Happy July! It is 100F in NYC, or 38C for my Celsius friends. The other day was the hottest day in NYC in 14 years. During these horrible times of climate change, I think about what happens to Aida and her father at the end of C Pam Zhang’s highly recommended novel Land of Milk and Honey. IYKYK
Some things I’ve been thinking about recently—
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I read about Issey Miyake’s project A Piece of Cloth (1997), which aimed to make the consumer not just a consumer but an active collaborator in the process of clothesmaking. MoMA describes it as follows:
Miyake and Fujiwara's A–POC (A Piece of Clothing) Queen Textile is an innovative outfitting system that produces self–tailored clothing through mass production, a marriage of systems that seem inherently at odds. An industrial weaving machine is preprogrammed to spin an enormous, continuous tube of fabric. A repeating pattern of seams is woven into the tube, creating a patchwork of shapes whose outlines begin to suggest dresses, shirts, socks, gloves, and hats. The customer can cut along the seams without destroying the tubular structure of each individual item. The result is a puzzle of monochromatic articles of clothing that leaves behind virtually no wasted material.
So basically you walk in, cut the garment how you want (alter the neckline, the length of the sleeves, etc.) out of the cloth, and the machine (??) will take your cut cloth and transform it into a piece of clothing for you to wear. It’s not clear to me how it worked mechanically, and the documentation I’ve found on this seems a bit scattered because (1) this was 1997, (2) much of the original documentation was in Japanese, not English, and (3) it never managed to bloom from a conceptual project into a fully productionized system.
This is a fascinating idea for all kinds of reasons and I have a great deal of admiration for Issey Miyake as a truly original and innovative fashion designer. It’s an interesting vision for how we could try to make fashion more democratic and accessible, much more interesting than the quintessentially capitalist idea of “what if we made everything cheap and terrible and standardized so you can buy $10 ready-to-wear shirts that don’t fit you.” I’m torn about much of the thinking around fashion “accessibility,” which often leads to “let’s make this cheaper and worse quality (and terrible for the environment).” Miyake himself helped popularize polyester jersey because it was more affordable and its stretchy, flexible nature made it easier for clothing to fit a range of body shapes, which I’m conflicted about because, well, it’s polyester and that stuff is clogging up our landfills and poisoning our soil. But most people can’t afford their own bespoke fitted clothes either.
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It’s been hard to make time to write. I don’t have a lack of ideas, but I often don’t have the brain space. I’ve been meditating on a post on Isabel J. Kim’s Tumblr, in which an anon asked her how she balances writing with her full-time job as an attorney. She replied:
(…) for me, the answer is that you can get away with a lot when you're in your twenties and burning the midnight oil, and it becomes a question of being able to train your brain into dipping into writer mode very quickly and being able to slap a couple of paragraphs down in weird bits of downtime. being able to shift into writer mode easily is completely a skill and can be learned, so that's how i do it. i also occasionally say no to a social thing because i want to write, and i don't consume as much media as i'd like because i need to be writing.
I haven’t figured out how to dip my brain into Writer Mode; I have to carve out time for it, to capital s Sit Down and Write. I know this is not a good way to get anything done, especially if you want to be capital s Serious about writing, but I find that I tend to heavily compartmentalize the areas of my life: this is when I’m designing, this is when I’m sewing, this is when I’m writing, this is when I’m reading. Getting any kind of deep focus nowadays is so valuable and treasured in the 2020s attention economy. It also keeps me composed and sane; I find that if I multitask too much, I inevitably think to myself, “what is the point of all this? how is this having any positive effect on anyone, including me? why bother doing anything at all???”
(Side note: it is really reassuring to me when I hear about authors and their day jobs, especially time-consuming jobs, or jobs they’re passionate about and not just doing to keep the lights on. I often feel like I’m not a real author unless I’m heads down on my writing at least 40 hours a week. Or that conversely, I must not really care about my job as a designer that much if I’m also a writer.)
