Topography

Nothing compares/ no worries or cares/ regrets and mistakes/ they're memories made/ who knew how bittersweet this would taste

Adele, if you're reading this, you break my heart. And like a masochist I want it again and again. I want you to take my heart and smash it on the floor when you rush to the piano and feverishly get to playing, never caring that you're waking the neighbors and setting the roof on fire.

Let me explain.

I walk my elderly beagle, Patty, on the all-too-regular in Chicago's West Loop. We stroll through the alleys and freshly planted cabbage patches, through the urban wild flowers, and past the criminals smoking outside of Cook County's Parole office.

To ease the pain, I often listen to Adele and her heavenly piano rifts. When I do this, the urban decay transforms into a surreal opera in which the El tracks, hot breeze, and smell of fertilizer are all necessary and good--components of a life that refuses mediocrity instead of the non-life I fear is mine.

I'm not usually this dour, I promise, but I'm in the arduous process of putting my life together (college graduation!) and I need an inspiration and an idol. I need Adele's drama and heartbreak because otherwise I'm only partially employed, walking the dog, waiting for life to begin.

Adele's voice has its own topography, its own moons, stars, mountains, and I need to travel where it leads. I need the simultaneity of my life lifting and rising with her cadences, and the rocket trip to her universe. I need her adventure.

So thanks, Adele. Thanks for taking me with you. I really appreciate it. You couldn't know how much. And if you need an assistant, call me up. Seriously.

Summer Clothes

I'm an unabashed magazine reader and it usually results in tachycardia. My heart beats furiously, anxious to be united with the imagery: mermaids in their summer clothes, wine lips, garlands of peonies in infinite model manes, splendor and grass and striped umbrellas on the beaches of Marseilles. When I cycle through these portraits--immediate and gorgeous--I lust to enter the scene of the crime, to dip my toes into the emerald waters of the virtual beach. I'm perpetually inspired and energized, fizzy after drinking in the carbonated imagery of W, Elle, Bazaar, Vogue. I willingly suffer through the beauty that these magazines provide, just a hopeless supplicant at the altar of Fashion. I went quiet at the sight of this season's Lanvin rose-infused gown. Couldn't that be me in super-stellar dripping blooms with cascading hair and a face full of mystery? Couldn't it? My imagination runs like a race horse around a mud track. I want the photo, the glitz, the dress, the look, the locale, the dream, the mystique, the fantasy, the budget, the beauty, the life. Can I have it, the magical sartorial tutto? I don't know but I'll continue to bow my head in prayer, waiting for Lanvin to carry me to heaven or the golden wheat fields of Elle's location director.

Marrakesh

I'm a relentless optimist and it's a hip point of derision. All too often some drunk dude with cigarette dangling says "oh come on, how can you be so hopeful? How could you be so silly?" It seems I'm the only living girl characterized by a standard state of enchantment. Well sorry dude but I beg to differ from the cynical alley cat. Yes, we've all heard that the economy is parched, the job market blows, the world isn't kind, but are these the only breathing considerations? What about life's unchanging pleasantries?

To escape the alleged realities of my generation, I've turned to a book on gypset culture in which Yves Saint Laurent once said "[I see] a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future."

Finally, someone who sees the futuristic utopia in my head, a dreamer instead of a simple dude. Call me naive but I'd like to jump off the coast, cold water licking my arms, as the curtain rises off the beach.

The Gentle Giant

You can imagine my surprise when I watched RUN RICKY RUN about NFL behomoth Ricky Williams. Ricky Williams, for those of you athletically challenged, was a smokin' football player who had the celerity and dexterity to stake his claim in the NFL draft. Sadly Ricky's enviable talent was coupled with crushing anxiety; he sat through interviews in his football helmet and didn't lift his voice to the microphone.

Ricky battled his anxiety with pot. He smoked bluntsbowlsbongs and failed three drug tests before he was thrown out of the NFL. What was the world to do with this forlorn talent? Here was a player biologically engineered to dominate the game but uninspired to do so. Ricky took his leave to the chagrin and pleasure of broadcasters everywhere and experimented with planes of knowledge. He got into holistic medicine, yoga, and kush. He spent hours upon hours residing in his "dark places" where he felt most at home.

You, dear reader, may be pouring Irish whiskey into your morning coffee, wondering why a style bug like me gives a shit. After all, I prefer J. Crew to jersey and I never watch the Super Bowl. But Ricky was unearthly. While he was baked and demure, his eyes and mouth bespoke intellectual curiosity and unabashed opinions. Ricky was a dreamer, a mythical hybrid America hadn't encountered, "the heart of a yogi, the body of a football player."

I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'd watch football every Sunday if boys like Ricky ran the game.

Pruning

To the untrained eye, let's say those of my surly grandfather (no offense, Mario), fashion has gone down the tubes. Were he to peer over my shoulder at Vogue, he'd scratch his wiry chest hair through his tomato-stained tee and say “Remy, what the hell!”

He'd shuffle off to tend to his garden, cursing the day he ever left the cliffs of Calabria for this universe of misshapen shoes and elongated symmetry. I say this with relish: I happen to adore the bulbous cork platforms, intergalactic heels, and fruity sheaths of our current spring. I believe in fashion as escapism, in women (and men) playing gypsy, rebellious cowboy, and nerdy chemist solely through their artifice. Ours is a culture of impervious elegance. It is brazen constructions that torpedo through show rooms and street style blogs and it's these that please me best.

