Leandra Medine's Blog, page 638

NY Closets: Joyann King

Welcome to Joyann King’s closet. If you’re a fan of HarpersBazaar.com, you have her to thank. If you find that you’ve been shopping ShopBAZAAR.com more frequently than you do any number of the premium e-commerce sites that populate our browsers, you have her to blame. If you wonder how it is possible that she could have possibly gotten dressed for the duration of an entire work week and not once picked up the red patent leather Chanel boy bag to her mirrored right, lament with us in the comment depository below. Most importantly, though, if you’re on a beach or a lake or plainly near water (pool, bathtub…kitchen sink…), raise a glass to memorial day weekend and buy yourself a denim dress to celebr8! See you tomorrow, folks.

Monday

I like to kick Mondays off with a solid working girl look. This tweedy striped Sonia Rykiel jacket is my current favorite “grown-up” piece, and I love a cropped flare pant right now — but only with a massive platform to keep it cool.

Sonia Rykiel jacket, Theory pants, and Michael Kors sandals.

Tuesday

It’s Tuesday and I’m keeping it easy in a denim shirtdress. My Michael Kors platforms that I sprung for this spring are getting A LOT of use. This suede Chloe bag too. So 70s!

MiH dress, Michael Kors platforms and Chloe bag. 

Wednesday

Mid-week party plans call for a floral print dress that feels a bit dressy for the office (but still passable) and totally perfect for an evening out.

Thakoon dress

Thursday

Hungover and tired, my favorite floral peplum blouse and flared jeans are just what the doctored ordered for a day of just trying to just get it done.

Dries van Noten blouse, Frame jeans, Chloe necklace and Saint Laurent sunnies.

Friday

What other day of the week could you rock your new favorite boho blouse that laces all the way up and frowns upon a bra?

Talitha blouse, Frame jeans and Michael Kors shoes. 

Follow Joyann King on Instagram here. Want more closets? Click here. 

If You’re Staying in NYC This Weekend…

Nestled down on old MacDougal:

An old cafe not for the frugal.

Its leather booths are sure to please!

But burgers come without the cheese.

A scathing glance, an icy tone:

“The chef suggests it on its own.”

This burger costs ya thirty bucks:

Your screaming wallet self-destructs.

But still you crave that tempting treat:

Corner Bistro, you can’t compete.

Words by Emily Siegel, Illustration by Gabi Anderson. Follow them both at Urban Ditty, and read their poems on MR, like this one about scary bouncers, this one about Netflix and this one about that gluten-free life.

The Only 10 Things You Need to Know Post-Graduation

1) Paying rent is not like responding to a Facebook event invite.

You can’t coyly click “Maybe” and show up fashionably late, elaborate stories about a rogue 6 train in tow. You can’t rely on Siri sending opportune push notifications to your home screen when it’s time to get your shit together. You can’t opt for the “Decline” button because it does not exist, not even when it’s December and you promised yourself you’d actually buy presents this year, instead of making hand-turkeys and macaroni necklaces at the age of 23.

2) Contrary to popular belief, Ann Taylor is not where souls go to die.

In fact, you find its muted tones and Michael Bublé Pandora station soundtrack soothing, and you have never felt more powerful, competent, and Sandberg-y than when you are zipped snugly into one of Ann’s pantsuits (they have become your armor).

3) Feminism, activism, give-a-fuck-ism is important.

If you are lucky, your return address for the last four years was somewhere along Enclave-of-Idealism Road. During your upcoming foray into adulthood, you will experience many moments of frustration and disappointment in the face of bias and ignorance. You may, at times, feel like Jane Goodall — an embedded outsider — doing recon on a community you feel sure must not be your own. When you feel the urge to stand up for yourself or for others, Lean In to that urge. Worry less about rocking the boat than you think apt.  (It’s a sailboat whose jib is sewn from resumes — it will float no matter what, and you are wearing an invisible life jacket — it is called conviction.)

4) No one is having as much fun as their Instagram presence insists that they are.

