Headed to the Detective Agency!

If there’s one question that has been on everyone’s lipminds recently, it is: could the world survive under one governing body if there were an alien attack?

I am a creative person, filled with energy and light. When I speak, it’s music. When I hear, it rhymes. When I wake up in the morning and brush my teeth, my toothbrush is like a paintbrush, creating an Impressionist landscape that subtly suggests angst. As my tax guy once said, “You are all the nine muses….rolled into one.” He laughed. I said, “You laugh because I’m different.” He said, “And you laugh because…?” And I was like, “It’s against my relij to read the back of t-shirts.”

Anyways, as a luminary of the downtown creative scene, I decided to answer this burning question the only way I know how: with fashion. My clothes are my messenger. Or I am the messenger, and the clothes are the message? Whatever.

This is my answer.

I understand it’s shocking, but look at it this way:

My face is in the shadow because I was headed to a detective agency to solve a mystery!

Here’s the thing: the play. Just kidding, that was an English major joke. What I meant was, what I’m wearing: a Sophie Hulme coat, a Swash dress, Carven heels, an Eleven Objects x Bullett collar, and a hot pink purse that is a taxidermied cane toad with Swarovski crystal eyes.

EvErYtHiNg HaS a StoRy! You’ve already seen the coat, but you see, I love it so, I actually get all the use in the world out of it. Pink is my black, so this coat sorta goes with 90% of the stuff I own. (I mean the Beck karaoke specialist P!nk, of course.) You can actually still get it—it is mad on sale, and perfect for early spring and autumn!

The dress is by Swash, who is known for charming scarves. HOWEVER, they have the world’s coolest website. AND! they made this dress. I lurve it. You can’t truly appreciate it above—look at the full shebang here. This is ALSO from Dagny & Barstow and ALSO on sale.

Obvz I’ve worn the Carven tapestry shoes a milliondy times, but I like the look of a hundred maddening prints. The kitten version is still at MNZ and is on $@L3.

Speaking of COOL: the glorious women of Eleven Objects gave this to me over a Power Breakfast (see Page Six story here). With a rich tapestry fabric and a pearl and rhinestone button closure, it is like Dutch Baroque Legit. Also cool: my toad purse by Kobja. It’s demented, much like this demented Australian cane toad documentary that I luhhuuuve. It’s from Blue Tree, Phoebe Cates’s 2rad4skewl store in my hood. You can also shop Kobja online. It doesn’t fit more than a lipstick and keys, BUT FASHION KNOWS NOT OF COMFORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everything is from Paris or London, you see, because I am a sophisticated world traveler with unique and cunning taste! “No one can write like you,” my father once said, reading from an index card I had written and told him to read to me.

OK, I have to go because apparently there is a classical musician named Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and I have to deal with this.

DE$IRE$: Could This Spring Make You The Woman You Want To Be?!?!

Here is a list of things I very much want to obtain, because I know if I do I will finally be The Woman I Want To Be.

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Green Monster

Let’s just say: a person leaves the Lower East Side, where the streets are paved with the Saturday evening regrets of Gen-Y financiers (Cornell ‘09) and discarded French fries, and arrives in that genteel, Rococo truffle we call the Upper East Side, where the streets are paved with fur-trimmed $10 bills. And the person ascends with an armful of Tsumori Chisato, with backless Risto vests, with giant shirts trumpeting themselves as dresses or tiedye that suggests the buffoonish color palette of the cupcake industry… What I’m asking is: when a person shoots dead north in Manhattan and is playing for keeps, how should that person dress?

Some might say that the punkest thing to do is nothing. Strut down Park in that lace-up kimono. Dart into the flower shop in that tafetta Carven confection with dunks and bovine, er, millinery. But a recent viewing of Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie awakened the notion in me that we shouldn’t kick someone who’s already down (“It would be hard to imagine a less fair or accurate portrait,” said Stillman’s Charlie Black of the film). The WASP bourgeoisie is a dying breed, folks, with many a cultural idiosyncrasy that ought to be preserved in some small way—but, well, that’s a conversation to be had with E. Digby Baltzell.

The apotheosis of getting dressed should still be this, but rather than ruffling feathers uptown, the joke ought to be on the too-serious Williamsburg literati, on the graphic designers who think Nolita is their karmic reward for liking performance art, or, best of all, on the Tribeca-West Village tufthunters who buy things like piles of sticks dripped with Yves Klein blue paint and very old hummus without even a knowing wink.*

When I first moved here, I also contemplated throwing everything out and wearing black. The look was to be very, “I’m a lady in mourning; I need a whole new wardrobe.” But I consulted with my friend John, Spirit Animal to the Stars, and he told me that I shouldn’t desert my whackadoodle magpie aesthetic, because I don’t dress that way for fashion week or street style opportunities; I dress that way “because that’s how you really dress.” This was flattering enough that I chucked the idea, and moved boldly forward.

One of my favorite articles of clothing is a very crisp white shirt flounced with valences of lime green fringe on the back by a very cool Korean line for joyful aliens called pushBUTTON. I also recently bought a pair of Acne shoes which veer on aping those Balenciaga boots everyone is nuts about but are lime green and taupe and therefore very weird and potentially hideous and so, to my eye, a worthy acquisition rather than the Next-OK-Thing. Anyways, both felt indecorous uptown.

So I wore them like this: I added a very prep school Carven jacket, and jeans in that Barbour green, and a little wooden purse my Aunt Alita painted with horses, and a gold Asha by Adm ring that has my zodiac sign in a glowing teal blue. The fringe became a detail rather than a punchline, and with all that green, the boots became of a gesamtkunstwerk rather than a weird loud statement shoe.

Yes, that is Gossip Girl Academy.

And I went to J. MacLaughlin: The Restaurant and had a bloody Mary that helped me make up my mind about whether a man can live alone in a hotel when his spouse passes away, and then I went next door to the Corner Bookstore, which is the only level of heaven currently accessible to mere mortals, and you know what, folks? I felt at home. At long last, my aesthetic inclinations and my environs were in kismet.

Jumping like a blogger with my top-knot lopped off.

*Ah, the tables have turned: Nick Smith’s reply to Charlie: “The surrealists were just a bunch of social climbers.”