Babe by Ava Scott

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2

Chapter 1: Music

Chapter 2: Architecture

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Introduction Hofmann & Tchaikovsky Thompson & The Dirty Dozen Brass Band Vetter & Big Mama Thorton Brody & The White Stripes

Introduction Stoops & Plaid Turrets & Borders Caryatids & Figures Lunettes & Murals

Chapter 3: Cuisine

Chapter 4: Costume

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7 Reasons to Love Your Food The Case for Hard-Shell Tacos Rip’s Malt Shop Now Slinging ‘Vegan Junk Food’ On the (Rising) Trail of Thai Food in America Can Anyone Save French Food?

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Letter of Recommendation: Women’s Clothing Grease Is the Word... Again. My Favourite Fashion Decade: The ‘60s The ’70s Are Back in Fashion. Again. Help! The ’80s Are Back

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Chapter 1: Music

Chapter 1: Music Music is categorized into many different genres and sub-genres—so many sometimes, with so little distinction between them, that it’s hard to remember that most of them have the same roots. Sub-genres attempt to strike a contrast between different styles of music based on some sort of musical principle or subject matter. There is a lot of cross over between subgroups because they have the same root, but there are also larger genres which share approaches to music making. For example, jazz, rap, and the blues are all influenced a great deal by improvisation. Though they sound distinctly different, they have the same roots

which has influenced how they are created. Our project was to take four genres of music—jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and classical—define them in our own words, in selecting our own artist, in curating our own playlists. While listening to what we consider to each of these genres, we researched contemporary and historic graphic designers, trying to find designers whose work resembled the music we were listening to. This approach to design research was the complete dichotomy of the way we’ve been encouraged to think about design. Class after class, project after project, our grade has been taught

that design is a rational, objective process that emerges from research derived from the effective analysis of a project brief. This project a much more reactionary, subjective approach. It was about letting a body of work resonate with you and then going back to understand why that work clicked to you. In terms of project development, it then became important to put aside the music and focus solely on the visuals. We were charged with designing posters, album covers, and other advertisements for bands that we as-

Close up of album cover for Dirty Dozen’s Twenty Dozen album inspired by designer Bradbury Thompson. Introduction

Album covers for Tchaikovskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nutcracker Suite inspired by designer Armin Hofmann and Big Mama Thortonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Way It Is album inspired by designer Brad Vetter.

sociated with the four genres of music in the style of the four different designers that we had selected, so we had to determine what united their body of work. For some designers, these uniting design elements were obvious while some required more careful observation. Classical actually was one of the easiest for me to define musically. I listened primarily Antonio Vivaldi,

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Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Johann Sebastian Bach. The songs by these composers captured the delicate ways in which classical music is often interpreted with runs of string instruments and gentle winds, but they also were frantic and dramatic and suspenseful. The juxtaposition of the soft, soothing, flowing pieces against the full, quick, loud part was something that resonated with my ears and into how I saw classic music as a visual aesthetic.

My initial thought was that classical music would look a lot like Louise Fili, but as I continued to listen to the classical music that I know, the more I realized that this was an assumption and not necessarily an accurate reflection of what classical music truly looks like. It is rather an example of the connotation that classical music has. My real designer options for this genre had been Herb Lubalin and Armin Hofmann. I had

though of Lubalin because of his bold typography choices. They are structures and formulaic in the same way that classic music is, but Hoffman had these very rhythmic black and white elements. The comparison of the black and white was a great representation of the extremes of classical music in speed and volume, and his pieces have a sense of movement which I liked in connection to The Nutcracker (the opera I

would be designing for) as it is the classic Christmas ballet. The red accents also add a sense of drama to his pieces. He also uses a san serif type which was the antithesis of what I had originally imagined, but the clean lines and geometric forms also align with the mathematical structure of classical music. In order to create my poster, I decided that I would use the repeating shapes

of irregular quadrilaterals to create my visual interest. I looked up photos of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and used an image of a ballet dancer during this number as the basis of my design. The black rectangles are based on the overall form of the body, going from her one pointed toe on the group to her extended arms. The red organic shape is based on the position of her legs. Together—though not necessarily obvious—is a

Album covers for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s Twenty Dozen inspired by designer Bradbury Thompson and The White Stripes’ Elephant album inspired by designer Neville Brody.

Introduction

Hofmann & Tchaikovsky Album cover for Tchaikovskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nutcracker Suite inspired by designer Armin Hofmann.

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dancer participating in the opera being advertised. The final aspect of the formatting of the design was discoing where the text should fall and how it should be formatted. Ultimately, the square of texted needed to be aligned somewhere, but as long as it was aligned to something specific in the piece, it still was very Hofmann. In the album cover,

Chapter 1: Music

the text is aligned to a black rectangle whole side is completely vertical which the poster has the text aligned to the red piece. Jazz was a no-brainer in terms of sound. New Orleans jazz was the way to go. As much as the Chicago style or New York style is complex and sophisticated, the soulful horns and brass of the New Orleans style of

Left: Poster for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite inspired by designer Armin Hofmann. Right: Poster mockup, Playbill, and album cover for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Design inspired by designer Armin Hofmann. Hofmann & Tchaikovsky

Thompson & The Dirty Dozen Brass Band Right: Promotional poster for the Dirty Dozen Brass Bandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album Twenty Dozen. Left: Detail of poster for the Dirty Dozen Brass Bandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album Twenty Dozen.

jazz is what I think of when I talk about jazz. Eventually, I decided design for one BABE

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of the albums by The Dirty Dozen Brass Band because I found them to be exactly what I was trying to explain

to people about what I hear in my head when I hear the word jazz.

Right: Album cover for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s Twenty Dozen inspired by designer Bradbury Thompson. Left: Poster mockup and album cover for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s Twenty Dozen. Design inspired by designer Bradbury Thompson.

In order to get the bright sound of the horns into my visuals, I was thinking about color. I wanted a designer who used big bold color. Though I also want-

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ed a designer who utilized layers and repetition because in jazz you have so many instruments creating so many distinct layers of sound—even if some of them are somewhat similar. I was

torn between April Greiman and Bradbury Thompson for this genre, but when people started to show April Greiman as an option for rock and roll, I took her off my list.

In eliminating her, I was left with Thompson. While one of his most famous pieces is inspired by rock and roll, looking at it, I felt that the words underneath it could

Thompson & The Dirty Dozen Brass Band

Vetter & Big Mama Thorton

Repetition of album cover for Big Mama Thorton’s album The Way It Is.

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easily have been ‘jazz.’ To me, it really didn’t depict rock and instead was calling for jazz. His approach to type was also nice to use because it over set the images and interlocked them conceptually. One thing that I really enjoyed about listening to The Dirty Dozen Brass Band was their take on covers. They don’t actually have anyone singing in some of them, but

they use the horns to sing the melody. I feel like this is how the words are integrated. While they say things, they’re used as a counter to the image to create a more balanced design instead of just for meaning. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band does the same thing with some of their songs, they got rid of

the meaning of the lyrics by removing the words entirely and just used the melody as another line in the music to keep the full sound. Unlike the design for the classical music, the album and the poster have totally different designs using the same motif. Each design has a series of cyan, yellow, magenta, and black trumpets. The poster is based on

a spread in which he organized a series of women with umbrellas in a similar way, and the album is based on his use of the circle as a design element. These designs took a lot of redesigning because I was so easily distracted by the simple repetition of the CMYK colors, but there was more to consider like type arrangement and composition.

After spending time discussing the blues in a previous class, I was stuck on the delta blues. I couldn’t picture anything other than warm, thick voices and nimble-finger guitar riffs. I wanted the sound that inspired the genre of rock and roll. I also didn’t want to get too close to jazz. While Billie Holiday is a well-known blues singer, I often feel that the

instrumentation feelings close to jazz. She also has a cold, aloofness to her voice that didn’t quite feel was representational of the genre. Though she was not my inspiration, I needed a women in my series, so I picked Big Mama Thorton. After all, she was the first person so sing Hound Dog; Elvis just stole it from her. She projects like she’s got a microphone down her throat and her voice fills you up like warm tea with honey.

Design for album cover for Big Mama Thorton’s album The Way It Is was inspired by design Brad Vetter.

Vetter & Big Mama Thorton

For the visual representation of this genre, I wanted something that was as country-esc in nature. While country is a genre in its own right, the blues I was thinking of is founded in the

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deep south too, so they could draw from the same regional design. I needed those same kind of display fonts that we associate with that area of the country. I really enjoyed Brad Vetterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contemporary take on the woodblock poster. While

they are still printed in with a more traditional process instead of being designed digitally as mine has, he made tweaks to the layouts, content, and colors which bring it further toward modern times. The

colors have much more of a contemporary feeling because they are more varied than just a pure primary or secondary color, and some of them felt a little bit more feminine which could capitalize on as I was working on poster and album

cover for a female artist. I also liked the boldness. I feel like blues is a genre that unapologetically bold. The block shapes and commanding type fit the powerful messages and rhythms of the blues.

The primary motif of the design is pink rooster; it is the only image on the entire album cover and poster. I like the rooster as a symbol for the album because of their loud cry and southern connection but more

accurately because it’s in the title of the first song on the album I chose to redesign. I first heard “Little Red Rooster” as a cover by the Rolling Stones, so I wanted to give her credit

Left: Detail of promotional poster for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s album Twenty Dozen. Right: Full view of the same poster.

Vetter & Big Mama Thorton

Above: Mockup of poster for Big Mama Thortonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album The Way It Is.

for having a version of the song and not have her be out shined by white men again. The final design was the result of playing with the layout and piecing the information until it fit perfectly in both the square and rectangular format. Overall, I think this series is the least like the designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body of work. I think that the

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difference is due to the colors mostly. My color choices feel much deeper, much more saturated than his, and I also think that I have used more colors in my design than he uses in a typical printed poster design. He also tends to use more irregular shapes in his designs than I doâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;particularly in regard to including imagery. I stuck mostly to rectangles of varying shapes and sizes and

kept my imagery stuck in many of these boxes to explain why their cut off in certain areas. Despite the differences, I think the album cover and poster are successful as their own design though in consideration of the assignment, they are the weakest of the four design schemes.

Below: Mockup of album cover for Big Mama Thortonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album The Way It Is.

Vetter & Big Mama Thorton

Brody & The White Stripes Rock and roll was the hardest genre for me to define and design for. As an avid listener to all sub-genres of rock, thinking of what was truly rock and roll was difficult. If I went with really early rock and roll, it was too close to blues and wasn’t going to be specialized enough for the project. If I went with indie rock which is what I was into, it’s to contemporary to really be rock and roll. Then it was difficult because there are so many aesthetics that are tied to the music itself. My first instinct was to use Jamie Reid and go toward early punk because it has a very distinct style that’s widely recognized as rock and roll.

