I Styled My Brother for a Week, Via FaceTime

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If you really want to get to know somebody, I recommend dressing them for a week. I can think of at least a dozen revealing things you’d learn about me if you attempted such an undertaking. I am already quite familiar with my brother’s sartorial development, and yet talking through his thought process behind getting dressed gave me a new sense of what it’s like inside William Young’s remarkable head. For starters: his favorite color is purple. Who knew? I’ve known the guy since the day he was born, 24 and a half years ago, and I had no idea.

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Meet my new neighbor, same as the old neighbor

A post shared by edith (@edithwyoung) on Jul 16, 2019 at 2:36pm PDT

As we prepared for this cross-country experiment—my brother is in San Francisco and I’m in New York—William gave me an overview of how things were going over in his closet in San Francisco by way of an interview. He’d been working on revamping his style in the months leading up to quarantine, and “just as it was getting good,” he had to take his talents back to the confines of his apartment. After our conversation, I received a follow-up phone call while I was watching the new episode of Billions—an activity the subject knew he was interrupting—to let me know that he had “Kondo-ed his closet right before quarantine and now regrets it” and that I could quote him on that.

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A cartoon by @maddiedai. #NewYorkerCartoons

A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons) on Apr 20, 2020 at 10:20am PDT

He told me that a few factors have shaped his aesthetic sense of self: the occasional shopping excursion with the brain trust that is my parents and me, complemented by an ongoing dialogue with his inherently stylish friend Rem Remmel. “Rem has given me good advice: when you’re looking at your closet and see a lot of blue or gray, the trick is to be more intentional with color,” William relays to me. “When you’re shopping, you have to go out of your way to be more adventurous.” William’s also in a dedicated Instagram DM with 5 or 6 guys, including Rem, that’s exclusively dedicated to clothes: “There’s a lot of ALD [Aimé Leon Dore] and PAA, a lot of vintage and secondhand goods, links from Hard To Get and Grailed, a decent number of Birkenstocks—which is when I consider leaving the group. Rem also opened my eyes to Corridor. Oh, look at this tote that just landed in the DM.”

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Tote detailed with rubberized imprints of AF1, Louis Vuitton, Adidas Tyshawn, Vans and Converse outsoles. Scroll for details