Miuccia Prada, sartorial superstar of Prada and Miu Miu, in an interview with British Vogue, said her greatest contribution to the fashion world was her “ability to make ugly cool.” At current, Miuccia's passions revolve around the elemental: burlap, wool, cotton, retro sweaters, school girl with a twist of organic color and polyester blend. Mario is poking his head in from the rosemary patch, shears melting into his hands. “Whaddaya care about that, Remy?” he says before spitting into the grass. But I do care.

Prada has cut a slit into the atmosphere, releasing unruly monsters of material delight: four inch multi-layer cork platforms, faux dyed minks, boxy boat dresses stitched messily. What's thrilling is not the clothes themselves (though I'll happily accept a Miu Miu geisha dress) but the abstract and hedonistically glamorous universe that they inhabit. They are seperate from the everyday, burning like constellations in a dark sky.

Prada is not alone in her quest for The Ugly. Spring collections for Valentino favor studded stilettos while Maison Martin Margiela showcase snake skin booties appropriate for the likes of Indiana Jones or Mike Tyson. And let's not forget the Tibi onesie—a body suit/ mature diaper for the fashion savvy and irresolute bathroom goer.

If I may be so bold, it seems that my generation is informed by sleek nihilism, cynicism, and distaste for classical conceptions of beauty. What we are drawn to is the weird, the futuristic, the ethnic, the bizarre. Ours is a world of nuclear sponge baths, pot-smoking celebrities, and cinder block heels and we've come to like it. Call us weird, call us alien—we'll step, ever so lightly, shoes chaining us to the current.

Just look at popular website “The Man Repeller” with a cult following of 4,102 members. The site records the exploits of a fashion-enthusiast with a penchant for self-deprecation and dissuading dudes. The blogger styles looks inspired by all that is hideous and otherworldly, e.g. “the infant gets abducted by a black crow that was bred in a Parisian atelier.”

We just can't help ourselves.

Lego Queen

Iris Apfel is a G. That's right: I'm talking about the 90 year old globe-trotting-sherpa-wearing- turquoise-clad-parrot who both embodies and dismantles all that is style and fashion itself. Let me explain.

Iris Apfel was born in Queens in 1921, the granddaughter of a master Russian tailor, and daughter of Samuel and Sadye Barrel. Iris's father worked in the mirror and glass business while her mother owned a small boutique. Admittedly, Iris emerged from the womb to an artistic brood but her fashion sensibility seems God-given. As she recounts it, her first stylistic inspiration occurred at age eight. Sadye had arranged for a formal portrait and Iris was in charge of herself. She and her nanny constructed a gown out of cheese cloth, inspired by Isadora Duncan, thus setting the wheels of improvisation in motion.

As an adult, Iris studied art history at NYU and attended art school at the University of Wisconsin before taking up with Women's Wear Daily, interior designer Elinor Johnson, and illustrator Robert Goodman. Iris developed into her own designer during the Depression. She had a knack for chic ingenuity and maintained affordability even as her clients increased in wealth.

Iris met beau, Carl Apfel, on holiday. It wasn't love at first sight: he declared that she'd be beautiful if only she would have her nose fixed. She scoffed, kissed him, and they've been married happily for 63 years.

Together, the duo started a textile company called Old World Weavers. Due to the nature of her business, Iris and Carl traveled the world, collecting beads, bracelets, silks, and cloth embroidered with mysterious hieroglyphics. Iris and Carl amassed a fortune, with the credibility to restore fabrics at the White House and the luxury of an Upper East Side apartment. Iris remained humble, preferring street style to that of the catwalk. Her friend, designer Duro Olowu, said it best: "Iris is more 'street' than anyone I know...You think of the great dressers – Gloria Guinness or Bab Paley – and there's a certain sense of sadness and sacrifice to them. It's immaculate but cold. Iris dresses how we'd all dress if we had the eye. Fashion is like a big box of Lego to her."

Iris is a child in a toy store where clothes are concerned. She calls herself a “geriatric starlet,” favoring oversize glasses (“the bigger to see you!”), tangles of exotic bracelets, feathers, lace, leather, and otherworldly accessories. Apfel is a maximalist with the opulence of Cleopatra and the pocket of Oliver Twist. Sure, she occupies a gorgeous apartment filled with Velasquez paintings and leopard furniture but she's fiscally conservative. She claims she's never spent more than $15 on a pair of jeans and her signature is her rarefied thrift. She attended dinner at the White House in a monk's robe (the heat was off! she claimed) and gleefully interchanges gypsy capes for Balenciaga cropped pants.

It seems that Apfel's sartorial spontaneity originates in her insistence upon singularity: “if you can't be pretty, you have to learn to make yourself attractive. I found that all the pretty girls I went to high school with came to middle age as frumps, because they just got by with their pretty faces, so they never developed anything. They never learned how to be interesting. But if you are bereft of certain things, you have to make up for them in certain ways. Don't you think?"

With retrospectives at the Met, Peabody Essex Museum, and a recent book entitled Rare Bird of Fashion: Irreverent Iris Apfel, Miss Apfel is commanding Chanel showrooms and African street vendors alike. There's no better time to be yourself. A round of applause for this kooky beauty queen, the rarest bird of all and a sartorial spectacular.

Lady Talk

"what i probably changed deeply was making ugly cool." -miuccia prada