I eliminated him rather early on though because it felt predictable and it didn’t fit rock as an overall attitude. It was too specific to punk. I really struggled to figure out what I was going to do because I ended up with different designers that fit different sub-genres of rock. I had David Carson which represented groups like The Who. It felt rebellious but it wasn’t hardcore. There’s a

Left: Detail of poster for The White Stripes’s 2003 album Elephant. Brody & The White Stripes 23

Above: Album cover for the The White Stripe’s Elephant album. Design for album cover was inspired by designer Neville Brody. Left: Promotional poster for Elephant by The White Stripes.

reliability to it despite its apparent attempt to be subversive. I had Neville Brody who felt more contemporary due to his use of san-serif type and heavy rotation of black, red, and white as a color

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palette. He was a great designer to represent a group like The White Stripes—especially in their Icky Thump phase—because they were a modern group who had an aggressive edge. I couldn’t

pick though between these two designers because I couldn’t choose between the two styles of rock. I enjoy them both and listen to them on a regular basis. They both seemed like they would be a challenge yet fun to experi-

ment with. Ultimately I chose Brody as my designer —due to other students using Carson for the same genre—and subsequently also ended up with The White Stripes as

the victims of my redesign. When I confirmed I was going to use Brody’s work as the inspiration for my White Stripes album cover and poster, I didn’t realize what a typographic challenge I had set myself up for. His work is deceptively simple because there doesn’t seem to be much that brings it together as a collection. Still with each week, it would become apparent that I had missed a much larger design concept that I needed to go back and fit into my design. I feel like I discovered more about his work retroactively than I did in my own investigation. His work in the integration of image and type; bold san-serif type; full-page designs; and heavy use of black, white, and red. Looking at my current designs, I think they get close to Brody’s designs, but they aren’t quite there yet—though that might have to do with the mastery of typography and amount of experience. My design was done for their fourth—and probably the most widely recognized—al-

bum, Elephant. Released in 2003, the album is filled with some of their most loved songs including the stadium anthem “Seven Nation Army.” The imagery is obviously derived from the name of the album itself and the color

them. The big difference between Brody’s design aesthetic and the White Stripes’s branding is the emphasis on type. For Brody, the type is the front man while for the White Stripes, type takes a backseat to the image. In

choices are not only derived from White Stripes existing band branding. All of their full album covers include black, white, and red photos of Jack and Meg, and their singles also have black, white, and red imagery on

order to create the design I photoshopped photos of elephants into black and red versions to stick with the color palette and add drama

and then experimented with letter placement until I found an arrangement that felt connected and legible but irregular. A difficult task became how to take such a simple cover and expand it into a poster. Eventually, I gave up on using the same elements as they exist on the album cover as I had done with the Big Mama Thorton and Tchaikovsky pieces and recompose the type. I use the same approach as I did with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band poster; I rearranged the base images and then added. The ‘elephant’ and ‘white’ type is the same in both designs, but the letters in ‘stripes’ were rearranged to meet the new elephant head. I chose a front facing elephant for its vertical emphasis in the length of the trunk and chose to crop in very close because I wanted as much white space as possible but knew that the trunk would be enough for the animal to be identified as an elephant. Most of the work was tinkering with exact placement of the letter forms, but overall, I think that its pretty successful—much like the album.

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Mock up of promotional posters for the The White Stripes’s 2003 album Elephant.

Mock up of album cover for the The White Stripe’s Elephant album. Also pictured are the White Stripes single “Hello Operator” and an album by the Raconteur’s (another Jack White project).

Continuation of the mock up of promotional posters for the The White Stripes’s 2003 album Elephant. Brody & The White Stripes

Example of a caryatid, a draped female figure used instead of a column as a support.

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Chapter Chapter2:1:Architecture Music

Chapter 2: Architecture

Architecture Is No Longer Just a ‘Gentleman’s Profession’ By Reed Kroloff

Architecture was long called a “gentleman’s profession,” which may have been true if by that you meant one that systematically excluded women for most of its existence. Before World War II, you could count the number of noted female architects on one hand. As late as the 1990s, the percentage of architecture firms owned by women in the United States was still in the single digits. Today, less than a third of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) membership is female, and a survey of the world’s 100 largest architecture firms by the online design magazine Dezeen found that women occupied just 10 percent of the highest-ranking jobs. The first time a woman won the AIA’s Gold Medal, its highest honor, was in 2014. The recipient, Julia Morgan, had been dead for 57 years.

There are signs of improvement, though. According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the number of women in the field continues to rise: Women now account for nearly half of the students in architecture schools in the United States; they make up about 40% of those taking licensing exams — up by nearly 50 percent in 20 years. As the 14 projects streaming across these pages indicate, offices led or owned by women are creating an ever-wider range of public buildings that address architecture and urbanism in new and invigorating ways. In 1999, when Elizabeth Diller and her husband and partner, Ricardo Scofidio, won the first MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant ever given to an architect, they were known more for

their brainy publications and art installations than for their buildings — of which there were none. Today, Ms. Diller’s office is a high-culture juggernaut, responsible for some of the most renowned projects of the last decade, including the High Line in New York City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. With the Shed, a new multidisciplinary arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group, their design collaborators, have created a first-of-its-kind, 200,000-square-foot, reconfigurable event space for the Far West Side. The building’s signature element is a striking 120foot high, pleated glass enclosure on massive wheels that can extend or retract to accommodate

‘Gentleman’s Profession’

varied programs — concerts, exhibitions, theater — and crowd sizes. Major construction is expected to end this winter Though also an arts center, Deborah Berke’s NXTHVN, in New Haven, is world’s away from the Shed. Ms. Berke, who announced herself to the architectural world with a manifesto entitled “Architecture of the Everyday” and is now the first female dean of Yale’s School of Architecture, has always eschewed the flamboyant. NXTHVN, which opens in December, occupies two former factories that were quietly renovated into studios and a community center founded by the artists Titus Kaphar and Jonathan Brand. A new tower clad in glass and scalloped concrete panels links the two buildings and creates a beacon of renewal for its frayed neighborhood. Renewal and civic identity are also the goals of an arts project in Mestre, the Italian port town long overshadowed by Venice, its

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more glamorous neighbor across the lagoon. In December, an angular, colorful, 250,000-square-foot museum and cultural complex called M9, designed by the Berlin firm Sauerbruch Hutton, will open at the city’s center. “The big victory here,” says Louisa Hutton, the firm’s founding partner, “was reinstating walking paths across a site that had been closed to the public for decades. This knits the project into the city and gives residents a place to gather — and call their own.”. The Parisian architect Manuelle Gautrand also aims to create an urban gathering place with her new Belaroia Hotels, a mixed-use project in the southern French city of Montpellier. Ms. Gautrand wraps a conference center, hotel, restaurants, shops and apartments around a five-story public terrace that looks out over the city. “The question of how we make our cities welcoming to new populations is paramount,”

Ms. Gautrand said in a recent interview. “This space addresses that.” The architect Amanda Levete and the artist Anish Kapoor, both of London, pursue a similar goal with the subway entry plazas they have created for a neighborhood in Naples, Italy, that has suffered from municipal neglect. Two massive, contrasting sculptures — one in reflective aluminum, the other in Corten steel — now mark the two entrances of the Monte San Angelo station. Below ground, Ms. Levete incorporates the vaults of an earlier, failed transit station into the rest of her design. The 80,000-square-foot project began while Ms. Levete was a partner at her previous firm, Future Systems, and is scheduled to open in 2019. Next month, when a school that the New York architect Toshiko Mori designed pro bono for the remote Senegalese village of Fass opens, it will be functionally and architecturally momentous. It is the first school in a region with 30,000 school-age chil-

dren, and will serve girls and boys. Ms. Mori’s oval design, plaster-covered mud-brick walls, and thatched roof are a modern take on local housing traditions — an effort to make the building welcoming to its 200 students, ranging from 6- to 10 years old. “I’m fascinated with how we bring forward the vernacular with contemporary applications,” said Ms. Mori, who in 2015 completed the Thread cultural center in the village of Sinthian, about an hour to the north. Magui Peredo and her partner, Salvador Macias, the principals of Estudio Macias Peredo in Guadalajara, Mexico, and finalists for this year’s Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture, elegantly reinterpret the Mexican building tradition of thick walls and courtyards for their mixed use — apartments above commercial space — González Luna Building. “Walls are an enduring aspect of Mexican architecture in general, and our work in particular,” Ms. Peredo explained. “Luis Barragan, who

was from here, used walls to critique the thinness of glass, its impermanence. For us, the question was how to express the wall in a vertical building.” Their solution was to puncture the exposed concrete perimeter structure with recesses that give visual depth and create private terraces and shade for the apartments. Tradition also inspired Neri & Hu’s brick-clad, 17-room hotel in Yangzhou, China, which opened officially last month. The Shanghai architects, whose practice also includes a thriving design store and their own lines of furniture and objects, looked to Chinese urban and residential typologies to create a modern-day “walled city,” a collection of quiet courtyards and enclosed spaces linked by a grid of narrow pathways. Another of the firm’s projects, the 25,000-square-foot Aranya Art Center in Shanghai, is trying to become an urban destination in one of the hastily built, culturally arid suburban developments

that characterize so many modern Chinese cities. “The situation in these developments is far from ideal,” said Rossana Hu, the firm’s co-founder. “We’re trying to create context where there is none.” Creating context was not an issue for Huang Wenjing and Li Hu, principals of the Beijing-based Open Architecture, with their Tank Shanghai project, which opens this month. It repurposes the fuel storage tanks of a former military airport into an art museum and cultural center in the booming West Bund arts district. There’s a traditional museum in one tank — and a restaurant, nightclub, and event space in individual tanks. The 110,000-squarefoot project also includes a tank with an open-air oculus, for exhibiting large-scale art. On a smaller scale, but equally striking, is the firm’s 8,000-square-foot Dune Art Museum, opening in October and named for its unusual location: carved into — and mostly beneath — a sand dune near the Chinese coastal city of Qinhuangdao. The subterranean siting

strategy actually preserves a small slice of open sand in an area where mammoth development has all but erased a once sylvan beach. In Chicago, the architect Jeanne Gang first captured widespread attention with the rippling balconies of her 2010 Aqua tower. Shared among units, the balconies shade otherwise unprotected glass facades. Solstice on the Park, a new Chicago condo tower, carries the solar energy investigation further by tilting blocks of southern-facing apartments out from the building core to shadow the levels below them. (The north face, where solar protection isn’t necessary, is flat.) For Ms. Gang, it’s all part of a larger search for order — social, natural, or mechanical. “The angle of the glass gives a scientific or mathematical order, and of course an aesthetic order — but importantly, a performative order as well,” she said. More than almost anyone, Zaha Hadid unmoored contemporary architecture from its affinities for right

angles and male dominance. The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize (in 2004), she died at the height of her powers in 2016. Two of her later projects will finish major construction at the end of this year and extend her legacy. The first, 1000 Museum Tower, is a 900,000-squarefoot condominium in downtown Miami with an exposed structural system that climbs the 62-story building like the tendrils of a giant, otherworldly beanstalk. Hadid’s 70,000-squarefoot headquarters for the Bee’ah Corporation, an environmental and waste consultancy in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, is even more organic in design: a 70-foot-high, dunelike composition that looks as though it was swept into place by a desert wind. When Hadid opened her office in 1979, there was some question as to which was more radical: her work, or the idea that a woman could lead a practice that would grow to a staff of more than 400. Happily, today only the work continues to amaze.

