The Design Issue

Thoughts…on…style???

I sometimes wish my apartment could look “effortlessly chic,” as they say—I’d like it to seem casual and tossed off, but with an avant garde, “anti-decor” vibe evocative of the downtown New York art scene. Ideally I would hang weird Victorian religious prints on the walls and have bookshelves full of arcane novels no one’s ever heard of (the ones they release under the New York Review Of Books imprint would be good for this I think) and the general response of guests would be, “holy SHIT I’m finding this apartment beautiful and confusing and almost…funny?…to the point where it’s sort of pissing me off (in a positive way).” 

Unfortunately, I am not sure this is possible due to the tragic state of affairs re: I am addicted to buying items from Target’s Pillowfort line of brightly colored housewares for kids. Why? No one knows why. Bold, multicolored patterns have an effect on my brain much like what goes on with babies, who can only see in high contrast due to their being young and stupid. My go-to, design-wise, is anything that looks like it would be in one of those fucked up, bright white Swedish candy stores where they only sell rainbow gummies. Which is not necessarily wrong, stylistically, but I don’t know if it is “cool” per se to have so much in common aesthetically with this child from the Target website who is enjoying an item from the Pillowfort collection:

I’ve had the same problem with fashion: there was a period around seventh grade when I decided I was interested in looking stylish and awesome at all times. I’d spend half an hour every weeknight trying to put together an outfit for school the next day, but the main clothing items I had to choose from were three pairs of hand-me-down boot-cut l.e.i jeans from my cousin, several t-shirts from Abercrombie and Hollister that said “Maui” and “This Is From Abercrombie” and things along those lines, and various solid-colored stretch camisoles from Aeropostale. 

I would try dark wash jeans with Maui shirt with green cami, and light wash jeans with Abercrombie shirt with pink cami, and so on and so on, not really understanding why none of the t-shirt-and-cami-and-jeans combinations I could come up with were reading as “high fashion” in the way I wanted them to. This went on for a long time until I figured out how to solve it via the mid 2000s method of wearing a very normal outfit with an enormous pair of statement earrings. But the issue remains that it is not easy to style an outfit that consists of two elements, one of which says, like, “Girls Love The Beach” on it. Style requires having more varied and interesting tools at your disposal than that.

Which brings me to…literature?? I wonder about literary tastes sometimes, and contemporary literature, and where literature is “going,” and how to write more like the writers I admire but in a way that is personal to me and relevant to the 21st century literary project (I guess). Some contemporary fiction feels to me either too abstruse and impenetrable, or too weird for the sake of being weird, or too abrasive for the sake of being abrasive. And I find myself liking work that is more…accessible, one might say. But I wonder if I am just not trying hard enough to get something out of these more experimental works, which are ostensibly pushing the form forward into new and unexplored territory. Is it basic to want to read a conventional novel that uses novelistic conventions to say something new about contemporary life? Is that literally as basic as buying a polka dot rug for children from Target for $29.99?????? 

I know that whole last paragraph was abstract, but I am not ready to name names as far as books I’ve ready lately that I’ve had these dark and confusing thoughts about. Maybe in another letter. But please, let me know if you have read any good books lately and whether they struck you as normal or weird, and what that means to you. 

Back to my apartment. Right now it is actually looking really nice, in large part thanks to my boyfriend, who, if you are not a toxic bigot/gender role fundamentalist, you might have correctly assumed is great at decorating. I think there is a middle way between spending all my money and time and energy trying to make my space look perplexing and incredible, and on the other end of the spectrum buying 100 plastic storage bins and just kind of putting stuff in the bins. And that middle way involves tastefully deploying ONE understated basket from the Target Pillowfort collection and no more than that.

To conclude…I guess there is no accounting for taste. Taste is surprising. You can be shopping with a close friend, someone you think you connect with on a stylistic level, and they can show you one of the most insane clothing items you have ever seen in your life, and all there is to do is go like, “THAT LOOKS FREAKING PERFECT GIRLIE!!!!!” while you question what it means to even know what something looks like in the most fundamental sense. We each have a singular consciousness and we perceive things differently and that’s why every person on earth could have their very own Substack and no two would be the same and probably only like 100 million total would mention the Pillowfort collection at all. Isn’t that beautiful??? Yes…it is.

Ok, very good. Bye for now…

Xoxo

Jewel