HELP! I'M DELUSIONAL!

jesus christ...am i defending "vibes"??

During a particularly deep period of depression a few years back, I used to ride the train out to Rockaway Beach at least once a week, usually twice. It was one hour each way and I would stare at the dark hallways of the underground as the subway shuddered beneath Brooklyn. I’d get to the beach in the late afternoon and sit on the sand as the sky shaded pink, watching children splash in the water and men with metal detectors slowly trace the land. Once the day went dark, I’d ride the subway back to Bed-Stuy, sand in my shoes and saltwater on my skin. 

What I remember most from that era isn't the beach, although it was the reason for the journeys. What I remember, vividly, is sitting on the orange plastic seats of the old A train and the striped silver metal of the car walls. I remember the weight of my beach bag and how it always reeked of coconut sunscreen and how I’d stick my nose in it to overpower the smell of summer subway. As the neighborhoods changed above ground, so did the people on the train: tourists with suitcases boarded at JFK, freestyle rappers got off at Broadway Junction, moms pushed strollers at Euclid Ave. This was the summer that Frank Ocean put out “Blonde” and I’d listen to “Solo” on repeat during that hour-long commute, staring at the changing underground to the words:

It's hell on Earth and the city's on fire
Inhale, in hell there's heaven

With my phone on airplane mode and that one song on repeat, I began narrating the scene to myself. I was narcissistic with my imagination, convincing myself that these depressive funks were not only interesting but essential because I Was A Writer And Therefore I Needed To Feel Things Deeply Because If I Didn’t Then How Would Other People Be Sensitive To Beauty? And with the soundtrack and the scenery on lock, I was crafting primo cinematic shit in my mind. My moods were more than moods…they were entire vibes and aesthetics and scenes. I was obsessed with decorating reality, giving it meaning with emotion and soundtrack and setting. In short: just romanticizing the fuck out of every minute of my existence. 

For someone obsessed with daily romanticization, it’s remarkable how much I resist straight-up romantic aesthetics. I hate puffy sleeves and opulent jewelry and those TikToks of people wandering grocery store aisles to Lana Del Rey. (Probably because they hit too close to home and I came of age in the era of irony.) I never stray too far from my tried-and-true uniform of a band t-shirt, ripped jeans and platform sneakers. But Acne just did the impossible and made a collection that’s a burning bright flame to romantic but disaffected former emo moths like me. 

The brand’s SS23 collection features pastel boots with spikes, pink bows for pasties and earrings that go all the way down to your knees. (Sidenote: I already know I will be spending a likely reprehensible amount of money on these thorny rose earrings when they’re released. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick.) The brand somehow married urban cool with soft-hearted sexy baby. 

In a similar vein, Patrick McDowell’s “Marie Antoinette Goes to Liverpool” collection is not only just a fucking funny premise but an ode to delusion, with makeup modeled after New York’s Queen of Delusion Du Jour Julia Fox. (Sidenote: years ago, a friend of mine saw Julia Fox read bad poetry about her period at an open mic…which is, truly, one of my favorite things to imagine being read in a vocal fry. I think about it often.) 

And I recently discovered the Italian brand No. 21 whose new collection is called “THE LOVERS” … because nothing says romance like latex. The vibe is vaguely, like, Mrs. Robinson of “The Graduate” meets Rimbaud. Specifically a Rimbaud who showed up to the bar in a lace jacket but got in a fight and is now drunk and wandering the streets at 3am in tattered clothing, bruises and thoughts of Verlaine. Bless. 

But why am I getting caught up in romantic aesthetics? Where the fuck will I wear any of this? Why do I want a pair of light blue Manolo Blahniks with floppy grosgrain bows? 

In her newsletter

Maybe Baby

last week,

Haley Nahman

wrote about aestheticism as a coping mechanism. A reader asked if Nahman saw the internet’s obsession with aestheticizing every aspect of life as a response to the stress of living in a capitalistic society. Nahman responded that she saw this impulse as a desire to replicate society’s obsession with image and to understand yourself through understanding (and mastering) your own visual brand: “When we compliment someone’s photo by saying it looks like an advertisement—itself an imitation of reality—that doesn’t seem backwards to us at all,” Nahman writes. 

On a simpler level, this desire to “live aesthetically” speaks to a basic human desire for collective meaning, I think. People repeat the values of their culture (and when you’re in a market-based, image-obsessed economy, of course the highest compliment is “omg I was scrolling and thought this was an ad for Crate & Barrel!”) The ability to make your life appear like something that a marketing team got paid to produce is a romanticization in and of itself. A supremely capitalist romanticization, of course, and one that barely hovers above the mundanity it tries to elevate but still…it is an attempt to create meaning or significance by tapping into common cultural values. 

We can relate this all together. Like a TikTok therapist trying to boost their following, we can ask: is romanticization a coping mechanism? An effort to accept mundanity by elevating its importance and beauty? Do we seek reassurance in a symmetrical face or a color-coded pantry that life can be better because It Can Look Like This? If I can’t make it nice, at least I can make it pretty. 

A little while after those trips to the beach, I read Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” because I had a crush on a guy who loved it. Obviously, the guy quickly faded from my life but I’ll always consider this passage from the last page of the book his gift to me: 

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” 

And please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. I don’t think that the fashion industry is “not inferno.” I don’t believe that aestheticization is a solution to any actual problem. Glamour is a delightful decoration but a faulty foundation. However, it can teach us something valuable. The ability to recognize “not inferno” requires an attention to detail and, more than that, a conviction that details are important. The “not inferno” is alchemy, turning mundanity into meaning. It is an outfit that, however impractical, conveys some ineffable…vibe. 

It’s when you’re on the subway in a city of 8 million people and the doors open and who boards but one of your closest friends. It is five-minute belly laughs that hurt like they used to in childhood. It is the sincere apology that you never thought would come, particularly not from your own lips. It is riding the train alone and noticing the other passengers and the way that the smell of coconut wafts out from your bag and convincing yourself that one day you’ll write about it. Then years later…

Inhale, in hell there’s heaven. 

P.S. I’m distraught to report that I just saw the Church’s x Off-White collab and I really really like it. Fuck.