‘Gentleman’s Profession’

Stoops & Plaid

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All Summer on the Stoop By Sara Jane Witkin Berman Dear Diary: Dreams were born on Brooklyn stoops, Comic books read, and friendships forged. Secrets shared, and hopes revealed. “Hey, Jerry, here’s six cents, go and get the Nooz and Mira.” Crazy Ralphie told us jokes, and babes in arms were sleepy. Someone shouts, “Hey, Babe Ruth died!” The boys could not believe it. A girl named Mary Pellegrino met a boy strolling by on Graham Avenue. His name was Maxie Witkin. Their union produced children whose Art is now shown in museums and galleries. They live in fancy houses that have no stoops. They would trade it all for only one more night With Mom and Grandma On a Brooklyn stoop.

Example of a row of stoops in New York.

Stoops & Plaid

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Informational poster on the history and social implications of stoops in the United States.

Stoops & Plaid

Turrets & Borders Turrets and Towers By Lawrence M. Small The cornerstone of the Smithsonian Castle was laid in 1847. It’s the oldest of the monumental buildings on the National Mall, and familiarity hasn’t dimmed its original visual power. In the 1840s, the heritage of earlier great buildings in the capital (the Treasury Building, Patent Office, Post Office) was neo-Classical, linking the nation’s democratic character to democracy’s ancient beginnings. But James Renwick, the architect who won the Smithsonian commission when he was not yet 30 years old (and who subsequently designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City) used a medieval revival style—turrets and towers in place of colonnades—to link the Institution instead to a tradition of learning and

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universities. The Smithsonian was to have the mind’s own boundless independence. At the start, the Castle held the entire Smithsonian. More than a century and a half later, it still identifies the Institution to the world. That’s only fitting, because the various identities assumed by one or another area of Renwick’s building blossomed over the years into the profusion of individual Smithsonian museums. Recall that in the earliest debates about what the Smithsonian should be, the alternatives included a scientific research institute, an astronomical observatory, a library, a museum, an art gallery and even a teachers college. The ruddy sandstone exterior of the Castle looks today much as it did in 1854, when the building was officially completed. But the interior has known hardly a moment’s peace in 150 years. As the

Examples of turrets. The pink lines are part of an examination of the ornamentation of turrets.

Turrets & Borders

Smithsonian grew and its mission evolved, the space underwent continual reconfiguration. Walls, floors, ceilings and balconies, not to mention carpets, colors and furnishings, came and went and came again. (The changes are vividly portrayed in

a turn as a library and a site for graphic arts exhibits. A great hall directly above the lower hall was first meant to be exhibition space. When the building opened, it held instead a lecture hall seating 1,500 to 2,000 people, a scientific apparatus room

The approaching 150th anniversary of the Castle’s completion—in December— is, in a sense, nothing of the sort because the building has never really been completed. It’s been in a state of perpetual becoming, like the Smithsonian itself.

The Castle: An Illustrated History of the Smithsonian Building by Cynthia R. Field, Richard E. Stamm and Heather P. Ewing, published by Smithsonian Books.)

and an art gallery. But that configuration did not survive a disastrous fire in 1865. When the second floor was rebuilt, it belatedly became, and for more than 40 years remained, exhibition space. The upper hall was eventually compromised into two levels of offices. If you stand on the Mall and face the building, you can see that in the central portion to the left and right of the entrance, Renwick designed the upper windows to light a single story of generous height. Still grand on the exterior, the windows have been divided within by the insertion of a new floor.

The historic interior and exterior need tending once again, to modernize utility systems and shore up walls and roofs. But the building will stay anchored to its 19th-century origins, and to traditions older still. In photographs from the 1850s, the fanciful new Castle sprawls in isolation on its stretch of barren national ground. Before the surrounding trees grew tall, an observer could take its measure from almost any angle, and from as far away as downtown Washington. In time, the Castle would share the location with other museums, but seen from the right perspective, even in their company, it still stands alone.

In fact, the building was altered even before it existed: Renwick conceived the central portion with three stories, but one of those floors was lost to preconstruction cost cutting. The great hall on the first floor (now a visitors’ center) was originally intended to be a library and a lecture hall. By the time the building opened, it had become a space for displaying natural history specimens; many years later, parts of it would take

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Informational poster on turrets in the subway.

Turrets & Borders

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Informational poster on the history and use of turrets in architecture.

Turrets & Borders

Caryatids & Figures Acropolis Maidens Glow Anew By Liz Alderman ATHENS — For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fires of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping in the night. But only recently have the famed Caryatid statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their full glory. For three and a half years, conservators at the Acropolis Museum have been cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form believed to have been sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece’s greatest

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artist, Phidias. Their initial function was to prop up a part of the Erechtheion, the sacred temple near the Parthenon that paid homage to the first kings of Athens and the Greek gods Athena and Poseidon. Today they are star attractions in the museum; the originals outside were replaced with reproductions in 1979 to keep the real maidens safe. Over the centuries, a coat of black grime came to mask their beauty. Now conservators have restored them to their original ivory glow, using a specially developed laser technology. To coincide with the museum’s fifth anniversary, the women — minus one — went on full display in June, gleaming from their modern makeover. The missing Cary-

atid is installed at the British Museum in London, which acquired it nearly two centuries ago after Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had it sawed off the Erechtheion’s porch, along with shiploads of adornments from the Parthenon to decorate his mansion in Scotland before selling the pieces to pay debts. Greek and British authorities have long fought over the return of these so-called Elgin marbles, a dispute that heated up again recently when the actors George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray came out in support of the sculptures’ being returned home during an appearance in London for the movie “The

Example of a caryatid, a draped female figure used instead of a column as a support.

Monuments Men.” That ignited a firestorm in Britain, which maintains that Lord Elgin saved the marbles from destruction, and acquired them fairly. “Someone needs to restore George Clooney’s marbles,” London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, retorted. The controversy may flare anew as the British Museum plans an exhibit of the human body in Greek sculpture for next spring, using some of the marbles from the Parthenon. Greeks have not been shy about using the Caryatid restoration to help press their case. While the Caryatids’ restoration is not part of a specific campaign to get the marbles back, the

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fresh cleaning shows that the museum can support their return, said Dimitris Pantermalis, the president of the Acropolis Museum. “We insist on a solution” to the Elgin marbles, Mr. Pantermalis said. “A country must be ready when it claims something, and the Acropolis Museum has completed this.” In the meantime, the missing Caryatid is glaring in its absence from the platform, a subversive display of resistance that is reflected one floor up in the museum, where large swaths of the Acropolis frieze owned by the British Museum are represented as chalky plaster copies of the originals. On a recent weekday, Mr. Pantermalis wove through crowds who

stood enthralled around a special dais on which the five remaining Caryatids were displayed. “With the pollution erased, we can read more about the history of the last 2,500 years,” he said. Knots of people were glued to a video screen showing footage of the cleaning project, which was set up on the floor of the museum. Conservators wearing dark goggles wielded a dualwavelength laser developed by the Foundation for Research and TechnologyHellas in Crete, a system that was also employed to restore the Parthenon’s west frieze and the highrelief metopes that adorned

the east entrance. Beams of infrared and ultraviolet radiation pulsed across the hem of one Caryatid’s robes, burning soot millimeter by millimeter to reveal the apricot-tinted patina of the original marble. Starting in 2011, a team of six Greek conservators focused on one Caryatid at a time, setting up fabric rooms around each statue and mapping its surface before attacking an ebony mantle of pollution that had thickened when Athens became a modern metropolis filled with car exhaust, factory fumes and acid rain. Along the way, the conservators found traces of an enormous fire set in the first century B.C. by the Roman general Sulla, and chunks of marble from

clumsy repair jobs attempted centuries ago. It took six to eight months to transform each statue from night into day, with the crews rotating shifts to avoid fatigue. The inhouse restoration costs were minimal and funded with income from ticket and museum shop sales, said Costas Vassiliadis, a conservator who heads the restoration team.

architectural sculptures from the Acropolis, using the laser technology, Mr. Vassiliadis said, although he declined to give details because the new projects had not yet been announced. In their original setting,

the Caryatids stood on the porch of the Erechtheion, with a sweeping southern view toward the Aegean Sea. They rested in contrapposto poses, three of them standing firmly on “It looked almost like tattoo their right legs, demurely removal,” said Shawn bending their left knees Hocker, a tourist who had beneath diaphanous robes. traveled to the Acropolis with The others stood in opposite his wife and friends from pose. Together they held Wilmington, N.C. “You can up a part of the temple’s imagine what they looked massive roof. like in the ancient world.” The Caryatids’ origins were The museum plans to less poetic: According to clean a number of other

one legend, Mr. Pantermalis said, the statuesque maidens were not intended to be glorified, but condemned to stand in penance at the temple for eternity to atone for an ancient treachery committed by their hometown, Caryae, a Greek city near Sparta that took the side of the Persians against the Greeks during the Greco-Persian Wars. Other historians say young women from the city who danced for the goddess Artemis were inspirations. The statues remained nameless, and even today they go simply by the letters A, B, C, D, E and F, Mr. Vassiliadis said. Under the Ottoman Empire, the Erechtheion was

converted into a harem, an indignity that the Caryatids survived. Soon after, in 1687, they were nicked by bullets and debris when the Parthenon was shelled during a battle between the Turks and the Venetians. But officials say the modern equivalent of that destruction is the gaping hole that was left when Lord Elgin made off with the statue. Mr. Pantermalis glanced out the window toward the Parthenon, leaning into the sky from the soaring rock of the Acropolis. “It’s been 200 years,” he said, returning his gaze to the Caryatids. “We think in the framework of the new museum, it’s possible to reunite our treasures.”

Caryatids & Figures

Informational poster explaining caryatids and their origins.

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Caryatids & Figures

Lunettes & Murals Protect Every Lunette, Every Curlicue? April 7, 1988

Example of a lunette, an arching apetiture within a wall or concave ceiling, with a mural decoration.

