KW Flash List #6: eye drops, eBay stripes, the fruits of the style network
Happy Spring. Happy to be back here. Happy Flash List.
This is what I showed my colorist as a reference this weekend for where I wanted to go with my double process. Meet Chèrie.
I saw Challengers. I had so much fun. I won’t spoil it for you, but I did get to see both the full trailer for the Amy Winehouse biopic (oh boy) and my college dining hall and athletic center heavily featured throughout the film (not Stanford ;) ). The churro scene is also where I developed my own tortured love triangle with Diet Mountain Dew and black coffee with Splenda during finals.
What is Yoanna House up to these days? She is a multi-hyphenate She-E-O, has one of the craziest looking professional websites I’ve ever seen, and is virtually unrecognizable from her ANTM days. Every photo looks different. I see glimmers of her original Yoanna-ness, but it’s hard to discern as her face has been chiseled away to look like a permanently face tuned version of herself. So,WHY am I asking this? I’ve been thinking a lot what gets me inspired and how I’ve learned to assemble my closet/outfits. Such investigation lead me to the depths of my brain closet…watching the Look for Less on the Style Network. For those who didn’t get to experience the Elisabeth-hot-off-Surivior-Australian-Outback-Hasselbeck hosted show, then taken over by ANTM’s Cycle 2 winner 2005, it was a race against the clock reality show dedicated to recreating runway looks. A stylist would pair up with a look-less “normal person,” they would select one of two runway looks that they needed to mimic, and then equipped with a budget of $150 they had a mission to do a fierce mall crawl to create a head to toe replica of the look. The normal person would then show off their L4L to friend’s and family who would celebrate that they “understood the assignment.” The show ended around 2007, and we’ve been looking for the look for less full ever since.
This methodology imprinted on me—to equip myself with an arsenal of runway looks I want to reference as I pull together an outfit. Now, this seems really normal and is also quite easy to do because retailers are able to spit out their L4L in less time than it takes to invent a new runway collection. So much content is now dedicated to identifying, replicating, hauling L4L’s. Endless TikTok’s and reels showing side by sides of the luxury and fast fashion versions of modern fashion plates. For me, 17 years ago, Style.com was instrumental here, as were the iterative versions of show in print—the entire function of Lucky Magazine, shopping pages in Teen Vogue, and Nylon. There was creativity in it. It wasn’t so much isolating a trend or selecting copy/paste, but emulating the moment or mood crystalized in this one shot from this one photographer in the pit of photographers in Paris, Milan, or New York. It felt tangentially glamorous and exclusive. I also wasn’t appealing to a cohort of strangers and peers for validation in accomplishing a likeness.
It’s quite literally my job, and just sort of how my brain works, to be constantly indexing and assorting product, looks, and items. Now, I’ll lean on the L4L approach in a modular way—what is the item for item trade in my closet that accomplishes both the silhouette and chromatic resemblance of the primary source. Other times it’s more proportional and styling-based—how can I attain the balance and mood of an image? This is why I am always turning to Dries, Prada, Miu Miu, Lemaire, and Consuela-era Marni. I’ve enjoyed clocking looks from Auralee and Molly Goddard more recently too.
This is also how I am a V.S.S—a Very Specific Shopper. I’ll be led to a new item based on what holes exist in my wardrobe that are preventing me from getting the Look or it might lead me to find the Exact Look for Less which becomes another hunt in itself. Perhaps controversial, this is also the reason why I do not do seasonal closet swaps. I lean on and invest in perennial items that I can pull from in a 15 minute pinch—far from a Wet Seal dressing room—to make the final buzzer and channel Ms. House’s warm words of approval.
Hang Ten Tees. I think about stripe layouts more than most people ever will. For the last 3 years I’ve been working for stripe heavy brands and learning how nuanced and hard it is to strike the right linear balance from both scale and color perspectives. I’ve tried my fair share of CDG Play French stripe tops, but I always feel sort of childish (Hanna Andersson was alive and well in my adolescent dresser). I’ve been looking for something a bit weirder. Look 43 and 45 of the Miu Miu SS24 show went into my L4L file and I started mining eBay for surfer stripes. Enter: Hang Ten. You might recognize the barefoot logo merchandised alongside Billabong and Op in the 90’s.
The company was founded in the 60’s in Seal Beach, CA by Doris Moore and Duke Boyd. Duke was a surfer and Doris was a “shopper” aka what a merchandiser is today (she would go to Gimble’s and Macy’s to see what pricing was in the market and what items they should go after to create). They sought to create the first line of fashion-minded surf wear and sold the company in the 70s. Here is a really great/touching radio interview with Duke talking about the history of the brand. Duke went on to start Lighting Bolt, another surf brand. The original tees go for well over $300 but the iterations produced by the new owners in the 70’s and 80’s are covetable as well. I ended up buying a tee with horizon lines of burnt sienna, umber, butter, and crimson. I’ve worn it tucked into wide leg trousers and look forward to pairing it with my boyfriend’s basketball shorts from high school. Here are some more good ones
Seasonal Allergies Update. I’ve unlocked my personal cocktail to survive this year’s sublime pollen assault and I’m telling everyone I know. I went to an allergist last year that confirmed that, yes, I am in fact reactive to “local trees” and “dust mites.” The trick she said, was to pregame with Flonase a month in advance of peak blossom hell (so starting in March), because apparently you need to build it up in your system for maximum efficacy. Who knew! Not me! I’ve been doing this alongside popping an Allegra, and then glazing my eyeballs with Pataday eyedrops which come in an offensively small 1/8th teaspoon size squeeze bottle. I feel confident enough in my antihistamine armor to bike to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden tomorrow morning to catch the cherry blossoms before work.
xoxo Ketchup Girl.