It’s Reader Question Wednesday. Unfortunately, we don’t have the answer for this one, but we decided the best way to figure it out was to get the word out. Ergo:
Who makes the shirt Rachel B. is wearing in these pics?
We checked out sources, and came up empty. Thus far. We’re on the job. This is actually sort of hard, though. We know it’s a Chanel bag (er, thanks to Us Weekly), but we’re coming up empty on the shirt. Anybody out there know?
We worked our way through high school at Gap Kids, which, as unbelievable-but-true as the fact that dinosaurs once roamed exactly where we now walk, this was considered at least semi-cool. We were quite bad at making anyone want to buy anything, but we were quite apologetic all the time, and this, apparently, was enough to keep us employed. (This is a strategy we have applied, with varying degrees of success, to all of our jobs, then and hence.) We remember one woman in particular. Some new thing had been added to the kids’ denim, allowing us to say things like, “You could probably get a whole week’s worth of wear before throwing them in the laundry.” We’ve always wondered how someone would like if we told her to butcher a kitten, but we wondered no longer after we said that. “Sometimes I don’t even wash my jeans for a week,” we said, desperately trying to cover our tracks. This was before that guy was in the NY Times magazine saying he’d never washed his jeans, ever. And really, one week? Pshaw.
Where were we? With things that need to be washed. These necklaces, it was pointed out to us, don’t. Now, we got the jeans thing. We didn’t get the necklace thing. Or that the Gore-Tex … chains? what do you call that, the thing the loops around the neck, when it’s not made of metal? — that the Gore Tex here is apparently very anti-germ, so you could wear this for “more than a couple days, without worrying.” We really, seriously, did not know we even had to consider worrying about that.
We’re so off track here. All we intended to say was that we love these Jill Platner necklaces, with their clean, clean, clean Gore-Tex chains [sic] and their simple, elegant-y … er, charms. We don’t know the word for that either. Did we mention we live about the on-ramp to a bridge? Those fumes are fucking us up.
Moving on:
Er, we just realized the word is “cord.”
Moving on for real:
This (top) is the Baby Beads necklace. We’re not sure about babies or beads, but we love the necklace. $255
We also love this one. We can see this getting a little repetitive. Stepping Stones necklace, $330
She reminds us a little of Sarah McGuire, our other favorite. These are her oxidized silver bangles, $338
And this remains an all-time fave. The Braille choker, $138
All this stuff is so expensive. That’s why we’re doing this Walgreen’s thing today.
Today we went to yoga, which is normal, but our teacher was on some kind of crazy tear, which is not, and people would just plop donw in the middle of his psychotic schemes and take little breaks. We took considerably longer breaks. And now we can’t lift our arms. Seriously. When we took a shower afterward, and attempted to wash our hair, we actually had to bow our head down to our hands to do the lathering part. This is one of those times the royal “we” fails us, but really. We’re so tired we’re walking into things.
Is it us or is this Tucker Max person basically every guy in New York, but the only one who figured out that being an asshole in public would get him lots of money from other assholes? Really, as far as business plans go, it has its advantages. Like the lack of a shortage of assholes, if you can navigate the double negative there.
Anyway, in a rather awkward segue unless we are segueing from the whole icky thing to the washing-our-hands-of-it-all—er, yes. That’s how we’re going to do it. Wash our hands of this, we will. With hand soap.
We’re a little addicted to the idea of hand soap. This is because for so long we’ve been washing our hands with shower gel. It’s better the other way. Everything in its place, and to its function.
Honestly, if we could be anywhere right now, it’d be Hawaii, on a beach, and we would not attempt to move our arms for hours. Malie Kauai Liquid Hand Soap. This is the picture of Coconut Pineapple, but we prefer Coconut Vanilla. $18
Full disclosure: We saw this in Lucky. It’s $24 from the chefyossi.com website, but it’s bizarrely, and conveniently, on sale at Anthro (not on the site, but in stores) for $14.95.
Friends of Bunnyshop may recall that Molton Brown hand soap and a naked woman’s accusation that we were stealing it was the cause, rather than the solution, to our one and only act of thievery. It was worth it. Rosé Granati fine liquid handwash, $23
Love Cowshed. “Contains an aqueous blend of lavender and calendula with lavender essential oil and added aloe,” whatever that means. Too tired to parse. Dirty Cow hand wash, $24
Lavendar hand wash. It makes us wish we were in France. Although if we were in France, we’d be so stressed out about our shitty French that instead of going to the grocery store, we’d eat Oreos for dinner. That is a true story. Lavendar Harvest hand wash, $14
This is the one we actually bought. $12, smells nice. Hand soap probably doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. C.O. Bigelow lemon hand wash, $12
In today’s Ask the Stylist:
My sister’s having a baby, and she’s gone fucking crazy. I guess this is pretty usual, but she’s focused on organics. She won’t touch anything with parabens, and she’s trying to wear lots of organic materials. So I was wondering if you could find me an organic outfit to wear to her baby shower as a silent protest, and some fun organic presents.
