BLOOD AND HONEY

the OG of classic, unstudied, breezy cool. nobody can say "sit your narrow ass down, hot shot" quite like Lauren Bacall can--with her eyes.

In all things except skin care and bathing suits, I am a traditionalist. Part of this is because it is low-risk in some ways, and I have an engineer for a father. Engineers are allergic to risk. I have inherited this. 

And so when it comes to clothes, I detest trends. Trends only exist to convince women that they need to buy more things. I don't think you should have to do that. 

And seriously, most trends are not that flattering. Do side cut-outs or dresses made of netting and strategically placed doilies flatter most women? No. When people look back on this time period, they will marvel at the fact that so many celebrities and fashionistas walked around in full-body pantyhose. Remember super low-rise jeans from the early aughts? God help us. I was in elementary school then. It was apocalyptic. I don't know how anyone survived.

Right now, the seventies and the nineties are both massively on trend (which seems odd to me as in silhouette and color palette they are disparate) and I hate the fads from both these decades, which means I have been continuously vomiting and ping-pong-ing back and forth between shops looking for something, anything, that is not fringe-y or suede or a velour turtleneck.

I AM NOT SUGGESTING that if you want to try out trendy things that you are wrong. I am saying that you don't have to. It's just marketing. You can still be stylish without constantly adding lots of different pieces to your wardrobe.

And this brings me to my point about personal style: it comes from consistency, not trendiness. Why does any of this matter, you ask? And you are absolutely right. The fact that any of us worry about such things shows us a) how privileged we are, and b) how blown-out-of-proportion-important image and personal branding have become in this digital age. It is not as important as feeding the hungry or protecting the innocent. But we can't get away from it. And if you want to create a personal style, that requires understanding which silhouettes, fabrics, and colors work best on you and running with it. You will find that if your top priority is flattering your body, similarities and themes will emerge. Most of us are best suited to a few silhouettes or styles. For me, this means shirt-dresses or shift-dresses cut well above the knee, high-waisted and narrow jeans and trousers, muscle tees, and motorcycle jackets. I can tart around with the Free People gauzy maxi-dress thing, and I can do WASP-y tweeds and cable knits if I really need to convince someone I'm a good student and/or employable. But I don't feel my most confident in those things. I feel most confident in red, blue, white, or green, in little shirt-dresses and simple sandals, in cuffed jeans and a muscle tee with my Vans. (I'm 1000% a closeted bro.)  I love ornate embroidery and beading but I save that for evening wear. My style is very specific: it's what Betty Draper would wear if Betty Draper went to high school in Venice in the early seventies and dated a Z-boy. (Z-boys would rather cut their own hearts out than wear fringe. You can bet on it.). 

So, you know, I've created a character of sorts. For you it may be totally different. You may be that New England prep school girl who nonetheless has a weakness for skate shoes and leather. Or maybe you're a total IDGAF diva in the vein of Rihanna, or a breezy bohemian languid under the weight of turquoise rings. Maybe you're that rare person who was born to wear yellow sheath dresses. If you're having trouble, think about the movie stars you admire. We often subconsciously choose to admire famous people who share our coloring or body type. For me, that's Lauren Bacall and Francoise Hardy. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out. But when you find a look that makes you smile in the dressing room in that half-embarrassed, half-exhilarated flush of I feel like a goddess, that's your look. Stick with it. It will serve you better than hi-lo hems.*

*Remember those? What a time to be alive.

    
     I was going to write a skincare post today but then I thought, I should really talk about something that moves me. (Of course, skincare also moves me. Ole Henriksen's moisturizers smell like orange creamsicles. That would move anybody.) And weight lifting is that absolute highlight for me. It's always the best part of my entire day. Which I guess makes me sound like a drug addict or something. But it's true.

     I cannot overstate how improbable this is for me. I took ballet and gymnastics as a little girl, and I've been surfing since I was eleven. So I have great balance and I am a strong swimmer. But apart from that I am about as athletic as a sea anemone. Owing to poor depth perception I have outrageously bad hand-eye coordination, and I hate competition and confrontation of all kinds except for explaining why BuzzFeed is bad for America. I was an awkward, gangly, bookish, gap-toothed towhead with a big vertical scar above each eyebrow and easily hurt feelings. (Ah, how little has changed. Except for the gap teeth.) So nobody wanted me on their dodgeball team in elementary school. I'm not kidding. I was always chosen last unless my best friend Cailend was team captain. By the same I was seven I had suffered two major concussions, had a fork stuck into my eye by my infant sister, and been hospitalized for fever seizures. I was a risk-averse kid. If anything spherical came hurtling towards me from anywhere, I ducked and called on the Holy Family (the Olsen twins).

     Then in middle school I developed Osgood-Schlatter syndrome, which is hilarious in itself because it's far more common among young boys. Basically, my patellar tendons hated me, and running or prolonged walking caused darting pain just below my knees. Despite written medical exemptions from both my pediatrician and a specialist, my PE teachers made me run the mile every other Friday anyway, as they lumbered behind the stragglers on their golf carts. So as you can imagine I grew to hate running.