Actors and preservationists won a major fight recently when New York City's Board of Estimate landmarked 27 Broadway theaters. Unless a sensible compromise is reached on the designation and restoration of all interior surface decorations,

The theater owners feared, however, that the Landmarks Preservation Commission's proposal for blanket designation of every crescent-shaped figure, every ornament and every surface decoration would weaken the theater industry.

Fortunately, at the last moment the Board of Estimate adopted a resolution ordering the Landmark Commission chairman, Gene Norman, to set up an advisory panel that will review interiors in each designated theater, with an eye to

however, the victory could turn out to be hollow.

Yet that is what the board ultimately approved.

exempting run-of-the-mill surface decor and fixtures.

As the Board of Estimate deliberated on theater landmarking it became clear that a consensus existed among actors, preservationists and owners for the protection of theater exteriors. There was also agreement that theater interiors deserved some degree of landmark designation.

Theater owners point out that restoring every lunette and curlicue after every production would be prohibitively expensive. The cost could drive producers to curtail the imaginations of scenic designers and directors. Elaborate productions like ''Nicholas Nickleby,'' ''Cats'' and ''Phantom of the Opera'' are likely to suffer.

The panel, drawn from the Landmark Commission and the Mayor's Theater Advisory Council, will present recommendations for the Board of Estimate's consideration by the end of the year. But the commission remains free to accept or reject the panel's report. The ultimate effect of the new regulations will turn on the good faith and good sense of the panelists and the commission.

Informational posters on lunettes and stoops in the subway.

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Lunettes & Murals

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Informational poster explaining the function of lunettes.

Lunettes & Murals

Burger, hotdog, and macaroni and cheese from Ripâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Malt Shop in Brooklyn, New York.

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Chapter 3: Food 7 Reasons to Love Your Food By Shana Swain June 28, 2017 Foodie, a modern word used to describe a person who lives to eat, and not the other way around. This is a person who looks forward to trying new and different foods, while thankfully embracing their traditional foods, too. They may make food their business by working in a food-driven industry, travelling to eat food, photographing food, and even blogging about it. I am a foodie. Everyday, I live up to that title. I fit all those above descriptions, and then some. I Love Food. Being a Charlestonian, there leaves little room for any choice in this, as I live in the food Mecca of the South. You

should love food, too. Here, I show you why you should love all the foods. 1. Food provides you with sustenance. Imagine not eating. I mean, for real, can you imagine that? I can’t; no way, no how. (I am so thankful that I have never had to experience hunger, so this is not a slight to that epidemic at all) We need food to nourish our bodies, to get those muscles and organs in gear. Of course, there are people who fast for long periods of time- for spiritual or political reasons- which is a formidable feat. Some doctors

say a human can live up to 8 weeks with no food; but I pray you or I will never be on the other side of that.

feeding ourselves and our families, and it is not uncommon to make friends along the way.

2. “Breaking Bread” with others can highlight diversity. Dinner parties. Luncheons. School cafeterias. Food courts. Mess halls. Grocery stores. Restaurants. Besides the obvious fact that food is found at all these places, what else will be there? People! Folks from all walks of life use these places and times to gather with their trays and platters and forks and knives to eat. More times than not, they are also interacting with others. We share a common goal of

3. Food relaxes you. I had to work on explaining this to some friends, as they say preparing food or ordering food brought them stress. Try and think of this in another way: think about the knife cutting that first plump, ripe tomato. The flesh tears as juice emerges on the blade. The tip slightly scrapes the board, and a new shape has been created. That slice is the beginning of an awesome

Love Your Food

sandwich that you’re about to destroy, or the beginning of that velvety bisque you’ve been planning. And then when you sit to enjoy your creation, a great calm sets in as you realize now it’s all good. Your work can be done in peace with the anticipation of what’s to follow. So, relax, and prep your masterpiece. 4. Food is art. Speaking of masterpieces, have you ever looked at a plate of food and mused, “this looks too good to eat.”? Yes, I am sure you have. Sushi plates do this to me the most. A perfectly plated maki, coupled with a couple nigiri and slices of sashimi, then finished with thin slices of pink ginger and bright green wasabi is akin to a Poussin landscape perched in the Louvre. Or, a plate of Southern fare signifies an

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artful history of the plight of African-Americans in the south. According to folklore here in the Lowcountry, collard greens denote incoming riches into the household, while peas and rice bring luck. 5. Food encourages travel and exploration. Once you see how happy food can make you, and how curious you are on how to make certain dishes, it is easy to pick out travel destinations. You may not be the most adventurous person, but an awesome meal may just be the ticket to wanting to travel. From the Skyline Chili in Cinncinati to Nashville’s Hot Chicken, or the Mole sauce in Puebla to a Moroccan Tajine, the love of food can take you anywhere. Nine Countries and 26 states

later, I love little more than strengthening my desire to try different foods. 6. Food ups creativity. So, you already see that food can be art, right? How can you do this at home? Use your food to open your mind! Sure, the chefs in award-winning restaurants possess some of the most creative minds out there, but there is nothing that says you cannot achieve this in your own kitchen. Use the relationships of different types of food to conjure your own fantastic recipes. Use your dining experiences to piggyback when creating your dishes. I used to think that a sweet potato was only for baking with some butter, or putting into a pie. Once I was preparing a stew, and realized I was out of white potatoes. I had sweet pota-

Photo of the interior of Myrtle Thai in Brooklyn, New York, decorated for the holiday season, Myrtle Thai is a Pratt studnet favorite and is constantly surviving the student population, both in the restaurant and by delivery.

toes, though, and my taste buds and taste brain opted for a sweet potato and lentil stew. Thank God I wrote the recipe down, as it is now my favorite stew during those cold months!

7. Food makes you happy. And when you add all the above, you realize food changed your life. It put you on the sunny side! Now your coffee and your frittata get you hype in the morning. Your business meeting over

burgers and fries happily reminds you of that butcher in Texas that freshly ground his own 1/2-pound patties. You greet your children coming in from soccer with mounds of mozzarella, spinach, pineapple, and pepperoni for make-your-own-pizza night,

and they are pumped! Food can bring smiles to all, and truly helps bring out the happiest times in your life. Make the foodie come out, and live to eat!

Love Your Food

The Case for Hard-Shell Tacos By Sam Sifton October 10, 2017 A year or so ago, in a fit of hunger after a long day of working outside, I pulled in at a Mexican-themed restaurant near my home, and for no other reason than the fact that everyone else was doing so, made like the other mutts sitting at the bar watching

ing; algos, pain. I felt none at that moment and none in the days that followed. Instead, the combination of silkiness and crunch, the taste of sweet corn and salty, warm-spiced meat, the bite of Cheddar, cool lettuce and the fire of the hot sauce

sports and sucking down beers: I ordered three-nomake-it-four hard-shell tacos with picadillo, guac and sour cream, yellow cheese and shredded lettuce. I dolloped hot sauce on the sour cream, red rivulets running down the white, and ate, perfectly content. I ordered a fifth and felt proud I had finished it, just as I had in middle school, crushing taco day in the cafeteria.

left me happy, sated, at ease. I started to cook them at home.

Nostalgia requires sadness. The word comes from Greek ones: nostos, homecom-

Probably you have some notions about hard-shell tacos, those prefabricated crunch sleeves of bright yellow corn, filled with spiced ground beef. They are as Mexican as a ranch house in the Michigan suburbs. They are a taste of inauthenticity, perhaps, a heretical sham â&#x20AC;&#x201D; lame supermarket Tex-Mex food, a whitewashed charade. Gringo tacos, some people call them, an embarrassment.

New menu design for Tepango Taqueria in Brooklyn, New York.

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Hard-Shell Tacos

But they remain well loved — and in surprising quarters. “Hard-shell tacos served their purpose and serve it still,” the Mexican-American journalist and taco savant Gustavo Arellano told me recently. Arellano is the editor of the OC Weekly newspaper in California and once wrote a defense of the hard-shell taco. “They were the ambassadors of Mexican food at a time when there weren’t as many Mexicans spread out across the United States,” he said. “People say Mexicans don’t eat hardshell tacos, and that’s bull. We eat tacos dorados — fried tacos. We ate them all through Lent. I could eat five of them right now.” Aarón Sánchez, the chef and television personality who is a son of the noted Mexican cookbook author and chef Zarela Martinez, echoed Arellano when I spoke to him. “I’ve changed my position on hard shells,” he said. “I’m not dogging them. They’re just folded tostadas, and” — he paused, and sighed — “I guess they get people together as family to assemble and eat and that’s good.”

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Even Alex Stupak, the fierce and opinionated chef and owner at the Empellón restaurants in New York and the author of “Tacos: Recipes and Provocations,” allowed that the hard-shell taco has its place. He ate them often as a child. “It certainly appeals to middle-of-the-road America’s favorite flavor,” he said: “Crunchy.” He wasn’t being snide, he added. We got to talking about the joys of making your own picadillo. Maybe even frying your own tortillas and draping them over a foil form to cool into a hardened U-shape before assembling? “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “No morality here.” So think about long-ago taco dinners spent in the homes of friends, everyone lined up along a kitchen counter while someone’s mom spread bowls of fixings across the Formica for people to graze. (That couldn’t have been just me.) Make like the chef Derek Dammann of Maison Publique in Montreal, who loves hardshell tacos so much he put a recipe for them in his cook-

book “True North.” (“Perhaps not Canadian cuisine in its truest form,” he conceded.) Or follow the lead of the chef Alex Raij, who with her husband, Eder Montero, runs a number of restaurants in New York City. Assembling hard-shell tacos, Raij said, teaches lessons in balance and the concept of less is more. “There’s something fun about it,” she added. “It’s a great thing to share with adults and children.” And then watch what happens. Chris Jaeckle, who was the chef at Ai Fiori and All’onda in Manhattan before he moved on to start the sushi-roll concern Uma Temakeria, told me preparing hard-shell tacos in high school made him want to become a chef. Jaeckle grew up on Long Island, a latchkey kid with a hard-working single mom and an insatiable appetite. His mother left him taco kits in the larder for after-school snacks, ground beef in the fridge. One day, browning the meat and toasting the shells and adjusting the spice blend, he realized he was actually cooking — “I was multitasking,” he said, “and it was

exciting. There was something about the smell of the cumin and the oregano, and I just wanted to make it perfect. I thought: I could do this for a living.” The next day he went to his guidance counselor and said the same.

“You’re crazy,” the counselor said. Jaeckle transferred to a school with a kitchen program and cooked every day. Culinary school followed. I told Arellano about the start of Jaeckle’s career. “That is

a testament to the ambassadorial power of Mexican food,” he said. “That something so humble as a hardshell taco could get him to imagine the heights to which he could aspire.”

