The Value of a Break.
I've been away and it's been a necessary vacation from the digital churn.
Hello Back Row subscribers!
In case any of you were missing this newsletter the past couple of months: I had to take some time away from Substack to finish a big, multi-year project. I cannot wait to tell you more about it soon here, but suffice it to say the deadlines were intense, the nights were late, and my baby and toddler will reliably get up early in the morning no matter how tired Mommy is.
In the past I would have powered through and done everything – met my deadlines, had 5 pm coffee so I could stay up late to send out a newsletter, hustled posts about it onto social media. But with children, that is just not what I can or want to do! And that is OK.
In an effort to disentangle from metrics-oriented things, I also took Instagram off my phone for a bit, and it was GREAT. Publishing a newsletter and telling people about it on social media are one and the same, such is the broader media’s ongoing slow death spiral, but I’m going to get back in the swing of things there in what is hopefully a less misery-inducing way.
Moving forward, I’ll be posting here regularly, expanding the content scope from news roundups to essays and more Q&As. You will not hear from me during holidays. And as always, I welcome your feedback.
And now, some news I’ve been reading this week, presented in a slightly abbreviated format:
Holy shit? Warby Parker’s IPO: Warby Parker, the affordable yet cool glasses retailer founded in 2010, went public on Wednesday. Shares increased 36 percent Wednesday, placing the company at a valuation of more than $6 billion. While that is a sexy and eye-popping number, CNBC reminds us: “While Warby has a growth story to sell, it remains unprofitable and still has a lot to prove to live up to its current valuation, according to analysts.” One analyst said a fairer valuation would be more in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion. People are also interested in this because a number of other direct-to-consumer businesses, whose investors are surely ready to get their money out, plan to IPO. These include AllBirds, Rent the Runway, and Kate Hudson’s leggings line Fabletics, about which I truly cannot recall a single piece of positive press.
Vanity Fair has an exhaustive oral history of Zoolander: Honestly it just made me want to re-watch the movie instead of learn more about the movie.
But I did enjoy this anecdote from Nathan Lee Graham, who played Mugatu’s assistant Todd, regarding the scene where Mugatu (Will Ferrell) spits a latte all over him and cries, “Are you not aware that I get farty and bloated with a foamy latte?!”
GRAHAM: The famous foamy latte scene—we did it like 14 times in a row. I remember Ben getting frustrated because he couldn’t see the imprint of the latte clearly on my 2(x)ist white V-neck T-shirt. Ben was just like, “Why can’t we see the imprint of the foamy latte? The shirt’s not tight enough!” So they kept stretching it, and they kept putting clamps on my back. So eventually, they had to cut the T-shirt on the sides and sew me into it so that it stretched tall enough against my chest so that you could see the imprint of the latte on my shirt. That’s just how much detail Ben had.
The show season continues: Given I’ve been away from Instagram I have been missing the internet’s sentiments on the fashion shows. However, a cursory scroll through them on Vogue Runway suggests it’s kind of business as usual, even though we’re still in a pandemic and it’s very much NOT business as usual? A lot of people are still not having shows or seeming to “show” on the usual schedule. Ralph Lauren non-show images tricked out around the same time as Rick Owens’s show-show images. Other random takeaways:
There are tons of shows, probably too many shows. I don’t even know what lots of these brands are and often feel like I can’t keep up with who’s doing what for what label.
Dior isn’t bridesmaid dresses this time but it isn’t terribly exciting either. (Aren’t you glad YOU support this newsletter and not ADS so that can be said?)
Balmain was a delicious wild ride, especially because 6,000 people attended for creative director Olivier Rousteing’s ten-year anniversary show (read Cathy Horyn on it here over at The Cut).
You could find a worse outlet for unfettered fashion enthusiasm than that or, say, Rick Owens. (And I’m mindful that I’m writing this before Valentino images have come out, for which I am already prepared to feel unfettered fashion enthusiasm. My breath is caught just typing about it!)
And of course, famous offspring have presented on the runways.
First, Eve Jobs (yes, Steve Jobs’s daughter): She walked for Coperni wearing platform foam flip-flops. Other star models in the show included Adut Akech and Gigi Hadid.
Second, Lila Moss: She walked for Fendi X Versace, which is apparently a thing and which we’re apparently calling Fendace.
Moss has type 1 diabetes and went down the runway with an insulin pump clearly visible on her thigh. She hasn’t commented on it, but social media followers are praising her for it.
I’m sure Kendall Jenner was somewhere if not everywhere, but I’m also sure you don’t need me to tell you about that here.
Lastly, are you, like me, reading the new Gawker? Jennifer Schaffer writes there about our current Charisma Drought and she has many quotable lines such as this:
We’ve overemphasized all that can be faked: cocksureness and symmetry and digestible wit, and that entrancing, addictive quality that makes TikToks tick — this synthetic charisma substitute, this mash-up of shock and serotonin and some aural-visual massage being performed on our deep lizard brains that gets our heart rate up for people who are not insightful or interesting or good or cool. Karisma™. It’s like the Spice equivalent of charisma: a knock-off with dangerous consequences.
Honestly, that’s how the pandemic shows often feel to me: knock-offs with dangerous consequences.
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