What I Can’t Live Without: June/July 2024 Edition

A monthly catalogue of obsessions

Photo: Paul Eekhoff

The way 90% of people are about Taylor Swift, I am about quilts: a borderline fanatic. So when I heard that the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto would be staging an exhibition called Quilts: Made in Canada I was, as some might say, unreasonably excited.

I made a pilgrimage to the museum on a quiet morning in late June, spending a meditative hour weaving in and around the quilts, doing my best to admire every stitch. Many dated back to the 1850s and though they were laboured over for countless hours, used to warm cold feet and swaddle babies for generations, their original sewer remains a mystery. More often than not, the provenance of these quilts was listed simply as, “Maker no longer known.” I did my best to honour these invisible quilters by imagining the thought process behind their decisions to place different fabrics side-by-side, an act of private curation. There was much more than just bedspreads, too. One quilt was made by a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp. Another was made by an Indigenous quilter to tell the story of the Kahnawá:ke resistance during the Oka Crisis. It was fascinating to see such varied examples of the form, from domestic to political. There was something so emotional about seeing rips and tears in many of the quilts, which made visible the love and life they’ve experienced throughout the years. (Which reminded me of that “To be loved is to be changed” meme.)

Photos: Paul Eekhoff

I left the exhibition with many questions: how were some of these ancient quilts that remain in near-perfect condition stored? And what informed the curatorial decision to display dresses besides some of the quilts, which helped date and contextualize the fabrics used but also, in my opinion, ghettoizes the quilts by suggesting viewers appreciate them as “women’s work” rather than their inherent artistry? The exhibition is on now until November 17th, 2024 and I hope you go see it for yourself.

Photo: Paul Eekhoff

Without further ado, here is everything I’m obsessed with this month (and last month too, since I wasn’t really that into shopping in June).

What I’m Considering

A particular pair of shoes has been haunting me lately: the Margiela tabi mary janes. It feels as if everyone on the internet whose sense of style I love owns a pair of these and I’ve become increasingly convinced that my wardrobe ennui will not be solved until I have a pair of these in my rotation. This is usually this is the beginning of an obsession where I can feel a literal tension in my body that builds up like a pressure valve, which can only released by making the purchase. (It doesn’t feel great.) The style seems somewhat tricky to get a hold of, so I’ve been stalking this brown pair on SSENSE — I’m not usually a brown shoe person but these ones are $400 cheaper than every other pair for whatever reason, so I’ll take what I can get.

What I Actually Bought

I detest buying pants online but finally caved and ordered a pair of Everlane Way-High Curve jeans. At a certain point, you have to accept that it’s basically impossible to find trendy, newish silhouettes secondhand. So in order to indulge my barrel-leg obsession, I had to go new. These Everlane ones seemed like a good bet because I’ve tried their jeans on in person before, so I know they run big and are relatively stretchy, which means they’re likely to fit. I’m excited to hopefully get my fashion mojo back in these…and dream about what they’d look like paired with the aforementioned tabi mary janes.

What I Made

Cue "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" (California Raisins version)

I lack the patience and the precision required to ever become truly great at sewing, but still managed to knock out this pair of sick California Raisins pajamas under the tutelage of my mom, Laurel Slone, a professional dressmaker. The fabric was originally a bedsheet I rescued from a by-the-pound thrift store several years ago. The fabric was a nightmare to work with, 70% polyester and staticky as hell, but I’m delighted with how they turned out.

What I’m Reading/Watching/Enjoying

• Anything involving comic actor Danny McBride

I had been meaning to watch The Righteous Gemstones, an HBO comedy series about a family of unhinged, self-involved televangelists, since 2019 and when I finally got around to it this month, it was even funnier than I expected. The casting (John Goodman plays the family patriarch!) is unbelievable and spawned a full-blown obsession with Danny McBride, who plays the bumbling, narcissistic eldest son, Jesse Gemstone. I decided to seek out the rest of his oeuvre and was not disappointed. Eastbound and Down is brilliant, deliciously offensive (it was 2012, what do you expect?) and eminently watchable. I’m a lifelong fan.

• The Strange Journey of John Lennon’s Stolen Patek Philippe Watch, The New Yorker

Jay Fielding spins the fascinating yarn about the “Lennon Patek,” the luxury wristwatch Yoko gifted to John for his 40th birthday two months before he died, which somehow ended up at a German auction house. Bonus: Famed rock photographer Bob Gruen plays a huge part in this story, whose website is an incredible archive of pop culture since the 1960s. You could spend hours looking through his stuff!

• Jane Song on beauty packaging’s “pebble-dagger dichotomy”, Dirt

You know how beauty packaging used to be all black and gold, selling forbidden sex and now everything looks like a pastel coloured children’s toy? This story, which dives into why, is cultural criticism at its finest.

Some adults carry few of the privileges promised by their age but most of the guilt. Consumerism is not an inconsequential game. Any mass-produced object comes with environmental and ethical costs. If a dagger transfers its power and charms to its user, the pebble’s owner intends to take on the object’s cuteness and infantilization. If a dagger is an admission of intention and visible beauty labor, the pebble represents a sense of absolution from overconsumption. How could the adoptive mother of a Glossier solid perfume, 7 Owala thermoses, and twin Calico Critter bunnies possibly be an ecological villain? She’s just a 27-year-old girl!

What I’ve Written

-For Business of Fashion, I wrote about the unique challenges slow fashion brands face and how many are struggling to survive in the current market. This was a depressing but, I think, very important piece to write.

-For The Logic, I wrote about how a growing cohort of people are replacing their social media addiction with an online shopping addiction and what that means for the resale market overall.

-I profiled this whimsical, colourful-yet-classic home designed by Studio Sonny for Architectural Digest.

What Made Me Laugh

Last Word

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