Composite of a new menu for Tepango Tacos on a place setting.

Hard-Shell Tacos

Rip’s Malt Shop Now Slinging ‘Vegan Junk Food’ By Scott Lynch August 28, 2018

Cover and first page of a new menu for Rip’s Malt Shop. The menu would take the form of a tiny booklet.

THE VIBE On the end of Clermont Avenue in Fort Greene, right across from a bland luxury rental building and steps away from the cars speeding on Flushing, co-owners Jonathan Schneider, Patty BABE

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Wu, and Allison and Matt Robicelli have opened a casual all-vegan spot (in a former Oaxaca Taco) called Rip’s Malt Shop. The bright red Rip’s awning out front is new, but the lighted arrow is an Oaxaca holdover, and the interior

layout of the narrow space is also pretty much the same, with tables up front, ordering counter and open kitchen in the rear. The big bonus at Rip’s, though, is the pleasant back yard with picnic-table

seating for about 20, and a turf lawn featuring cornhole. There are also new murals by Belowkey back here, and the far wall will soon be covered in chalkboard paint, for kids and anyone else who wants to tag the hell out of the place.

The next two pages of the menu: burgers and sandwiches. The green color is in reference to the vegan cuisine.

On two recent visits to Rip’s the service was friendly, knowledgeable, and efficient—total professionals. (Getting back to the Robicellis for a minute: Yes, this is same couple who made such great cupcakes out in Bay

Ridge until personal health issues forced them to move to Maryland. In addition to helping to launch Rip’s from afar, they are also involved in the rebranding of Oaxaca as Revolucion de Taco.)

Other than its understated but firm commitment to plant based food, there’s nothing really innovative about the recipes at Rip’s, but man do they nail these vegan ver-

sions of fast comfort food classics. Take the Cheeseburger, for example. The patty comes to you via Beyond Meat, and there’s enough going on here flavorwise—

Vegan Junk Food

The next two pages of the menu: sides and ice cream.

get it loaded with fresh toppings—that (if you’re typically a meat eater) a bite or two in you don’t even really think about it being vegan, just that it’s a really good sandwich. It comes with chips and a pair of fat pickles, too.

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This keeps happening as you make your way through the Rip’s menu. The Coney Dog, in which a Field Roast sausage is served swimming in smokey chili and melted cheese, may lack the snap of a first rate meat frank, but that doesn’t detract from the

deliciousness. The Chopped Cheese is packed with flavor (it’s the spiciest thing they served me here, which I know isn’t bodega-authentic, but neither is vegan ground “beef”), and the Chicken Sal-

ad was a creamy delight, the fake meat not even a tiny bit dry. And if anything doesn’t punch quite hard enough for you, try some of the Aardvark habanero hot sauce by the ketchup and mustard, it’ll do the trick.

The final page and backcover of the menu, complete with restaurant hours.

The side dishes I tried also performed as hoped. The Tater Tots don’t have that preferred crisp coating, but the interior is nice and chunky. The mayo-less Macaroni Salad, the pasta cooked firm with just the right hit of sweetness from

the peppers, ably satisfied a summer-long craving of mine. And for dessert, there’s Van Leeuwen’s vegan ice cream, available in straight-up scoops, oatmilkshakes, or a

wonderfully decadent buildyour-own sundae. THE VERDICT Rip’s Malt Shop comes out a total winner. Among other things, it’s the perfect place for a mixed crowd of vegans

and omnis who want to eat some good casual food at okay prices in a chill setting, and maybe knock back a few beers or glasses of rosé while doing so. Hopefully enough Navy Yard workers discover the place to give it some life. Vegan Junk Food

On the (Rising) Trail of Thai Food in America By Thomas Fuller October 10, 2017 Crunchy hearts of palm and giant shrimp stir-fried with basil and the perfect ration of red chiles. A green papaya salad, freshly shredded and mashed with an extra portion of tiny Thai limes. There was a downside to living in Bangkok for a decade as a New York Times correspondent and being surrounded by great Thai dishes like those: It really raised the bar for when I moved back to America. Last year, a few weeks after my family and I arrived in the United States for a new posting and a new life, we went to a Thai restaurant in Manhattan where my son, then nine, casually rattled off an order of one of his favorites, pad see ew gai — stir-fried rice noodles with chicken, garlic, leafy greens and a mixture of dark and light soy sauce.

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The Thai waiter, having not encountered many American children who speak Thai, was charmed. He doted on my son, and after he had delivered the food made a standard Thai inquiry: “Is it delicious?” “It’s pretty good,” the boy told him in Thai. “But it’s very, very sweet.” We had just encountered the bland and sugary food found at so many Thai restaurants in the United States, and other places outside Thailand. Ever since, I’ve been preoccupied with a mystery: how one of the world’s most sophisticated and flavorful cuisines can be reduced to such a starchy and insipid mess. I’ve heard lots of explanations. One is the persistence of a belief — not unfounded — among some Thai chefs that Westerners like their food sweet and can’t handle spice.

When I was living in Bangkok, a Thai friend told me she had worked in the kitchen of a Thai restaurant in Austria. I asked her whether it was difficult to cook for farangs, the term Thais use to describe Europeans and Americans. “It’s easy,” she said. “You pretend you are cooking for children.” Thai food is not the only cuisine to have been transformed in the journey across oceans. But I’ve made it my mission to track down good Thai cooking in the Bay Area, where I am now the Times bureau chief. I quiz every Thai person I meet, trade tips with diplomats and scour the streets for high-end and hole-in-the-wall restaurants that hold promise.

New menu design for Myrtle Thai. The colors were inspired by the pattern of tiles on their restaurantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s floor.

Trail of Thai Food

Composite of the new menu for Myrtle in a fancy menu protector, next to a dish.

What I’ve found has been encouraging. A number of restaurants here serve dishes that respect the complexity of Thai food and its balance of sweet, sour, salt and spice. They’re part of a sea change that in recent years has produced ambitious and acclaimed Thai restaurants around the country, particularly in West Coast cities like Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. “It’s a golden age for Thai food,” said James Syhabout, a Thailand-born chef and cookbook author who owns Hawker Fare, a San BABE

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Francisco restaurant that specializes in dishes from that country’s Isaan region. “Restaurants serving good Thai food, as they do now, didn’t exist two decades ago because there wasn’t the community to support it, besides our own community.” “Now diversity is more celebrated. And we are more brave, more proud of showcasing our ethnicity,” said Mr. Syhabout, who also owns Commis, an Oakland restaurant that has two Michelin stars.

When his parents opened their first Thai restaurant in the late 1980s, they made their dishes milder and sweeter to attract diners unfamiliar with the cuisine. “The last thing any chef wants is to get the food sent back.” he said. “You want to play on the safer side.” In California, the change has come in part because the Thai population has reached a critical mass: The Thai Consulate in LA estimates that there are more than 200,000 Thais in the state, enough to have restaurants that cater only to them.

San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the epicenter of the down-and-out in a city that has become unaffordable to all but the very wealthy, is also home to some of the city’s best Thai food. There I met Narupon Silargorn, who came to this city as an art student and in 2008 opened Lers Ros Thai, where most of the early customers were Asian. “I didn’t care whether farangs liked it,” he said. He also didn’t care that many customers couldn’t properly

Images of the original menu which was cluttered with information. The new menu takes out some of the information in favor of a clean and simple design.

pronounce the name (layre rote tie), which means “excellent taste.” Now he has three branches, and two-thirds of his customers are not Thai. The image of farangs with unsophisticated palates is out of date, Mr. Narupon said.

For years, Thai chefs in America pointed out that fresh ingredients were not available; they were forced to buy Thai vegetables frozen or out of a can. That has changed with the intertwining of immigrant groups in California. Thai chefs today describe an informal partnership with ethnic Hmong refugees from

Laos who came to America after the Vietnam War. Many settled as farmers in California’s Central Valley. It’s a classic American and Californian story: The Hmong farmers grow herbs and plants essential to Southeast Asian cooking, and the Thai chefs rejoice over access to freshly plucked Kaffir lime

leaves; calamansi, a small citrus fruit akin to a kumquat; unripened papayas ready to be shredded into som tam, and the chickpea-size Thai eggplant found in dishes like green curry. The Hmong grow cilantro, for decades a staple of California cuisine; they know not

Trail of Thai Food

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to slice off the roots, which are used in Thai soups, chili pastes and meat marinades. Michael Yang, a Hmong immigrant who works for a University of California agricultural program in Fresno, has helped organize small-scale Hmong farmers to sell Asian vegetables and herbs to restaurants, grocery stores and farmers’ markets in the Bay Area. “We took a full busload of farmers to meet with restaurant owners,” Mr. Yang said, describing a trip three years ago. “We wanted them to make connections.” When he began working with the farmers 24 years ago, they were growing about 50 varieties of Asian vegetables and herbs. Now they grow more than 200. “The list just goes on,” Mr. Yang said. “I’m still discovering new crops that are coming in.” One avid customer for Hmong produce is Pim Techamuanvivit, the Bangkok-born owner of Kin Khao (Let’s Eat), a Thai restaurant

wedged between the Tenderloin and Union Square. Kin Khao breaks the mold of Thai restaurants in a number of ways. The staff is a mix of Thai and non-Thai. There are no wooden elephants and pictures of Thai landmarks; in an otherwise sparse wood-and-white dining room, Ms. Pim has chosen a Thai accent mark, mai toh, as the restaurant’s icon. My favorite dish there so far is a yam som-o, which is normally made from pomelo, a citrus fruit the size of a cantaloupe that grows in the tropics. This version is a medley of citrus fruits — pomelo, grapefruit, blood orange — mixed with small fried shrimp, cilantro, peanuts, shallots, mint and toasted coconut. Sometimes an item on the menu is followed by this: “Warning: This is not Thai food for beginners.” Ms. Pim described one such dish, namprik long rua, an intensely spicy sauce. “It’s got shrimp paste, it’s got a

lot of garlic, it’s served with raw vegetables, some of them quite bitter,” she said. “It’s supposed to hurt you, probably for a couple of days.” (Another convention that Kin Khao breaks is price. A solo dinner a few months ago cost me more than $100. My crab meat and betel leaf curry was delicious, but set me back $55.) A 10-minute walk away is Zen Yai, where the check for two people came to $35. Zen Yai is a meeting spot for the Thai community, and most of the conversations I heard at nearby tables were in Thai. Still, there is a lot of mediocre Thai food in the Bay Area, and beyond. Leela Punyaratabandhu, a Thai-American cookbook author who shuttles between Chicago and Bangkok, says she has been to restaurants where it was clear that the chefs and waiters would not eat what they serve. This is especially true of pad thai, a dish that has become the defining

Thai dish in America. It’s probably eaten more widely here than in Thailand. The worst pad thai Ms. Leela had in America was in a restaurant in Detroit. The Thai waitress warned her not to eat it, but Ms. Leela says she wanted to experiment. “It was really, really bad,” she recalled. “The server was looking at me with a puppy face that said, ‘Sorry’ and ‘I told you so.’” How to find flavorful dishes in Thai restaurants that tailor their food for American tastes? I usually speak Thai in the hope that servers will take me seriously. Ms. Leela asks the staff what they would serve if their parents came to the restaurant. Sometimes, authenticity can be painful. When I beseeched a waitress at Daughter Thai Kitchen, in the Montclair neighborhood of Oakland, not to hold back on the spice, she asked me to estimate my heat tolerance on a scale from one to 10. I told her nine. And I nearly cried my way through a three-alarm southern curry.