It’s been scientifically proven that a stimulus with Valencia filter promotes increased activity in the FOMO-us Maximus corridor of the cerebral cortex (note: said stimulus is actually just a brunch that cost them half their weekly paycheck, a sunrise they watched from their desk at a job they find only vaguely fulfilling, or a boyfriend who they met via a Tinder match that revisionist history has allowed them to name Trader Joe’s.

5) Not everyone you right-swipe is worth your time.

Never wave the white flag on your own self-respect and quiet faith that love might actually be like a Hugh Grant movie. (However: always pick a first-date bar close enough to your office so that you can fake a work-emergency-flavored evacuation, if needed.)

6) Resist the (all-powerful) urge to find the guy who just interviewed you for your dream job on Instagram, regardless of the fact that he may actually be your professional soul mate.

Double-tap nothing; plead the fifth if discovered.

7) Throw your colleagues (metaphorical) acapella concerts.

Unlike in college, the secret talents and beautiful complexities of your peer group will not have convenient, mid-semester showcases; they will, in fact, remain largely undiscovered unless you take the initiative to ask. Give those around you occasions and space to grow past their one functional dimension in your life and you will be perpetually surprised by all that blooms just beyond the edge of their business card. This will pay dividends for your entire career.

  8) The job you are doing is not brain surgery (unless it actually is, in which case: YAS QUEEN); your cube is not a snowflake.

Everyone else your age is hauling around their own, similar set of existential anxieties and half-baked ambitions. You are not the only one hustling. Period. You may not have the same jobs, but you are all doing the same work — of building a career, a passion, and a person. And so inside each of your Blackberries and classrooms and grad school applications are identical words — of hope and stress and goals — describing efforts, the impacts of which have yet to be forecasted. (Cliff Notes version: your job is not “harder” than anyone else’s. I promise.)

9) Keep the “movie theater” momentum.

You know, that fleeting feeling between the final line and the closing credits of a truly transcendent film when you whisper resolutions into your popcorn bucket: I will tell him how I feel, I will quit my job, I will not be afraid of failure, I will never participate in or allow the evil destruction of another Avatar culture’s Hometree. In life after college, you may find that there are fewer junctures to confront those principles and an abundance of convenient excuses to avoid them. When you feel the matrix of minutia getting in the way, watch the closing scene of Say Anything and let yourself get reacquainted with your closing-credit-confessions.

10) Apocalyptic nostalgia doesn’t make you a “sissy,” it makes you productively (albeit tearfully) appreciative.

You are right. The tsunami of emotion you surf into Commencement on is warranted. This is as enormous and important and impossibly ephemeral as it feels, perhaps even more so. You are not being melodramatic. Put the end of this chapter in bold font, put it in italics, underline and CAPITALIZE it. For if you let yourself preempt the coming nostalgia, you grant yourself the opportunity to feel and to share the wistful gratitude most only receive as a gift from their sidekick, Hindsight.

Illustrated by Kate Worum. Follow her on Instagram here. 

ICYMI: A Week in Sound Advice

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably:

A) Looking for some sartorial inspiration as you pack for your weekend getaway.

B) Drinking a margarita in bed, wishing you were packing for a week in Cannes.

C) Cursing the fact that everything good in this world is made of gluten.

Chances are you have your mother’s brother’s sister’s pet cow’s wedding approaching because hey, it’s that season. You’re stressed over what to gift the happy couple because you’re saving all of your hard-earned cash for the H&M X Balmain collaboration. Have no fear, Stone Fox Bride wedding expert Molly Guy is here!

Still, there’s the question of what to wear, and your style is as unpredictable as the weather these days.

Go to your fridge. Have a glass of wine. Marvel over the best Jane Birkin slideshow you’ve ever seen. Take pen to paper. Relax.

Now here’s the challenge: don’t turn to Instagram. Chances are it will only exacerbate your woes. Rather, take comfort in the company of MR and good advice. Turn up the latest Beyonce Nicki Minaj teaser for the umpteenth time. Get to know a new French designer. Find the receipt for that $70 lip balm you were cajoled into buying last week.