Also, everyone please read Isabel J. Kim’s Sublimation. It’s a novel where people split into two versions, or “instances,” of themselves, typically when they immigrate to another country. In the novel, Soyoung splits into two instances when she leaves Korea for America at age 10. One grows up in America, the other grows up in Korea. As adults, they’re meeting each other for the first time at their grandfather’s funeral, conflicted over his dying wish that they reintegrate into one person. Would recommend to anyone, but especially those who enjoy intricate speculative worldbuilding or are interested in diasporic identity.
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I’ve been reading more memoirs lately. Some examples:
- The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley
- Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- (currently) I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, trans. Jack Hargreaves
One thing I like about memoirs is that they are so often descriptive, rather than prescriptive. In a book I read—I can’t remember exactly, it might have been Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World—the author recalls how in a literature class they took, a classmate complains how Toni Morrison will describe these horrible things happening and not tell us what to think about them, and the instructor was like, “yeah, the point is she wants you to figure out what YOU think about it.” Many memoirs are like this. I think it’s because in fiction, the author (to paraphrase Vicente Huidobro) is this little god who decides everything that happens and the authorial reason for them happening, but when you’re talking about your own life, you can’t make different events happen, all you can do is place the frame.
I particularly liked Just Kids, which is interesting not only for the anecdotes about all the artists and celebrities that hung out at the Chelsea Hotel in the ‘70s, but also for its description of the material realities and difficulties of “making it” in the art world. Smith is homeless at a couple points, she describes the horrible rundown apartments she’s lived in, and she loses many friends to the AIDS epidemic, including Robert Mapplethorpe, the best friend whose friendship forms the center of the memoir.
One thing I found interesting was how openly and sincerely Mapplethorpe talked to her about wanting to be famous, commercially successful, financially comfortable, and recognized by others. It's such a surprising and honest desire, especially from someone whose art has a reputation for being rebellious and controversial. Then again, the landscape nowadays is so different—it’s hard to picture an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe, so unwilling to censor himself or cater to mainstream tastes, gaining mainstream fame or becoming a household name in 2026. Smith writes:
He had absolute confidence in his work and in me, yet he worried incessantly about how our future, how we would survive, about money. I felt we were too young to have such cares. I was happy just being free. The uncertainty of the practical side of our life haunted him, though I did my best to stay his worries.
There’s a fair amount of overlap in the people mentioned in both Just Kids and The Chiffon Trenches, since both authors were running with many of the famous artists in NYC in the late 20th century. Both Smith and Talley hung out a fair bit with Andy Warhol, for example (Talley worked at his magazine). Smith mentions being acquainted with Loulou de la Falaise, the muse of Yves Saint Laurent; Talley attends Loulou’s wedding and of course frequently talks about Saint Laurent in his book. But they lived in such different material realities. I was a bit put off by one part at the end of The Chiffon Trenches, where he talks about how because Vogue’s profits have dropped so much in the digital era, they can’t afford to have the senior editors get a personal chauffeur or stay at the Ritz when they go to Paris. They have to deal with the “indignity” (his phrasing) of waiting at the airport taxi stand. Like…yeah we’re all suffering from layoffs, but clearly some of us are impacted worse than others.
But I don’t want to paint Talley’s memoir in a purely negative light either. I’ve also been thinking about this passage from The Chiffon Trenches, in which he discusses being replaced in his role as the greeter at the Met Gala by a young YouTuber with 17 million followers:
What could this talented YouTuber offer? Surely she didn’t know what a martingale back is to a Balenciaga one-seamed coat. Or did she know that Katie Holmes’s Zac Posen dress, worn with great elegance, constructed with great technique, was an homage to the master architect Charles James, who was the subject of the 2014 Met exhibit Charles James: Beyond Fashion? Or that Cher’s incredible Bob Mackie jumpsuit, worn to the gala in December 1974, was the foreunner to all the see-through evening dresses designed by Ricardo Tisci at Givenchy couture, now worn by Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian in this century? Like an extinct dodo bird, my brain, rich and replete with knowledge, has been relegated to the history books.
The extinction of knowledge…ah, something that I worry about often nowadays.
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That’s all for now—I hope you have a good weekend :-) and please let me know if you have any good memoir recs xoxo