Photo of spring rolls and pan friend noodles at the communal table in Myrtle Thai.

Trail of Thai Food

Can Anyone Save French Food? By Michael Steinberger March 28, 2014 Last year, outraged headlines worldwide announced that as many as 70 percent of the restaurants in France were using ready-made meals produced offsite at large industrial kitchens. The real surprise was that anyone was surprised. France’s culinary tradition has been withering for decades, the decline reflected in any number of data points — from the disappearance of raw-milk cheeses (less than 10 percent of all French cheeses are lait cru now) to the fall in French wine consumption (down by more than 50 percent since the 1960s) to the fact that France has become McDonald’s’ second-most-profitable

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market in the world. Since the late 1990s, Paris has come to be regarded as a dull, predictable food city. The real excitement is in London, Tokyo, New York, Copenhagen, San Sebastian. Suddenly, though, Paris is showing signs of renewed vigor, much of it coming from an unexpected source: Young foreign chefs. The city’s most-sought-after tables now are at places like Spring, whose chef, Daniel Rose, is American, and Bones, whose chef, James Henry, is Australian. These are not restaurants serving foreign dishes; they are restaurants serving French fare that happens to be produced by nonFrench chefs. At the same time, the most talked-about

Composite of menu design for Olivier Bistro on top of an elegent table setting. Olivier Bistro is located in Brooklyn, New York.

Save French Food

French chef in Paris these days, Gregory Marchand, did much of his training in New York and London and brings a distinctly AngloAmerican sensibility to cooking and hospitality. As a group, these chefs are reviving an artisanal spirit that had largely vanished from French food culture, composing menus based entirely on what’s available in the market on a given day and cultivating relationships with individual vendors. (“I have 16 different suppliers for the four dishes on the menu,” Rose says. “It’s kind of crazy.”)

Simone Tondo, the young Italian chef behind Roseval, puts it: “They want Paris to be New York.” This openness expresses itself in the embrace of foreign wines (which were rarely found on wine lists in Paris a decade ago), in the long lines for the gourmet hamburgers that the American Kristin Frederick serves from her food truck (another phenomenon that has now reached Paris) and in the acceptance of the idea that an Illinois native like Rose can make French food every bit as authentic, sophisticated and delicious as a chef from Lyon.

Twenty years ago, the idea of an American or an Australian cooking French food worthy of discerning Parisians would have been dismissed as laughable. But diners in Paris are yearning for the sense of adventurousness and fun that prevails in other international cities. As

The stirrings of insurrection began in the late ‘90s, with the advent of the bistronomie movement, during which some of the city’s most talented young French chefs eschewed the quest for Michelin stars in favor of opening no-frills

Layouts of the cover and interior pages of the menu for Olivier Bistro.

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Photo of the bar in the interior of Olivier Bistro. Olivier Bistro also opens its front window space entirely which transforms it

bistros serving upscale fare at modest prices. (For generations of French chefs, it has been an article of faith that the more sumptuous the setting, the more likely a restaurant is to win Michelin’s approbation.) But the food they were serving was, on the whole, pretty conservative — classic French bistro fare made in

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a lighter style. Moreover, bistronomie was as much a reaction to economic circumstance — a weak French economy was a powerful disincentive to open luxury restaurants — as it was about remaking French cuisine.

Today diners are flocking to restaurants acclaimed by publications like Omnivore and Le Fooding, which focus on “young” cuisine and are at the forefront of the love of the new that is sweeping Paris. “The food scene is the strongest cultural movement in France right now,” Luc Dubanchet, Omnivore’s

founder, told me recently. “For this generation, it’s what music was in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” In his view, this is now a watershed moment in French food history. The nouvelle-cuisine movement, which made French cooking lighter and more seasonal in orientation, was the last time French cuisine underwent a

into an indoor/outdoor space in the summer months.

major overhaul. But that was primarily a revolt by a new generation of French chefs who, caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s, wanted to liberate themselves from Escoffier classicism. What’s different today is that change is being led not from the kitchen but from the dining room. For the

first time, Dubanchet says, young restaurantgoers are seizing control of France’s culinary tradition and making it their own. In embracing expat chefs like Henry, these patrons are also signaling that French cuisine no longer belongs exclusively to the French. In 2010, the French food establishment succeeded in

getting Unesco to designate what was termed “the gastronomic meal of the French” as part of the world’s cultural patrimony. The effort to win Unesco recognition generated some criticism in France, both because it was viewed as consecrating the idea that French cuisine had become an artifact, a museum piece,

and because it was seen as an expression of French chauvinism. Regardless of the judgment of world bodies, what matters is what’s happening in the kitchens and dining rooms of the most exciting restaurants in Paris. The food there, for the first time in a long time, is very much alive.

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Model posing for photoshoot in 1972. Her outfit showcases staples of the seventies including sheer fabric and platform shoes.

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Letter of Recommendation: Women’s Clothing By Kalle Oskari Mattila November 6, 2018 Last year, I walked into an upscale independent clothing store in Berlin and greeted the conservatively dressed, bespectacled woman hovering in the back. I’d seen a stylish male mannequin in the window, but it wasn’t clear that they sold men’s clothing, so I asked. “It’s all for everyone,” she said. “I mean, technically that rack and this rack are men’s, but I believe it’s outdated to think like that.” “You know what?” I replied. “You’re right. Most people don’t get that.” She seemed pleased — until I pulled out a long women’s white underwear top and asked to try it on. Clearly, there were limits, and she tried to talk me out of it. The top was revealing, and normally would have been worn with a bra. This

was Berlin, though, and I needed something daring. Once I put the top on, in the privacy of a changing room, I saw how well it complemented the male body: its low crew neck and tight, stretchy fabric showed off my chest and arms. To the surprise of the shopkeeper, and myself, I bought it. I came out at 18, in Helsinki, then moved to New York at 23, and I’d steadily grown more aware of the possibility to wear whatever I wanted, to use clothes to express myself in experimental ways. But dressing outside my gender’s section still felt like breaking the rules.

Berlin was supposed to be my only excursion, yet I found myself returning to the women’s department back in New York, where I realized women’s wear wasn’t appropriate for only German raves. I could wear it to work, dinner and the gym. In fact, there were myriad advantages to it for any man: a wider selection; more colors to complement the complexion; different, edgier cuts; pockets in unexpected places. Sometimes it was just practical: small, tight shorts worked better for high-intensity exercise than basketball shorts, which grew heavy with sweat. I wasn’t interested in dresses, high heels or bras. I wasn’t cross-dressing as

Women’s Clothing

Model wearing a sheer blouse on the street in the 1970s.

much as doing a kind of cross-shopping, which I later learned is defined as a type of anarchy: a single customer defying retailers’ marketing segmentation by shopping where he or she is not expected to. I wasn’t trying to challenge societal norms or explore my gender identity; I was merely searching for cool new apparel. If women can easily cross over for things like sweaters and overalls, why not men? I was single and wanted boyfriend jeans, too. BABE

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I am a cisgender man, and present that way, yet sometimes my outfits are a mixture of what is labeled men’s and women’s. Most people don’t even notice the difference. My look isn’t as unconventional as, say, combining a beard with a dress (I’m not sure I could grow a full beard anyway), nor is it about claiming a different gender identity than the one I was assigned at birth. Instead, I find that cross-shop-

ping gives me a liberating sense of control over myself and my body — not necessarily overturning the designations of a gender, but instead widening my version of manhood. I can feel my most masculine in a colorful women’s blouse, my biceps bulging through its sleeves, whereas the softness of a men’s cashmere scarf, or the clacking sound of men’s ornate black leather dress shoes (which sound like high heels) can conjure in me a

more feminine sensibility. I feel most comfortable in outfits that blend the feminine and the masculine. They feel truest to me. A friend who works in fashion told me most trends originate in women’s designs and trickle down to men’s wear. Stretch fabric has been used for women for years, but it is only now making inroads in men’s. The same happened with skinny jeans, floral prints and the color pink. Women’s wear borrows from men’s, too: Pantsuits, button-down shirts and fe-

Found photograph of woman on a couch in the 1950s.

dora hats all flow from men’s wear. The fact is, most garments convey a mixture of the masculine and feminine. That gender divide is hazy. I believe no one is entirely masculine or feminine. As gendered constructs, clothes can constrict us but also liberate us when it comes to that complexity. When I’m shopping in the men’s department, I’m reminded of how far my frame is from the ideal muscular male

physique. But when I bought a pair of women’s high-waist black Levi’s jeans, friends started complimenting me on my behind. “I didn’t even know you had one!” one of my closest male friends said after a few drinks. For me, clothes have become a pressure valve: I am now able to express through them the full range of things I can be as a man — feminine things, too, like graceful and delicate, even sexy (I used to only be called “cute”). That doesn’t

take away from my masculinity; in fact, it enhances it. By also shopping in the women’s department I’m no longer preoccupied with arbitrary social norms; I’m simply becoming my realest, most stylish self. In the preface to style photographer Bill Cunningham’s memoir, “Fashion Climbing,” Hilton Als writes that Cunningham took delight in the “possibility of you”; all the things that fashion could

let you be. I believe in that potential, too. To have style is to not let others decide what those possibilities — in gender or presentation — should look like. Often men say to me, “Man, I love your shirt, but I could never pull that off.” It feels like a backhanded compliment, as though I am somehow at a remove, different from them. Yet it also betrays their longing. The truth is, they could pull it off. They just haven’t tried.

