Dress: A couple of days ago, my best friend and I got into an relevant, totally productive argument about what season we’d do away with if we could control the weather. I said winter. She said she’d get rid of summer in a heartbeat. If it were up to her, we would live in endless fall. Brisk winds. Dry, high skies. Lots of leaves and tweed jackets. It’s solid content, and I look good in flame colors—orange, red, gold—even if Halloween is second only to New Years Eve when it comes to anticlimax. Fall is extremely cinematic—I believe boarding school, as a concept, still exists in part become of how beautiful autumn looks on film. And when you’re operating on an academic calendar, fall still feels like the realm of the possible. It’s the beginning of the school year. Only 94 shopping days until Christmas.
I want to like fall the way that other people do. And sometimes I really do. I have a lot of affection for November, the actual bleakest and creepiest month of autumn. But all fall is sad. Not just in the grand things withering around you way. Or in the Fall is the season of Tragedy in the literary theory kind of way. Fall is specifically bad for me, historically. Fall is full of heartbreak. It is also full of dust, which I am allergic to, thus fall, for me, is the season of Flonase abuse.
I bought this dress back in the fall—another heartbreaking, highly disappointing fall, I might add—for a much-needed escape to New York. Instead, I got Covid. On one hand, I successfully slipped the net for three and half years. On the other hand, the timing. Lord, the timing.
Anyway, as of December 27, 2023, this dress still had the tags on it, and I thought it was high time I put it to use. I was going to wear it to go out with my best friend in New York. Might as well wear it to hang with her in Asheville.
Sweater: Back in the fall, some market researcher heard a distorted barre chord and got a whiff of something the kids were talking about on TikTok, and decided it was once again time to see if it wasn’t time to try to exhume punk for the fifty-leventh time. Out came the bondage pants and the 70s era t-shirts on the displays at Nordstrom. I guess kids still wear that stuff? It was old when I wore my variation of that stuff thirty years ago, and I was born a couple of months after the Sex Pistols played their first show.
Anthropologie, a brand that has never met a ruffle it couldn’t exploit came up with its own capsule “punk rock” collection, consisting mostly of faux-leather bustiers, plaid blazers, and ball skirts. All of it was inexplicable, wildly overpriced, a little tacky, and likely offensive to any actual surviving punks (and their earnest, gas station jacketed successors), which made the whole endeavor accidentally almost punk, but not at all intentional. How ashamed am I to tell you that this sweater was part of that collection? A little. I sent the picture to my mother with the note “this fuzzy fuschia sweater with the rhinestone ameobas would make a nice Christmas present.” And it did.
Boots: Covered Elsewhere
Earrings: Narrow silver hoops. These came from Las Vegas, the strangest place I’ve ever visited that I absolutely never, ever, hand to God, need to visit again. The shop situations in the bottom of the casino hotels are something else. That whole trip was basically Ground Zero for my then-incipient midlife crisis. But I think I might have had an out of body experience in the whole “”Here is a Galley Ship-shaped Cocktail Bar in this Intergalactic 1980s dream of a Galactic Roman Forum where a man in a zebra suit is doing a jazz cover of “Lose Yourself” that is the Caesar’s Palace mall.
Outfit: I met my two best friends in West Asheville. First, at the DeSoto Lounge, a dive bar holiday tradition, then down the block through a miraculous sunset to the new Lowdown, which is not at all divey, though it is in a basement. I liked it down there. It didn’t feel like I was in Asheville in all the best ways, and increasingly whenever I am in Asheville, I try to pretend like I’m not there, or at least not there in the present tense. Nostalgia, grief, family stress. All that shit catches up with you, especially at the holidays. We were into a cocktail when the lightest of all friend ribbing caught the frayed ends of one of my overcooked nerves. I stood up to leave, which shocked and confused my friends. And I found myself in the always embarrassing situation of trying to explain why I felt hurt and depressed on an ostensibly fun night, surrounded by crafty Art Deco wood cutouts and whimsical hand lamps. My friends were kind and sympathetic, but I’m still not sure I did a very good job explaining the ineffable, careening fucked-upness, this quintessence of bullshit that was my psyche at approximately 6pm on December 27th. I’m not grandiose enough to believe I ruined the night, but I will tell you this: I would like to make 2024 the year that I don’t cry in a bar. I do not like country music nearly enough for that kind of reputation.
Dress: Black Plisse column dress, ASTR The Label, Nordstrom, 2023
Sweater: Anthropologie, 2023
Earrings: Silver octagonal hoops, Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, 2018
Shoes: Dr Marten Platform Chelsea Boots, 2022
Tiny Commotions 