Apartment

by Teddy Wayne

It was an unstylish microperiod, best banished to the back of the closet of fashion history, with a potpourri of nineteen-seventies artifacts thrown into the mix—a few bell-bottoms, collars spread like albatross wings, sideburns (Jason Priestley and Luke Perry); cultural nostalgia, so goes the theory, operates in approximately twenty-year cycles, the period required for impressionable teenagers to become adult tastemakers who seek comfort in the rose-colored remembrance of their youth.

Beyond that was a roomful of trim people who were young or aggressively fending off middle age, the women almost all in black, the men in the publishing uniform of open-necked shirts and blazers, chinos denoting industry professionals and jeans for the writers, nearly everyone gesticulating with a cigarette or sloshing drink.