Women’s Clothing

Grease Is the Word... Again. By William Van Meter October 19, 2011 The models at the September N. Hoolywood show were turned out as various early 1960s male archetypes, all with Brylcreem coifs. College nerds, sharkskin-suited flimflam men and “West Side Story” street toughs in high waters were well represent-

duce, and this season’s collections are perfect fodder: all dark denim and leather. It’s no surprise that the oily vagabonds are everywhere. Michael Bastian resurrected James Dean in all of his incarnations, the strongest being the red-jacketed pro-

“It’s such a good look it can’t go away,” said the hairstylist Guido Palau. “It’s a style that can look as cool today as it did in the ’50s and ’60s.” Mr. Palau worked on the aheadof-the-curve fall 2010 Bottega Veneta show, a perfect modern greaser distillation

ed. But the leader of the pack was the greaser, in all of his popped-collar glory.

to-emo of “Rebel Without a Cause.” The Dolce & Gabbana fall men’s campaign stars chic vagabonds in a graffitied vacant lot (classic motorcycle included, of course). Hedi Slimane’s widely followed online photo diary has veered lately toward the teenage rebel, all slickedback hair, leather, denim and tattoos, and he turned female models into Teddy Boys for the women’s fall fashion issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

in both the clothes and the sculptured pompadours.

“If you’re a guy, you should be interested in something bad!” exclaimed Daisuke Obana, the N. Hoolywood designer. Mr. Obana hit upon a maxim of men’s fashion: the greaser (like the military man) is a perennial butch theme. The look is rather easy to repro-

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“It’s very male, that kind of hair, even though it is quite dressed and female in a lot of ways,” Mr. Palau said. “It makes guys very cocky. It has an arrogance.” Is the return of this retro bad boy a reaction to the unfettered “Mad Men” mania in fashion, the unending cavalcade of skinny ties,

Retrospective invitation to New York Fashion Week for the year 1959.

Grease Is The Word

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To the left: Composite photo of a retrospective invitation to New York Fashion Week for the year 1959. Above: two lady-like suits worn by women dressed in the ladylike fashion of the 1950s.

tight suits and slicked side-parted hair? Yes, they smoked and drank, and Don Draper has a stolen identity, but where is the danger in a corporate shill? It was bound to happen. The greaser is revived in nearly every decade. The movie “Grease” gave new life to the look in the ’70s, as did “The Outsiders” in the ’80s. Today, a likely impetus

is the renewed interest in the photographer Karlheinz Weinberger. Mr. Weinberger had two posthumous shows in New York in February, one heralded with a party at the Swiss Institute hosted by the downtown retailers Opening Ceremony. Mr. Weinberger’s images of Swiss bikers in the ’50s and ’60s capture a wonderful otherness, a left-ofcenter take on an American phenomenon with bizarre D.I.Y. flourishes. Rizzoli pub-

lished a compendium of his work, “Rebel Youth,” earlier this year. The look is scarcely exclusive to the male of the species. Sandy from “Grease” might have donned one of the full skirts in Prada’s spring hot-rod collection when she enrolled at Rydell High. Luckily, Rizzo’s hair hasn’t caught on, but her attitude sure has, especially with pop divas. On the cover of her latest single, “We Found

Love,” Rihanna rocks full denim and an updo. Lady Gaga’s alter ego, Jo Calderone, is the type to use a Hanes sleeve as a pocket for Marlboros and doesn’t skimp on the pomade. Mr. Palau admits that there are some risks involved in perfecting the greaser look. “It’s not great for pillows,” he said, “but you have to give up something for style.”

Grease Is The Word

My Favourite Fashion Decade: The ‘60s By Georgia Murray April 13, 2018 It’s not very cool to love the ‘60s, is it? Thanks to that guy at every house party who earnestly explains the genius of The Beatles at 4am, those who wear flower crowns and crochet at Glastonbury wishing it were Woodstock, and the

actually owe a lot to the free-loving, mind-expanding subculture. Tie-dye (see Burberry’s SS18 rainbowdyed puffer), bell bottoms (tell me you’re not wearing kick-flare denim or cords right now) and a penchant for organic fabrics (hello,

Vreeland to signal the moment the post-war notion of the teenager really came alive, when kids began establishing their own cultures and identities. We wouldn’t have punk, grunge, or today’s ‘Supremacists’ if it weren’t for the teens of the

naff peace sign-emblazoned outfits sold at fancy dress shops, the decade hasn’t aged particularly well in our collective consciousness. But I’m here, in spite of all these caricatures, to tell you that the 1960s was in fact the best decade for fashion.

sustainable fashion) are all elements of our current fashion landscape, and can be directly traced to the gender-shirking, sexually liberated hippies. Their rejection of consumerism also led to a more individualistic approach to style, which we still revere today. It pains me that this group are the poster kids for the ‘60s when so much else was born out of that decade.

‘60s who shunned the staid couture houses in favour of style born out of the Kings Road and Carnaby Street boutiques. Previously, that age group dressed as mini versions of their parents, which is perhaps the least cool thing you can think of when you’re a teen. The ‘60s saw the youth kick back against tradition and

Let’s address the hippies first. Admittedly, their style wasn’t my favourite (with the exception of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin), but we

Which brings me to ‘youthquake’, the term coined by Vogue’s Diana

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A retrospective invitation design for London Fashion Week for the year 1967.

confinement, changing the course of youth and fashion culture forever. Of course, the most famous faces of this movement were gamine model Twiggy, doe-eyed Jean Shrimpton (my take-to-the-hairdressers fringe icon), and the otherworldly Penelope Tree; their lithe limbs ideal for showcasing Mary Quant and

André Courrèges’ liberating and iconic mini skirt. These women also represent the first successful use of It Girls as advertising tools; without them we wouldn’t have the Jenners and Hadids of today – just another way the decade has shaped our fashion landscape. Key pieces from the time? Psychedelic prints, shift

dresses, colour-pop hosiery (Balenciaga SS17, anyone?) and bright faux fur (hiya Shrimps, Charlotte Simone, and Jakke); my inner peacock is salivating. Just before the Swinging Sixties came the mods. In the ‘50s, ‘modernists’ were a group of slick kids who listened to modern jazz but by the ‘60s the movement was more focused around

European style (think French and Italian suiting and polo shirts), Lambrettas, and soul, ska and R&B. My favourite thing about the mods is that their sartorial outlook was, in the words of The Who’s manager Peter Meaden, “clean living under difficult circumstances”. This meant looking as sharp and sophisticated as you could within your means. Thanks Decade: The 60’s

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Left: Twiggy modeling a teal and pink color blocked dress in the 1960s. Above: Composite photo of a retrospective invitation to New York Fashion Week for the year 1959.

to the mods, tailored suits, embellished scooters and clean haircuts were no longer just for the wealthy. They were considered effeminate by their rivals, the ‘rockers’, because of their preening and attention to detail, but I’m a sucker for a man who puts care (and flare) into his style. By the

mid ‘60s, the mod style had gone from working class

trousers and shirts, Cher in her bohemian days. Jackie

style at its finest. The Cold War’s space race had a huge

subculture to mass market, and Carnaby Street became more of a tourist attraction than genuine hang-out.

O and Audrey Hepburn presented a refined and sophisticated look, all pillbox hats, pastel hues and skirt suits, while the Nouvelle Vague film scene had Anna Karina and JeanLuc Godard repping French

impact on aesthetics, with André Courrèges’ SS64 look introducing futuristic fabrics and space-age shapes to the catwalk. Vinyl go-go boots, sky-high hair and silver shift dresses were the order of the day, as seen in sci-fi film Barbarella, starring the incredible Jane Fonda.

But the ‘60s had so much more going for them than these youth-oriented, subcultural phenomena. They saw the birth of the two-piece bikini, women in

Decade: The 60’s

The ’70s Are Back in Fashion. Again. By Ruth La Ferla March 18, 2015 What did the ’70s feel like? As recalled by Bebe Buell, a singer and onetime habitué of that fabled hipster magnet Max’s Kansas City: “Everybody’s eyelids were very heavy. I used to chuckle to myself, thinking, ‘That’s the cannabis eye, the quaalude eye’ — the look people get when they’re feeling no pain.” What did the ’70s look like? “Stylistically, it was a free-for-all,” the designer Betsey Johnson said of the tangy stew defining the era, a jumble of Harlowesque evening frocks, belled sleeves, flared pants, belted suede and wildly patterned caftans. Fashion in that showily dissolute decade was silky and caressing, silhouettes fluid and bras a relic of a straitjacketed past. So goes the lore. “It was like you were walking around naked, but you had clothes on,” said Phyllis Magidson, curator of costumes at the Museum of the City of New York.

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At the peak of that period, exalted in the popular mind as all that was kicky, inventive and louche, Ms. Magidson was in charge of wardrobe for soaps like “As the World Turns.” She recalled draping an actress in a slithery dress that exposed the outlines of her nipples. “She can’t wear that,” a sponsor huffed. So Ms. Magidson cast about for a way to make the star’s breasts less, well, perky. “I’d say to her, ‘Warm ’em up, honey.’” Before long, though, the languid sensuality that was part of an aesthetic flowering extending roughly from 1967 to 1973 had pretty well run its course. And yet.

ticated pantsuits, bohemianisms and a childlike play on the ’60s baby-doll look.” And that’s to say nothing of the slippery fabrics, folksy embroideries, jumpsuits and swingy little dresses that might have been at home amid the glitter and grit of Studio 54. Those long-ago emblems of worldliness — and waywardness — have now returned in force, with designers scrambling to loosely resurrect an era that keeps spinning like a continuous reel in their heads. Aptly enough, Tom Ford, who in the 1990s rescued the ailing house of Gucci with a ’70s rock-infused collection, was prompt in his spring 2015 show to channel Bianca Jagger and other idols of the day, issuing a bell-bottom evening suit that conjured the dandyish regalia of Ms. Jagger’s tabloid days.

“Certain elements of the period — the garish prints and weird color combinations — keep repeating,” said Rebecca Arnold, a fashion historian at the Courtauld Institute of Chanel paid homage to the Art in London. So-called ’70s Charlie girl, “kinda young, style, Dr. Arnold added, is actually an aesthetic mash-up, one encompassing “sophis-

A retrospective invitation design for London Fashion Week for the year 1978.

