In anticipation of a trip to New York in June, I’m sharing my thoughts on Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, which was recommended to me by a friend.
Let’s start with a different book. When Stephanie Danler wrote Sweetbitter, she purposely set it in 2006 New York, when the iPhone didn’t dictate human interaction. It’s why her story, built around developing a palate, work. Sexuality, conversation, desire, taste—it all had to be explored intimately, in the flesh, filterless.
Stagg’s collection of essays and stories comments on a different New York, one rooted in disorientation. Print media is going to the wayside and it’s replaced with digital media-driven by consumerism. In the Foreward, Stagg writes, “at times, consumerism’s close breath feels like fresh air.” But to fight the consumerism that underlies influencer culture (used extremely broadly here to encompass fashion, image, and media because influencers inevitably touch on all of them), is to attempt to encompass a moral superiority that doesn’t exist anymore. We talk about our skincare, our favorite presets, how we curate our lives into an intriguing grid, while also wanting to appear effortless, sexy, and desirable. In the same vein, we all pursue truth, but really in name only because the truth is just as warped as everything else. Stagg’s ideas teeter somewhere between critique and complicity, and it in this middle ground that we all seem to exist – giving bored condemnations of shallowness that never really go far enough to escape it.
Read It Like Rory 