downtown, fashion, advertising. There were whole little codes to it, and I paid attention.

I was working in advertising then, so of course I was looking at everything through that lens. What I miss about it now is how much less explaining there was. A photograph and a few words could do the whole job. Nobody was standing there telling you the strategy behind it. Fashion advertising was especially good at making you want the life around the clothes as much as the clothes themselves. The coat was nice, sure. But what I really wanted was whatever was happening after work in that coat.

Then there was Prada. The Prada I loved was nylon and weird proportions and clothes that seemed to have absolutely no interest in making you look conventionally pretty. That was part of the appeal.

The black nylon bags barely looked like luxury, which made them feel even more luxurious. You either got it or you didn’t. And no, I don’t think we were saying “if you know, you know” yet, thank God.

Meanwhile I was walking around New York with a Stussy backpack, which is funny because in my memory I was this sophisticated young woman yearning for Prada, while apparently dressed like a 15-year-old boy.

But that mix was the good part. You could want Donna Karan and still wear Gazelles. You could lust after Prada while carrying something from a skate shop. Nobody had assembled every element of themselves from the same mood board.

That’s what looks good to me now when I see old photographs. Things are a little wrong. The polished coat with wrecked jeans, the good watch with the cheap T-shirt, the man’s shirt with something feminine. People looked like they’d acquired their clothes over time instead of ordering a complete identity on Tuesday.

Fashion is much easier now, technically. I can identify a shoe from a photograph in seconds and buy vintage Prada from somebody in Copenhagen while lying in bed. We all do this, by the way. I am not claiming moral superiority.

But discovery was more fun when it involved walking around. You found things before you knew you were supposed to want them. Now by the time I see something, I may already have seen it seventeen times while scrolling.

I don’t miss being 23. At all. What I miss is the feeling of discovering that New York in real time, before everything was searchable, shoppable, geotagged and explained to death.

When I picture the New York I fell in love with, I don’t really see landmarks. I see Soho storefronts, black nylon, DKNY letters, ads pasted to buildings and people smoking outside offices when they should have been upstairs working. And I see women who looked busy. That was hugely aspirational to me. They looked like they knew where they were going and had somewhere better to be afterward.

Most of them probably didn’t. Neither did I, although I certainly tried to dress like I did.

I love how seriously I took all of this then. The brands, the magazines, the campaigns, the stores. I didn’t know I was collecting references for the person I would eventually become; I just knew what I liked.

A surprising amount of it stuck. I still love a man’s shirt and black nylon. I still prefer something slightly off to something matched within an inch of its life. And I still think clothes look better once you’ve stopped worrying so much about whether you’re wearing them correctly.

Every September, I get a little bit of that 23-year-old feeling again. The sidewalks fill up, everybody starts walking faster, and I immediately want a new pair of shoes and a project.

Then September 11 comes around and the month changes temperature completely. I remember the people we lost and that other New York, the one before there was a before and after.

Maybe that’s why September gets to me more than any other month. It was always about starting again. Now it is about remembering too.

I moved here thinking I needed to figure out how to become a New Yorker. Thirty-three years later, I’m pretty sure New York took care of that part for me. 🦞

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You know the poster even if you have never seen the movie.

A young man in a white shirt and jacket, looking like he's been asked a question he doesn't know the answer to. And across the top of the frame, filling the whole width of it, a leg. Bent at the knee. A hand rolling a stocking up over it. No face, no body, no name. Just the leg and the implication.

It is one of the most reproduced images in the history of American film. It has been parodied, referenced, put on tote bags, hung in dorm rooms, and used as visual shorthand for seduction by roughly every art director who has ever lived. Except it’s not Anne Bancroft’s leg.

It belongs to Linda Gray, who was working as a model at the time and who would later become Sue Ellen Ewing on Dallas. Bancroft was unavailable that day. Gray showed up, put on a stocking, and got paid twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars. For the leg. For the most famous leg in America.

A while ago, I told you nobody has ever looked cooler than Pete Townshend in 1977.

Plain dark t-shirt. Levi’s. Cigarette. A slouch you cannot buy at any price. The argument was that his cool worked precisely because he thought about nothing. The clothes got to be quiet because he didn't ask them to perform.

Mrs. Robinson is the exact inverse. Everything about her was thought about. Every single thing. Except not by her.

That gap between a woman and the enormous, expensive, immaculately designed idea of a woman that has been built on top of her is the most interesting thing in the movie, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough. We talk about her as an icon of seduction, but is actually an icon of exhaustion in a very good coat.

The clothes were assigned. By men. In advance.

The costume designer was Patricia Zipprodt, and she was not a Hollywood person. She was a Broadway person — Tony winner, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Pippin, Chicago — who had apprenticed with Charles James and Irene Sharaff and who researched a project the way other people research a dissertation. Her sketches for this film are sitting in the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library right now. You can look at them. Here’s how the look got decided. Mike Nichols had been thinking about a Henry James novella called The Beast in the Jungle, and he brought that to Zipprodt, and what came out of the room was a single directive: Mrs. Robinson would always be a jungle animal.

So she is. In every scene. Leopard, zebra, ocelot, fur. Reportedly around twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of it, in 1967 dollars, which is a genuinely staggering number. It is in her clothes. It is in her house. The plants on the patio are staged to read as jungle. There is zebra print on the barware. When she first undresses in front of Benjamin, her underwear is leopard.

The woman is not wearing animal print. The woman is being labeled with it. On set, they called her the beast in the jungle. And I want to be clear that Zipprodt did this beautifully. It is a masterclass. The reason animal print in that film still looks expensive rather than tacky is that a great designer executed a coherent idea at the highest level of craft. It works.

It works so well that almost sixty years later, we are all still calling middle-aged women cougars.

And leopard, in 1967, was not just a print.

Five years earlier, Jackie Kennedy had worn a leopard coat designed for her by Oleg Cassini. He had suggested it almost idly; the fur had been out of fashion for a while. She said yes. She was photographed. And the most imitated woman in the world set off a stampede. The estimate is that a quarter of a million leopards were killed to satisfy the demand. Cassini spent the rest of his life sick about it, stopped designing with real fur entirely, and eventually showed a hundred-piece faux fur line at a Humane Society benefit. He was living on a farm with rescued animals by then.

So when Zipprodt reached for leopard in 1967, she was reaching for the single most charged material in American fashion. It meant First Lady. It meant enormous money. It meant a woman who could summon a global craze by putting on a coat. It also meant the 250,000 animals that died because she did. Elegance and slaughter in the same garment. You could not have designed a better costume for this character if you had a hundred years.

Now watch what Bancroft does inside it. Nothing.

That’s the trick. The entire performance. The costume is screaming predator, and Bancroft plays her flat. Bored. Half-drunk. Faintly annoyed at having to be anywhere. She does not vamp. She does not purr. She delivers the single most quoted seduction in cinema — “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me” — and her contribution to it is to look at Benjamin like he is a slow child who has just worked out something obvious. She didn’t arrive at that on her own. Nichols told her, early on, that her version was too nice. Then he did something he almost never did: he read a line for her himself, cold and completely flat, with nothing in it at all. Bancroft heard it and understood immediately. That’s anger.

So the clothes are doing hunger and the woman is doing rage, and neither of them is doing desire. Nobody in that hotel room wants to be there. The costume is a performance the character stopped believing in a long time ago and keeps putting on anyway because it is the only role available to her. If you have ever gotten fully dressed for something you had no interest in attending, you already know exactly what this is.

Oh, and here’s something that might make you spit out your latte. She was thirty-five. Please sit with that.

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