Acquaint yourself with your reflection. Kiss the mirror, we’re not judging.

Cannes in Photos

When I think of Cannes, I see Jane Birkin with her stringy hair and short bangs holding a straw basket, her knee popped and facing outward. Her hip bone is protruding from her white flare jeans which are low rise and when paired with her cropped crochet t-shirt they display her entire stomach. She’s leaning against a wooden column next to Serge Gainsbourg and the dramatic scenery behind them boasts a mystical, breathtaking view of clear, gentle waters that seem to encapsulate an out-of-this-world shade of blue despite the minor detail that the photo is black and white.

If there is in fact any glamour left on the earth we — not Gainsbourg — now occupy, it is no doubt confined to pockets along the French Riviera. This is an argument that has long held true and maybe that’s in part because of the film festival that opens the summer season. Where else, after all, could the premiere of a film (not movie) demand that men show up not just in black tie but tuxedo, for the love of Armani! And this debacle on flats, you’ve read about it, right? At the Cannes Film Festival, still in progress right now, women are being turned away from the Red Carpet — the last remaining true red carpet – because of their lackluster footwear, displaying neither a heel nor the delicate female arch that it creates.

I had enumerable ideas of what Cannes during film festival season might be like. Gowns worn midday. Beach-side lunches where the rosé flows like jelly-fish in the Mediterranean. Sun umbrellas. And frankly, I wasn’t wrong. But there is something rather sad about the commercialization of the new world’s last standing old-world-destination.

Last week was the first time I had been to Cannes during the film festival. I was there as a guest of Chopard, the festival’s official sponsor, and when I arrived, I was astounded by the time-honored hotels covered in big-ticket movie banners. There were barricades containing fans as if sardines in a can. You could barely walk along the Croisette, Cannes’ main strip, without being stopped by the exhaustive foot traffic — suede loafers upon espadrilles upon luxury shopping bags and so forth. I’ve only been to Vegas once but once is enough to know that when you’re striking a semblance between the French Riviera and the anterior’s larger-than-life strip, glamour is hugely relative.

Maybe that’s not fair either. In Cannes, the women are better dressed, the jewelry is decidedly more dramatic (often requiring its own bodyguard), and the food isn’t genetically modified. The charisma tethered to walking down a red carpet and up covered stairs, into an enormous amphitheater full of lauded talent to see the movies that will instruct the following year in entertainment and to acknowledge that this formula worked and worked well for the past 68 years is worth something, right?

But I’m still curious about this notion of glamour. Was it swept away in the high tide of the film festival’s modern commercialism, or was it me? Did I suck the glamour out all on my own?

In partnership with Chopard. Curious about the last time Leandra had (a) deep thought about travel? Check out her Tokyo Diary. 

MR Writers Club Prompt: DIY Beach Read

Though we will certainly delve deep into the psychology of what your beach actions say about you in the near future — no point in overanalyzing it now, this isn’t a date — you’re likely already familiar with the many different types of ladies-who-beach. However, despite the plethora of personalities, there are still only two types of people in this world: those who read on the beach, and those who don’t.

Those who don’t are only human. They — fine, we — we prefer to sleep, take a walk, get a buzz, and then nap. Maybe play some Kan Jam if we’re feeling crazy.

Those who do (and I’ve observed this with my own eyes) can and will lay on their bellies for hours upon hours while their backs fry, flipping over only once a chapter is complete so that they can turn the page in tandem.

I love a good book. I’d eat books for lunch if they didn’t take like paper. But I cannot, for the life of me, read on the beach. I’ve always chalked it up to sun, noise, heat, sleep, alcohol, sleep, the fact that there are two kinds of people in this world so I have to be one of them, and peripheral distractions.

Yet it never occurred to me that I wasn’t reading the right beach read.