So here we are. We can relate, if not to the baby, then to the organics. This is a true story: We can cook only one thing, and that is broiled salmon, with a variety of sauces. It’s all we need, really. We used to buy the very cheapest salmon we could, until one day, we saw a documentary on these salmon basically swimming in nuclear waste. We didn’t really catch the details, but it freaked us out. (If you’ve seen that scene in Baraka with the chickens, it was the same thing.) At that point, we started only eating the wild salmon. Now that we spend our time looking for waitressing jobs, we can’t afford the wild salmon. It’s back to Honey Nut Cheerios. Which, by the way, our local Safeway was out of today, which screwed with our weekly menu plan in a seriously bad way.
Anyhoo, organic. Totally pro, wish we could afford it. Like with the salmon. And we wish there were more of it, sort of like Crossing Jordan. We fucking love that show.
Before we forget (again), our stylist wants your questions. Send them here.
And now, our stylist:
“I recently went to a baby shower, not really my natural environment. I was surprised, actually, by how casual everyone was dressed, and I guess these choices reflect that, and the limited amount of organic clothing—I expanded the definition to include earth-friendly companies, but it’s as close to organic as I could get. So these are pretty simple pairings.”
“First, this Edun top is cute, though you’re going to need really fitted bottoms to balance out the volumizing. I do not acknowledge the shorts there.” Yellow and blue silk camisole, $165
[These are pictured at the very top.]
“And then I would just pair that silk top with jeans, either these slightly refined ones from Edun….” Silverlake Dreamcatcher denim, $165
“Or these from Loomstates. I love these….” Flux Slim-Leg Jean, ChannelFlux slim-leg jeans, $170
“Or these white jeans from Edun.” Siren white destroyed jeans, $180
“Alternately, with the blue jeans, you could put together a simple blazer and tank.” Ivory Theodora blazer in organic twill cotton by Ecoganik, $108
There’s more!
Because we have just as many bored, underworked friends working in the industrial design industry as we have working in the fashion-styling industry, we introduce the very slightest riff on our signature [cough] Ask the Stylist feature: Ask the HOME Stylist. [We are going to stop with the capitalization anytime now.] This will be very good, even if it’s one more reminder of our total lack of creative thinking.
This all began when we received this very specific e-mail from a friend:
I need a couch. Any ideas?
Ah, guys. So to the point and direct. We e-mailed him back for more directions (“Preferably under $1000, modern looking, not ugly”) and posed it to our HStylist, whose qualifications for the position include but are not limited to: styling interiors for magazine shoots, managing-editing a magazine that typically suggested buying $15,000 “seating units,” and writing a book about furniture things. Obviously, this makes him wildly, unbelievably overqualified for our home stylist position, but apparently he’s got some free time on his hands, and all the better for us.
Does everyone know that Bridget Jones is pregnant, at least in the version published every week in the Independent? This freaks us out no end.
Moving on, the Home Stylist!
“With a budget like $1000, you’re pretty much limiting yourself to chain stores, although of course you’d want to consider a cast-off—design-savvy cities like New York and San Francisco have unbelievable treasures in the rattiest Goodwill or Salvation Army shops—or supporting a furniture student’s prototype designs, though that route takes some work ferreting out industrial design programs and going to grad student open houses and stuff like that.”
What I don’t recommend is IKEA: Plenty of what they do is brilliant, but I’ve found their sofas lumpy and uncomfortable, and they wear poorly. This, though, is my favorite of their sub-$1000 range.” The Lund Ekon, $549
“CB2 has a great line of under-$1000 sofas. This easy-clean microfiber sofa also comes in white and charcoal.” The Standard Sofa, $999
“Also from CB2, this conveniently converts flat into a bed but has none of that unpleasant sofa bed vibe.” Flip Flop Convertible Sofa, $999. (This is, annoyingly, we know, the first picture, at the very top of the page.)
“I’m a big fan of the no-cushion look, though maybe it’s not for everybody.” Oasis Sofa, $799
Keep reading below!
T-shirts. You can never have too many t-shirts. We’re still confused as to how a t-shirt can cost $100. That’s completely wrong. But we’ll get to that.
This could be our house t-shirt. Bunnies! We really don’t know where the bunny thing comes from. Hip-hop bunny tee, $26. Is that supposed to be a pun, like the hip-hopping bunny? If so, we just got that.
Dr. Pepper. The drink of champions. We have no idea why this tee is priced “$19 – $21.” We have been to the Dr. Pepper museum, and we don’t know what we expected, but we’re not sure it lived up to whatever that was. Maybe we wanted fountains, with Dr. Pepper flowing in them. Maybe it’s that we still can’t say no to Diet Coke. We don’t know.