     Then in college my freshman roommate was really into fitness. She would run almost every day, and lift weights almost every day. She ate more vegetables than anyone I had ever met. Her skin glowed. Her eyes shined. She usually handled stress a lot better than I did. All of this is also because she is the best person in the whole world and a gift from God, but it was only amplified, you know, by her exercising. It took two years of occasional and gentle peer pressure, but after I had my first significant bout of panic attacks, I asked the question that changed everything:
"Kayla, can I go to the gym with you?"

     She of course said yes, and the next day I followed her into our college rec center. She taught me how to use the rowing machine, a few free weights exercises, and told me which machines to use and which ones were a total waste of time ("that hip adductor thing," she said with a raised eyebrow, "is pointless"). That was where I started. I kept up with it for some of the summer, but I traveled a lot so it was spotty. This past year, my senior year of college, was when Kayla taught me how to do deadlifts and squats and lunges and the more serious stuff. She taught me to lift heavy and only do a few reps, and adjusted some of the moves to take pressure off my knees, which still give me trouble.

     At first, I didn't really notice a difference, but I mostly did it for my head. I liked the floaty feeling after a workout, and for the hour that it lasted, I knew I wouldn't have any panic attacks and I knew I would feel okay for a little bit, and when you have panic attacks, anything that makes you feel safe is invaluable. Then when I took a dance class I stood in front of the mirror in shorts and I noticed that my legs looked different. (I always worked out in sweats and we didn't own a full-length mirror so I had not seen myself in about five months. College dorms make preening difficult.) They were shapely and firm, and when I did plies my quads looked prominent and strong. My triceps actually rippled through port de bras, like I was a girl in a movie about a ballerina who secretly wants to join the crew team. My stomach was taut. I had, for the first time in my entire life, something that resembled an ass instead of a depressed pancake.

     And as I continued to lift heavier and heavier, I gained confidence in the gym. This is probably the most powerful thing of all; it's very gratifying to be able to go into the weight room full of men and lift just as heavy as some of them, proportional to respective body weights--without compromising my form and without grunting like a gorilla in labor. It feels good to be able to hold my own in there, mostly because I don't often feel like I can hold my own in very much. To feel like an athlete in my own right, even if I still cannot shoot pool or hit a baseball or run a four-minute mile, is to feel competent and strong.

     That's why I like weight lifting so much.

*I also feel that it's especially important for women, because resistance training increases bone density, thereby reducing the risk of osteoporosis. If you're a woman I think you should incorporate some weight lifting into your workouts for that reason alone.

Photo by Rocky Morgan. I don't really have one of me lifting weights because I feel preposterously silly taking gym selfies.

    One of the reasons why I try to hold my tongue in public is because I have this tendency to harp on about things that don't matter for half an hour and irritate the people around me. Since I am not a venerable silver-haired Jesuit or a very small child, people don't indulge me with this so I have learned to stop.
     Most of the time.
     I'm a loon. But I am old-fashioned in a lot of ways. Whenever I would feel overwhelmed or sad in college I would go down to the basement of the library and read La Morte D'Arthur. That's where they kept all the books, in the basement, because not that many people check out books anymore. But I would sit there and read and I would understand what people talked about when they talked about reading the Bible. It gave me deep solace. It's not that I thought, oh, this world is better, because it's not. Everyone in those stories is a bad feminist, absent fathers abound, and all those knights they killed they could have just arm-wrestled to make a point. No, I would think, I would fit better in this world. I guess the relative simplicity and the innocence appeals to me. I never imagined myself as one of those ladies of the court, demanding dragons killed for me and halls razed for me and grails sought for me and fainting all over the place. I always saw myself as Galahad's sidekick, riding out with him in chain mail, sleeping on the margins of forests at night and giving food to the homeless. We would rescue orphans and widows in their distress. We'd have a secret handshake. I would trick him into incorporating several gang symbols.
     But I have to live in this world, where there are no dragons or knights. And it's a mess because I'm trying to get back to the other one anyway, subconsciously, no matter how hard I try to be hip and trendy. This is why I care about etiquette and why I love vintage style, old movies, and old books, but also those old ideals of honor and love. I am completely unironic about this, to the bewilderment of jaded hipsters everywhere. The world may have broken my heart (as it does everyone's, in the end) but I am still longing for honor, love, and justice. I'm longing for them like they are lovers who got away.

     Oh also--that Guy Ritchie adaptation of King Arthur with (my husband) Charlie Hunnam that's coming out next year? You know I'll see it. I just don't fucking get why they're leaving out Lancelot. He's ninety five percent of Arthur's problem. Without him there is no story! Everyone can go home! But when a movie gives you Charlie Hunnam in his rough-trade swashbuckling prime, you say thank you and God bless America.