And so, in order to ensure that the coming weekends are spent in a literate and freckly manner, this week’s Writers Club prompt wants you to write a beach read (fiction or non) in ~500 words. A very short story, if you will, because the thing about that other half of the population is this: whether you read a novel or a poem or a paragraph, if you’re by the water then you, my friend, just converted.

Send all prompts to write@manrepeller.com by Thursday, May 28 at 12 PM EST. Bifocals and a bikini, here we come!

Check out past Writers Club prompts and entries here. Then weigh in on red carpet flats. And then, since you’re on a roll, read a letter Leandra wrote to her hair. 

Image shot by Joel Lim for Elle Singapore

Jane Birkin feat. the South of France

You don’t feel like working, I don’t feel like working. Why don’t we together do something for the better of humanity or at the very least, for the better of what should be renamed The Most Unproductive Friday in the History of Holiday Weekends.

But what can we do, you ask?

Easy.

You’re chained to your desk, I’m chained to mine, so let’s make the best of this fortress — not prison — and pretend we’re already on the beach. Here’s a slideshow of photos of Jane Birkin with her main squeeze Serge in the South of France to properly position your mindset. Become one with her bangs. Ask yourself why you’ve not yet jumped aboard the straw basket-as-bag train and then remember that you’re still en route to Montauk. Get off that train and consider a pair of low rise flare-leg jeans. If there’s no sailboat in your proximity, I get it (there are none in mine, either) but lean against something, anything, and imagine the French Riviera’s breeze combing your hair into a mystical state of natural oblivion. Ask yourself what natural oblivion means.

Now take it back, I don’t have an answer.

Forget bras, eat ice cream. Reconsider the ballet flat. Then fart glitter because Céline, my friends, is going on sale soon. Make a case for espadrilles. Ask your best friend to stop buttoning his or her shirt and understand that with great style comes the urge to shop. Give in with:

Hats!

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And bags!

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So many bags.

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Sandals!

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And crops! Then stripes!

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And frivolity! Such necessary frivolity.

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Now go home.

Want to keep shopping? Fivestory NY has e-commerce now. Oh, you’d rather drink? It’s kind of early but who am I to judge your timezone. Here’s a cheap summer wine guide, and here’s a best-of Manhattan margaritas list.

Shop One of Manhattan’s Coolest Stores Online

When we debuted our New York Closets series with Fivestory owner Claire Distenfeld, the comments were overwhelmingly kind (which is why we love you) and included such responses as:

“You’re cool and pretty and hella stylish and I want to be your friend.” — Quinn Halman

“I love that she raises up her shoes to offspring status.” — Misha Lobo

“I need that white buttons skirt pronto!” — Daphne Blunt

and

“Where did she get that backpack?” – Elaheh

Well now, regardless of where you live (Fivestory is a Manhattan boutique, you see), you can be Claire’s friend, copy her shoes, find her skirts and more readily hunt down niche backpacks because Fivestory now has e-commerce, and Claire does the buying.

This is a big deal if you’re looking for a clutch that says “chill pill.” Or if you’re allergic to shellfish but like to wear them. Or if you, like Quinn, want to smell like Claire.

It’s “just accessories” for now, which means no skirts (come visit NY, you guys!) but when there are Laurence Dacade boots that look like Bambi for pre-sale, who cares about e-clothes.

Besides, has Amélie Pichard taught you nothing? Shoes are the main attraction.

Shop Fivestory NY online here, and follow it on Instagram. As for Claire? Check out her New York Closet, check out her Insta , and while we’re at it, reminisce about her friend Rosie Assoulin’s SS15 fashion week presentation.

Feature image via The Citiphile.

Flats Are the Short Girl’s Middle Finger

I used to spend a lot of time several inches above the ground. It was painful.

I could never levitate or float or even jump high. I was not an invention of Roald Dahl. But I was very short and I was very desperate not to be, so I wore heels — often. I remember these years well: I am thirteen and on my way to a bar mitzvah in modest wedges. They leave a rim of angry blisters around each foot making it impossible to dance. I am fifteen, it is New Year’s Eve, and my heel breaks in a gutter on Third Avenue. I am seventeen, I just blew through my meager disposable income to own a pair of pumps, and when I put them on later, I’m in agony.