The 70â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Are Back

Composite photo of a retrospective invitation to London Fashion Week for the year 1978.

kinda now,” with a bellsleeve blouse and cropped wide-legged trousers, and Marc Jacobs offered a widesleeve camp shirt and loose pants covered somewhat subversively in a naïve-looking Liberty print. Rebecca Taylor offered a sweeping diaphanous maxi, Givenchy a studded leather vest, Gucci BABE

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a supple suede trench that Lauren Hutton might have worn at the peak of her modeling career. Who can help but plunder fashion’s past when its imagery is everywhere? The epoch was captured on film in “American Hustle” and,

more recently, in “Inherent Vice,” the hemp-saturated reimagining of the Thomas Pynchon novel. It’s vividly present in rock memoirs like “Just Kids,” Patti Smith’s recollections of coming of age in downtown Manhattan, and in trips through the decade by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and by Joni Mitchell, muse to the designer Hedi

Slimane, who highlighted the singer in his Saint Laurent spring marketing campaign. A wealth of pop ephemera is but a click away on Pinterest boards that worship at the altar of Ali MacGraw, looking womanly-provocative in the plunging silk dress or suede trench coat she wore in “The

Getaway”; or Marisa Berenson vamping for Vogue in high hippie caftans, turbans and multiple rings; or Lisa Taylor, legs splayed suggestively as she poses for Helmut Newton in a Calvin Klein dress. Clearly the period retains an emotional pull. In retrospect, the decade that spawned the DVF wrap dress, maxi-coats worn over hot pants, and Ladies of the Canyon in battered jeans seems a garden of earthly delights. “We didn’t have the consequences that we do for our actions today,” said costume designer Mark Bridges, who worked on “Boogie Nights” and “Inherent Vice.” “People smoked without pause; you made out with who you wanted to; and on all fronts we were in an experimentation mode. Why not? The stakes weren’t as high.” That age before AIDS and drastic budget shortfalls, Dr. Arnold said, “seems like the most exciting period of decadence ever. There’s an element of the ’70s that can still seem somewhat outré, kind of glamorous, but a little bit sleazy as well. It’s got an edge to it.” Small wonder it’s catnip to a generation that has yet

to evolve a seminal style of its own. Doris Raymond, the owner of the Los Angeles vintage emporium the Way We Wore, who is featured on “L.A. Frock Stars,” a Smithsonian Channel reality series, finds in the work of designers today echoes of ’70s fashion sensations like Ossie Clark, Halston and Thea Porter. The decade’s persistent allure may owe a debt to Mom as well. “Most designers now in the driver’s seat had mothers who were at their fashion peak in the ’70s,” said David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, a trend-forecasting agency. “They are doing what Dior did when he did the New Look as homage to his own mother.” True, quite a few contemporary tastemakers (the gallery includes Stella McCartney, whose mother, Linda, recorded tunes with her husband, Paul, and photographed the leading pop stars of the time, and Phoebe Philo of Céline, her mother a graphic artist) experienced the ’70s secondhand, through their mothers’ wardrobes. But fashion’s reflexive return to the ’70s goes deeper, and is part of a generalized recycling trend that dates, some say, to the midcentury at least. “Instead of being

about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once,” the British music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote in “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.” He notes that fashion, like music, now attempts to capture “a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself.” In the book, Mr. Reynolds argues that the tendency to mine vanished eras has only accelerated since 1964, the year that marked the advent of the Biba store in London. Tricked out like an Edwardian opium den, the shop enshrined the totems of a bygone day — feathery boas, peacock feathers, piano shawls and the like — marketing them to a style-besotted public as never hipper or more “now.” But the plumbing of the retro well, and the ’70s in particular, reached a frenzy, Mr. Reynolds goes on, “when designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui ransacked the styles of previous epochs almost as soon as they ended.” As he argues, fashion now “is about changes but not Change in the sense of progress.” Change, after all, can be at odds with commerce, a

concept few designers have embraced as vigorously as Mr. Slimane. A proven master at issuing biker jackets, fringed skirts and other signifiers of old-style rebellion, he has put forth a look so reassuringly familiar both to those who experienced the decade firsthand and to their spiritual offspring, that it was, in hindsight, calculated to make registers ring. “Slimane gives his consumers thoroughly digestible fashion, perfectly executed,” Robin Mellery-Pratt wrote this month in a Business of Fashion post, citing 2014 financial results reported by the parent company Kering, which demonstrate that while Saint Laurent leather goods and shoes are performing robustly, its ’60sand ’70s-inflected ready-towear has been the fastest growing of any category, surging ahead by 23 percent last year. It’s hard to argue with a strategy that so deftly conjures the spirit of sexual brashness and youth. “I put on a ’70s dress, and it changes the energy that I exude,” Ms. Raymond of the Way We Wore said. “Who doesn’t want that flower-emblazoned little dress that makes you feel young again?” The 70’s Are Back

Help! The ’80s Are Back By Vanessa Friedman March 15, 2018 I have spent the last month trapped in a wrinkle in time. Not the film, mind you, though that was quite the fashion moment, and not the book. Rather, sitting by the runways, hour after hour, day after day, city after city between Feb. 7 and March 7,

en masse that skirts would be short, or long; pants wide or slim, the message filtered down insistently through magazines and department stores. Now fashion has been fractured into a zillion subgroups and subcultures through social media and di-

This time round it was the 1980s, a decade that has been making a comeback of sorts around the aesthetic edges for the last few years. But while in previous seasons, its reemergence was tempered by assorted other decades

I could feel myself slipping further down a wormhole into the past. One moment it was 2018; the next it was 1981 (or ’85, or ’88).

rect-to-consumer everything, so that what has resulted is a smorgasbord of options.

and influences, it has now reached critical mass.

But here’s the thing: I have been there before. I’m not sure I want to go back. There’s a lot of talk these days about the end of trends, or at least trends as we knew them, when designers seemingly dictated

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Yet every season a few major, yes, trends appear and demand a reckoning, not least because thanks to their ubiquity, they will likely dominate the visual landscape come August. It doesn’t mean you have to buy into them, but it does mean you have to consider them — and more interestingly, the reasons they exist, and how that makes you feel.

Shoulders were the body part of choice, most often inflated to mega proportions (see Marc Jacobs, which even included a pouf-skirted party dress). There were a lot of power furs and leathers, at Givenchy, Tom Ford and Alberta Ferretti. Spangles

A retrospective invitation design for New York Fashion Week for the year 1988.

Help! The 80â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Are Back

Promotional photo from the 1988 film Heathers which served as inspiration for the decade’s invitation. The other inspiration include the 1986 film Pretty In Pink.

and shine, at Saint Laurent and Balmain — which, along with Gucci and Versace, also played logo-a-go-go. It was as if everyone had taken a wrong turn on the Warner Bros. lot and ended up in the costume department from “Bonfire of the Vanities.” And it was all set to an ’80s soundtrack: Terence Trent D’Arby and Sade at Ferragamo, “Tainted Love” and“Take On Me” at Balmain, Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” from “Working Girl” at Thom Browne. Julie de Libran, the creative director of Sonia

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Rykiel, even reconstituted Bananarama (live!) for her label’s 50th-anniversary show. With the requisite stonewashed denim (Miu Miu), lots of neon (Prada, Versace) and stirrup pants (Tom Ford) to match. I guess we should have expected it, given the current conjunction of political and cultural events, all of which seem to steer a designer’s thoughts naturally to the gogo decade. Given, for example, the #MeToo movement and the global explosion of women

demanding parity and recognition in the workplace and an end to sexual harassment, a phenomenon that apparently leads inexorably to the memory of the power suit, in all its big-buttoned, shoulder-padded glory — the most obvious recent reference point for armor to be donned on the corporate battlefield. Given the ascension of Donald Trump, with his suit and big red tie uniform (with its nod to Gordon Gekko and Ronald Reagan) and his unabashed love of gilding not just the lily, but every surface under the sun, the better to

convey aesthetic bombast: big hair, big gems, big belts. Bigly! O.K., big league. (Also, for that matter, his past connection to Blaine Trump, his former sister-in-law and the erstwhile socialite who put the pouf in pouf skirt.) And given the wellness movement, and the rise of athleisure and yoga pants, which has as its predecessor the aerobics years, with their love of bright-colored leotards, stretch pants and a bodysuit. Not to mention the current exhumation of assorted 1980s television and film fa-

Brooke Shields sporting a sport coat with shoulder pads, flannel, and turtleneck. The coat in this photo was used as one of the blazers in the pattern on the decade’s invitation.

vorites, including “Dynasty,” “Heathers,” “Baywatch” and “Blade Runner,” and Steven Spielberg’s new “Ready Player One,” which is itself pretty much an ode to the 1980s. And the coming royal wedding, with its connections to that other famous royal wed-

ding, in 1981, which featured, among other things, perhaps the biggest royal wedding shoulders of all. There is always a certain fascination, I know, with the style of decades one

has missed, and fashion is nothing if not obsessed with the generation of consumers that missed the ’80s, or were too young to remember them — the millennials and Gen Z. So maybe designers are sim-

ply offering them what they want (or don’t yet know they want, but actually do). And those generations may well embrace all this ’80s muchness; may wear it with the dose of irony and glee Help! The 80’s Are Back

Composite photo of a retrospective invitation design for New York Fashion Week for the year 1988. BABE

Chapter 4: Fashion

that the artifacts of the past always seems to give those who experience them for the first time, even if it’s in an ersatz fashion (pun intended). Certainly, the bunch of millennial celebs in the front row at Miu Miu — Stacy Martin, Zoe Kazan, Rowan Blanchard and Lucy Boynton, among them — hooting and hollering with glee as they watched Elle Fanning, 19, open the show in a big suede jacket and big bouffant, a scarf knotted just so around her neck, seemed to think it was a hell of a fun idea. But speaking as someone who is old enough to have actually lived through it — I was in high school and college in the 1980s; my mother was one of the ceiling-cracking women in those big-shouldered suits — I confess to having mixed feelings about the resurgence. Admittedly, it could be because I have mixed feelings about many of my adolescent choices, and the clothes I wore simply suffer by association, but I think it goes beyond that. I want to believe we are moving forward, and this feels like moving back.

Part of the aesthetic of the ’80s, after all, derived from the clothes of the ’40s, another time when women moved forward into the workplace (just as the 1960s echoed the 1920s, with the sense of sexual liberation and youth and freedom expressed through clothes). But it was a conceptual connection; a genetic link more than a clone. By contrast, the ’80s of 2018 is strikingly literal — seemingly made to be read through a small screen. Of course, it’s possible this is simply part of the struggle to reach a new stage; the fashion equivalent of two steps forward, one step back. Nicolas Ghesquière got at that backstage at Louis Vuitton when he talked about fashion as time travel. To a certain extent, he said, the job is all about navigating between the past and what you expect for the future, and the clash of the two. The place they conflict is the present.

which looked familiar, but weren’t; in the now-yousee-a-tux-now-you-realizeits-sweats at Undercover (one of the worst pieces of news to come out of the last season is that Jun Takahashi, who regularly challenges convention and conventional expectations, is abandoning women’s wear shows for men’s); in the leap from shoulder pads to etched-out shoulder mantles at Fendi and Vuitton, which was the same idea, but abstracted into its essence, as opposed to the glaringly obvious. If it is true that we are renegotiating our world, our clothes, to be really effective, need to do the same. I know we are all products of our own past and that fashion is built on dipping into and out of that netherworld, appropriating a style here, a silhouette there. It’s economical to shop our own (storage) closet, full of cringe-making memories though it may be. But it shouldn’t be the point.

And there were hints of new ideas, certainly, in the 3-D body-scanning and fabric fusion that went into creating the jackets at Balenciaga,

Help! The 80’s Are Back

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2