A Sunday Journal

Today’s newsletter is in partnership with @The RealReal I wanted to feel lighter. At least that’s what I said back in January after getting rid of nearly all of my clothes and accessories. But what I really craved was a clear image of self. Fear and insecurity had settled into my closet like a fog, one so dense and still that it felt intrinsic to the landscape. It came as the quiet, yet common desire to appear at least in an uncertain world, a haze I hardly noticed until dis-ease hit.

Loïs Mailou Jones, Untitled (Two Women), c. 1945 The title is taken from a comparison Alice Walker presents in her essay, “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models In the Artist’s Life.” The plan was to write about ugliness, to discuss the importance of visual discordance in presentation under technocratic fascism.

Lately, I find myself reflecting on the paucity of my early twenties. I was working as an editor then, making no money, and living in a wonderfully old apartment building. A mattress sat on the bedroom floor with a small brass Moroccan table beside it. My grandmother’s alabaster lamp lit the room just enough to read at night. The living room had a makeshift shelf, a replica of a set up my mother designed for a room I let for a summer a few years earlier.

For a while now I have been toying with the idea of creating a podcast to accompany A Sunday Journal. But podcasts have a bad wrap nowadays. This is not a podcast. This is Mini Musings. Because not every topic requires a long read and sources cited. Somethings just need to be discussed... Briefly. Think of it an extended voice note on from your friend… …

The Staircase, 2016 by Brooke DiDonato Editorial Note: The following post references white women, but for brevity does not specify that use of the term includes white-adjacent women. “Men do not differ from anything…” - Colette Guillaumin thingified 1. to treat one’s own body as an object separate of itself I think white women are socially stunted by notions of freedom and femininity. Now, I know that’s an inflammatory statement, but stay with me.

If I were attending tonight’s Met Gala, I would have gone as a horseman. Here we acquire perspective, not just things, and recently Arthur Zaczkiewicz, former Executive Editor at WWD, asked me an interesting question: how had the last year shaped my perspective and relationship to fashion theory? You can hear my answer, as well as the rest of our chat here, but the question still rolls around in my head. One point I keep coming back to is that fashion theory cannot capture our desire to transform.

Despite its significance, the body is notably absent from a lot of fashion theory. Over the centuries, writers, historians, and theorists — overwhelmingly white and male — may have wedged in a section on comportment but little else. That may not seem like that big of a deal, but the omission shapes how we understand clothing. Only when embodied and situated in society do clothes have any real meaning, and that meaning is derived from the wearer’s experience of society in them.

I have mentioned the uniform I relied on to get through 2025 — a gray threadbare sweatshirt, white single stitch tee, and a pair of 505s almost as old as I am — but I have not mentioned the ring; an open, modernist piece in brass that I bought in the midst of everything. Looking back, I cannot recall what prompted the purchase or even the shift toward something so unconventional, but I wore it constantly, growing fonder of its biomorphic beauty with each wear.

Editorial Note: The following is a piece critiquing the structure and discourse surrounding “personal style”. The phrase appears in quotation marks to indicate this, as opposed to describing someone’s situated style (personal/professional). This is not a criticism of specific writers or content creators (named and unnamed) or related methodologies, nor is an exhaustive argument. More from my super secret “personal style” Pinterest board.

From my super secret Pinterest board entitled “The 2026 Vibe Is… ” A few days ago, surrounded by laundry drip-drying, a dwindling pile of household paper products, and my dog’s dirty blankets, I sat on the toilet seat of my guest bathroom and began scrolling through Pinterest. I wanted to get dressed, but needed inspiration; a quick dopamine hit off of something — anything — new.