Foam Parties, Quiet Luxury Nonsense, and Male-Order Catalogs

Welcome to A Few Good Mentions, a weekly (or so) toss-up of five random, share-worthy things I might come across, see, read, do, or eat in a given week. You can find me on Instagram, and my website, which I try my best to update with latest published works. Ok, let’s go!

---

1.

Magazines are dead, long live magazines. I nodded my way through this piece by Brian Dillon in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine a few weeks back, and then I promptly went trolling online for old magazine bundles before spending the next three hours on the New York Public Library’s digital archives, scrolling through back issues of Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. “Of course, you might come away from such pages smirking at the fashions, assumptions and ambitions of the past — or with a nostalgic ache for its objects, textures or habits of speech. But also a sense that the past is never the past of present cliché, any more than our present is purely itself, entirely made of the self-celebrating now,” Dillon writes in his conclusion. And he’s right. The gift of perspective is reason enough to flip through the pages of something old. It’s a truer artifact of its era than any contemporary mirror we could hold it up to.

---

2.

Quiet luxury is a duuupe! So says Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson—and I’m in total agreement. Borrelli-Persson doesn’t take down the aesthetic so much as call it out for what it really is: minimalist dressing, which, thanks to her smart and informed insight, isn’t exactly new. (In this instance, it just happened to create a wildly unnecessary hullabaloo.)

---

3.

No FOAM-O. Whether you have kids to entertain, or dream of channeling Ibiza’s famous "La Espuma” party, this is without a doubt, the best Amazon purchase I’ve made all season. And for $43 bucks, get one for a friend. You’ll win summer.

---

4.

Speaking of print publications of yesteryear, what I would give to own a few back catalogs of International Male, the epochal subject of this surprising documentary chronicling its place in the world of men’s fashion and lifestyle from the 70s through the early aughts.

---

5.

I can’t say we used the “best potato chips, the finest olive oil and the freshest eggs,” as directed, but I wouldn’t exactly call our kitchen El Bulli either. Nonetheless, channeling Chef Ferran Adrià has never been easier.

---

Something I wrote recently: Unless you’re coming back from a nearby pedicure appointment, there’s no reason why you should be wearing flimsy flip flops on the city streets—or any other super-skimpy sandals for that matter. Instead, here are some sturdy and extremely stylish alternatives.