Weekend Rabbit Hole #2

Things I’m doing, seeing and going down a rabbit hole with this weekend.

1. Latest IG account I can’t get enough of is Maison Jaune, an antique store in Paris’s Marche Paul Bert full of unique, midi-century designs I can’t afford but love to swoon over and reimagine my living room with again and again.
2. Checking out some of the new “shows” of fashion week on Vogue.com, like this still from Dries Van Noten’s video with models dancing and moving. It feels like COVID may actually make those designers who transcend fashion because of their creativity, relevant again. In the 90s when I went to shows, designers were really pushing boundaries. It was the time of the Antwerp Six (Ann Demeulemeester, Dries, Martin Margiela), Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Recently everything about fashion has gotten too safe, too commercial (which may be why many of us have gotten into simpler fashion style-wise). Seeing some of the ways designers are reinterpreting what fashion means and how it intimately relates to us is a breath of fresh air when everything at this point feels overplayed and overhyped.
3. I am buying tickets now to go to the Frick Museum’s newest temporary home in the brutalist Marcel Breuer building that originally housed the Whitney which opens March 18th. I loved the opulence of the Frick, but am a minimalist at heart, so I am sure this will resonate with me. Also, if you read the NY Times article about the new installation and the Frick’s young curators, they are quite the anti-thesis of what you’ve expect from a relatively stuffy place. In fact their “Cocktails with a Curator” series, which I am going to watch, has garnered a huge following.
4. This citrus salad from designer Peter Som. Peter is taking his love of cooking quite seriously these days and now regularly offers up easy recipes on his IG and site. I made this salad last weekend….so so good. Will make again. Martha Stewart move over.
5. I watched the first episode of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy and it gave me serious wanderlust. Problem is, it’s on CNN and I haven’t been able to get the episodes I missed, because they aren’t replaying them yet. (It’s on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. EST.) For someone who was an avid Anthony Bourdain fan (I love a good dose of sarcasm), Tucci is a bit mild for my taste, but if I can’t make it to Italy, this right now is the next best thing.
6. The book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted has come highly recommended from a friend so I am going to read once I finish the Joan Didion book I just started. I got waylaid from reading Didion, when someone on IG suggested I read the memoir of Steve McQueen’s first wife (of 15 years) Neile Adams, My Husband My Friend. (It’s out of print so you have to buy an old one.) Well, it was a page-turner, but not necessarily in a good way. If you are a fan of McQueen’s iconic style, you might feel differently after reading this book. He did a lot of drugs and was quite abusive to his wives (including Ali MacGraw). He would have definitely, and rightly so, been #cancelled (or put in jail) today. Not to put a downer on things, but suddenly I see him in a different light. That aside, I look forward to a different kind of read.