January 4, 2023 First Person Nightmares of a Shopaholic By Adrienne Raphel Shoes near Covent Garden. Licensed under CCO 2.0. I’ve never been married, and I’ve bought my wedding dress. It was a skin-melting summer day. K. and I were going to this perfect vintage store, we have to go, I really want to take you. But she couldn’t remember its name, or whether it was off Columbus or Amsterdam, so we kept stumbling into these half blocks, asphalt shimmering under our sweating shoes. Suddenly, sure as a homing pigeon, she wheeled around a corner to a gated sliver of silver and pressed an anonymous black button. Then K. pressed her hand to the double-barred iron door, and it yielded. The store was a riot of color. Every corner had multiple layers of stuff, so you couldn’t put your eye down on one thing without it landing on five more: golden silk handkerchiefs, tallboy cabinets draped with ropy silken tassels, iridescent velvet slippers, a bristly thick, glossy black, lancelet fur capelet, gumdrop earrings that might have been rhinestones or Tiffany. The accessories had their own accessories: there were opera glasses with an eyeglasses chain on which dangled an opera-glasses charm. My molars ached. Oh! K.’s feathery exclamation snapped my vision into focus toward a dress form. The dress was white with the faintest tinge of seafoam green, beaded and stiff through the torso and then releasing into a tulle storm cloud that gathered barometric pressure above the ground at thigh height. It was the worst dress. This dress is amazing, said K. It’s so good. It would look so good on you. Read More
November 25, 2022 Diaries Shopping Diary By Adrienne Raphel Camille à la ville paper dolls. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0. September 14 I am in my mobile mall, which is my phone’s WiFi hotspot on the NJ Transit. Paynter Jacket Co. is this British couple, Becky and Huw, who make chore jackets in micro-batches. When you purchase a jacket, you also buy its journey, from sourcing the cloth to cutting the pattern to meeting with Sergio, who serges the jackets together in Portugal. I already have their perfect chore jacket from a micro-micro-batch, a Japanese tiger-print patchwork. The latest is a Carpenter Jacket, so, not a chore jacket at all. So different! I dither between Elizabeth and Linden about the wash – “vintage” as though I’ve owned it for generations versus “dark rich,” stiff and authentic. 195 pounds sterling plus 30 pounds sterling for shipping is GBP 225, USD 260 and change, says the internet’s calculator. It will arrive in November so I get to have it twice, now in anticipation, and when it arrives. At Princeton Junction, I get on the Dinky to Princeton University ($3 one-way). I go directly to Wawa to get a coffee (free, all September, for “teachers”). Read More
April 27, 2022 Fashion & Style Barneys Fantasia By Adrienne Raphel SPP Installation at Barneys, 2017. LICENSED UNDER CC0 1.0. FLOOR LL In 1923, Barney Pressman pawned his wife’s engagement ring for five hundred dollars and opened a five-hundred-square-foot clothing store on West Seventeenth Street and Seventh Avenue, in downtown Manhattan, where he sold well-tailored menswear at steep discounts. He hung a sign over the doorway: NO BUNK, NO JUNK, NO IMITATIONS. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. By the time Barney retired, in 1975, the store was doing $35 million per year in business. Barney’s son, Fred, added women’s wear, expanding the store into a row of town houses across the street. Under Fred’s leadership, Barney’s adopted a cool, upscale, whimsical vibe. Barney’s scaled up—it was the first place in America where you could buy Armani suits—yet maintained a patina of accessibility through its legendary warehouse sales, where you could find Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coats in wacky colors at whacked-down prices. In 1981 Barney’s became Barneys, discarding the apostrophe, becoming plural instead of possessive—the royal we. Read More
November 30, 2021 In Memoriam The Fourth Rhyme: On Stephen Sondheim By Adrienne Raphel a letter to the author from Stephen Sondheim. In the late fifties, Stephen Sondheim, who died last week aged ninety-one, performed a song from the not-yet-finished musical Gypsy for Cole Porter, on the piano at the older composer’s apartment. As Sondheim recalls in Finishing the Hat, his mesmerizing and microscopically annotated first collection of lyrics, Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy—in which Sondheim’s words accompanied music by Jule Styne—had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio “Together.” “It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,” he writes, to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!” Read More
December 25, 2020 Best of 2020 A Brief History of Word Games By Adrienne Raphel We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday! Paulina Olowska, Crossword Puzzle with Lady in Black Coat, 2014 When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries—I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation. Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper’s FUN supplement, so he took advantage of new technology that could print blank grids cheaply and created a diamond-shaped set of boxes, with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of FUN. Nearly overnight, the “Word-Cross Puzzle” went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page. Still, the crossword didn’t arise from nowhere. Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words. Crosswords are the Punnett square of two long-standing strands of word puzzles: word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren’t necessarily using deliberate deception; and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don’t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through. Read more >>
September 24, 2020 Arts & Culture Ramona Forever By Adrienne Raphel I returned to Ramona Quimby for nostalgia. What I found was even better: a mystery. Beloved Portland, Oregon, author Beverly Cleary wrote the Ramona books over four decades, from Beezus and Ramona (1955) to Ramona’s World (1999). Set on leafy Klickitat Street in Portland, the eight-book series follows the adventures of spunky Ramona Quimby, her sister Beezus (and, later, her baby sister Roberta), her cat Picky-picky, her parents, friends, and neighbors. Seeing images of Portland in tear gas, under an orange sky, I’ve felt enraged, terrified, and helpless. I’ve wanted to escape to Ramona’s Portland, with invisible lizards and makeshift sheep costumes and beloved red rubber boots. And then, escapism turned into an enigma. Cleary writes in Ramona Quimby, Age 8, “Ramona had reached the age of demanding accuracy from everyone, even herself.” As it turns out, this isn’t exactly true. The Ramona series has many tiny pinpricks of the uncanny—and each is a delight. Ramona and Her Father, the fourth book, opens with Mr. Quimby bringing home a little bag of candy as a present for Beezus and Ramona. “His daughters pounced and opened the bag together,” writes Cleary. “‘Gummybears!’ was their joyful cry. The chewy little bears were the most popular sweet at Glenwood School this fall. Last spring powdered Jell-O eaten from the package had been the fad. Mr. Quimby always remembers these things.” But there’s something wonky in the state of Oregon. How does Ramona know what gummy bears are? Ramona and Her Father was published in 1977, but gummy bears didn’t hit American stores until at least 1981. In the twenties, German factory worker Hans Riegel, founder of the candy company Haribo, produced the first bear-shaped gummy candies, and they quickly became a beloved confection in Riegel’s home country. In the sixties and seventies, military service members introduced the candies to their families, and German teachers started bringing the bears to American classrooms. But it wasn’t until the eighties, when gummy bears started getting mass-produced for the U.S., that they became a huge hit, inspiring TV shows (The Adventures of the Gummi Bears) and earworms (“The Gummy Bear Song”). So how were gummy bears the confection du jour in Portland, Oregon, in 1977? Ramona and Beezus aren’t in German class, and Mr. Quimby, who procures the candies for them, isn’t in the army. Plus, the flavors are all wrong. They call the red bears “cinnamon,” which, as any Haribo (or Trolli or Black Forest) fiend knows, is never the red flavor. Read More