These heels — all of them — could not promise much. They did not come with fairy godmothers or plastic surgeons. But they did the trick for a while. They let me peek at adulthood. They convinced bouncers that I was old enough and family friends that I could sit with the grown ups. I would endure the pain all over again for that. It was worth it.

And then I stopped. It wasn’t supposed to be a political statement or the crest in a new wave of feminism; I did it because flats are cool. I did it because after I finally became at least a convincing hologram of a grown up, I didn’t want to try so hard to look like one.

We are told that tall women are not supposed to wear heels. They look more demure in flats. Feet planted on the ground, they blend in better in crowds — which is exactly why a statuesque woman in stilettos makes a special impact. Waltzing into a room in added inches and blatant bravado, she announces herself: she is taller than you and your brother and that potted plant and she does not give a fuck.

We are told that short women are the lucky ones. Heels flatter our calves and thighs. They elevate us. Josh Groban agrees: they raise us up. But heels cannot be for us the same sartorial middle finger that they are for our lanky peers. To make an equivalent statement, we need flats. A woman in flats can be simultaneously impulsive and graceful. She is not enslaved to Uber’s surge pricing or cobblestones or the patriarchy. When the right person asks nicely, she can walk home. And when she wants to leave, she can make a quick escape. She never tries too hard.

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Effort is good and great and important. But control and pride are better. I have to imagine that the women who were barred from the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week would agree. They arrived in flats and were denied entrance. Heels are required on the red carpet, apparently.

Given that we live in a glorious age of fancy denim and white-tie jumpsuits and Jenna Lyons, what is in a dress code? What spells extravagance? Our dresses and heels and the tiny bags we carry are always a fantasy. Mine were, anyway. But is there now a different fairytale to tell? What should women wear on the red carpet? And when will Cannes force George Clooney into stilettos. This is the most relevant question. Let’s talk about it.

If flats are formal (and cool-wedding-appropriate) maybe that means flip flops are fashionable too. They’re certainly easier to pack if you’re going away this weekend and bringing a thimble of a tote. After all, you need to save maximum storage space for the wine.

Image via W Magazine

Your Beach Look in a Tiny Tote

I have only one issue to take up with the Michelin star of holiday weekends — the artist formerly known as Memorandum — being declared summer’s unofficial starting line and that is: packing. I know it sounds trite, disconnected from what constitutes reality, but the mind wants what the mind wants and mine, my friends, just wants to feel free from the disarray that is attempting to forecast what I will want to wear in the future. I can’t even figure out lunch when I’m standing in line at a salad bar — where the only options are, you know, salad — so how, really, am I supposed to feel comfortable electing outfits, the formidable windows into our souls, for days past the current one?

The best I’ve come up with is bending the contraband rule that mandates you’re supposed to pack in the first place. Why not assume that what you’re wearing on your back will be precisely what you’ll want to wear for at least the following 72 hours, right? It’s not quite hot enough to fancy yourself a bikini-and-the-city extra but it is hot enough to pretend.

So I’m suggesting the following for the packing that will precede wherever the upcoming weekend takes you: don’t do it.

Get dressed tomorrow morning like summer Fridays have been instituted (bathing suit as blouse, skirt that can be worn as dress or top, your favorite sandals and head off into the stark daylight.

If you must, take a beach bag and stuff the technicalities in there. (See: toothbrush, !sunscreen!, red lipstick.) If you have room left and figure you might do something beachside black tie, a crop top + heels are fine too. Oh! And take a large-size silk scarf. You can use it as a sarong, or head piece, or diaper, whatever.

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If and when someone in your share house is to ask where the rest of your clothes are, you should make it your point to share with the inquirer a new movement for which you stand: stuff is so last season. Besides, DOESN’T SHE KNOW? Real style is about making the same point over and over (and over) again.

Sooooo, WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Don’t know what wine to bring, wherever you’re going? Use this guide.