We have our issues with Kitson, but this t-shirt’s hysterical. Mean, but hysterical. Co.kee women’s Publicist tee, $48
This is $92. We love Bruce Springsteen. But $92. For a t-shirt. Tss. Trunk Ltd. Bruce Springsteen tee, $92
We don’t entirely get this, but we mostly do. Morphine Generation Familia tee, $79
This is adorable and reminds us of Atelier LZC. Anthropologie’s Ecosystem tee, $48
This is continuing with the bird-nature theme. We could have done this whole thing on t-shirts with birds on them, but after this, they kind of trail off. Burnout birds tee, $24
Disgruntled. We are often disgruntled. Wearing this would only save us the trouble of verbally expressing it. Nan Kim tee, $32
This is so ridiculous. That’s a hamster. Ha! Hamster Tee, $24
We remember peace and prosperity. From a very long time ago. We don’t really feel either way about the interns. Actually, con, but for all we care the president could be making out with dolphins as long as we have competent foreign policy. I Miss Bill Clinton tee, $18.99
Vogue.co.uk is reporting that Topshop is spreading out. This is bad enough. We like our Topshops where they belong, in countries called the the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. (And, indeed, a few European locations. But that is all.)
The worst, the worst, the worst, the worst part: They’re not coming to New York. They’re going. To. LA.
Oh, the barfiness of it all.
Isn’t this unbelievably beautiful? We think so, anyway. It’s Rob Ryan, who we have just discovered is a Cyprus-born Irish illustrator and artist. We couldn’t quite find products of his for sale anywhere, which sort of defeats the purpose but … ah, so what. This is from Vogue Japan. Apparently he’s done belts for the very clever jewelry designer Tatty Devine, but we can’t find them online. This is sort of like sharing a picture of a puppy or something.
This makes us a little verklempt, to be honest. At first we didn’t get the ending, and it was reading like one of those Wilmer Valderrama your-momma jokes. We think we get it now, though. His work reminds us a little of Kara Walker, without all the depressing elements.
That’s the cover from Narratives of a Negress and if we weren’t so unbelievably lazy we would have already seen her show at the Met.
We were just feeling a little blah on the wedges today.
We’ve already discussed the photography debacle we encountered last week at the Getty Villa. This did not entirely detract from our visit. This, by the way, is how Wikipedia describes J. Paul Getty: “In 1917, he announced that he was retiring to become a Los Angeles-based playboy.” Ha! That’s like retiring to be a golddigger or professional consigliere. We especially appreciate how he restricted his playboy activities to the Los Angeles area.
However, we have fewer problems with now-deceasd oil baron playboys than we do with any of those billionaire oil-producing, environment-destroying war profiteers actually now living, so with the Getty we will stay. We will avoid the whole looting-of-Italy-and-Greece problem in this space. We imagine the retired playboy would simply say: “Suckas!”
Anyhow, some home decorating elements from the Getty:
1. Columns and reflecting pools are a nice addition to any space. As are scary statues:
2. The really funny thing to do would be to have statues made of, say, all your ex-boyfriends, so you have a sort of Gallery of Unexpected Misjudgments. Along your reflecting pool.
3. It might also be nice to have tales of your recent, minotaur-slaying deeds available for convenient access.
4. Geometric marble floors: also good.
5. Atriums. Atria. With pools. We are wishing at the moment we could have been born as a slave-freeing noble Roman princess. With an atrium. This is a little tilt-y and overexposed because of the pre-battery-dying running around issue.
6. Now in all seriousness, rather than partial seriousness, these flowers were painted on the ceiling, Sistine style. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do this in your bedroom or something? There must be a stencil or something.
7. And we legitimately love this color scheme: We’re going to call it butter, rust, teal, and cerulean. Maybe we can forge a new career as one of those people who come up with the new names for paint. Except that was not really the skill we just exhibited. If any skill was, indeed, exhibited, which is unlikely. Also handy in any home: helpful directions to restrooms.
8. This is the lily pond our camera fell into immediately after we took this picture.
This is the thing: We really only feel like shorts look something other than ass [pun not intended] on people when they are really short—elongating the leg and all that. However, short shorts are the devil’s work. Thus, we are torn: Long shorts are unflattering, short shorts are treacherous. Given the options—it’s a lady or the tiger situation. We are going with the short. We think it’s because we run, occasionally, when we are not sitting in our bed watching television, and we’re just used to the silhouette. And because long shorts … really, they should just be burned immediately, everywhere, instead of books, in big bonfires in public square.
1. Johnson Millicent shorts, $220. Is it us, or does the model’s stance make her look like she’s embarrassed her shorts are so short?
2. We also like Johnson’s navy velvet shorts from Satine, $265
3. And we also sort of like these Sass & Bides. Striped shorts, $149
4. We find Kitson’s website just so difficult to stomach, but these are kind of cute. Kettle Black pin-striped shorts, $165. They run up to size 8, natch.
5. These are very, very small. LaRok cargo shorts, $138
6. Is it us, or do those shoes look at little bizarre on this model’s legs? We actually quite like the shorts, but the legs are freaking us out a little. Stretch Solid Shorts, $285
