Dear &tosters,
It’s been a while – I hope you didn’t miss me too much. My absence is only justified by my inability to multitask while I was wrapping up Junior year of college (I.E. studying, writing, reading … partying, playing, kissing, etc..), but as the days counted on, I found myself putting way too much pressure on my “comeback” article. I started researching trends and trying to articulate pretentious ways to talk about the fashion industry, entirely losing sight of what &tost is all about: reading about the quarrels and squabbles of two girls who you have literally never heard about. So as I’m sitting at my semi-corporate summer internship rent-a-desk workspace (more on this later), I’m deciding to break the cycle of procrastination, take out my figurative pen, and overshare. Maybe it doesn’t always have to be solely about who is wearing what, or how we wear it, even. When writers ask what style they should write in for us, I always tell them to write as if they’re journaling, or as if they’re texting their best friend (in weirdly organized paragraphs). Here’s to taking my own advice.
Welcome to my spiral, babies.
Taking it back to spring, I had quite the serendipitous semester, albeit mildly stifled by suburban CT charm. I don’t remember the day-to-days, so I looked over my journal and found some “interesting” things that I wrote down:
“500 Instagram followers is more chic than 2,000+”
Hear me out, because I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I think anonymity is something to be sought after these days. I can’t help but be intrigued by an Instagram handle that has 274 followers, an obscure bio, and a profile photo devoid of a person or any remote context, yet they have roughly 50+ mutuals. They curate such an intimate space that it becomes an exclusive club, almost. It borders a burner account and challenges the public, vapid nature of sorority sisters commenting “sooo cute” on posts of people who they don’t say hi to IRL.
I remember writing down this hot take after feeling generally overwhelmed – not just by social media, but by people who I see daily. Maybe it’s part of the people pleaser in me, but I became burnt out from lunches with acquaintances and tried to focus on, in total honesty, having fewer friends. Trying to embody the 274 versus 2,000 followers mentality, if you will.
I ran with this narrative so much that I almost deleted my personal social media. God, what an idiot I was. Not wanting to have an Instagram or only having a handful of followers is, in reality, just as curatorial as having 20k. Is everything we do just for the aesthetic?
Walking around campus, life felt bleak after I realized the minion-like way in which we all just blind follow each other for the aesthetic. I pull out my Black Honey, you pull out yours. We drink coffee with no milk, hoping to embody the Parisian, open button up, messy-bun, cigarette girl, and it works. I get pregnant just to wear a one piece with a baby bump in the South of France with a wicker basket full of flowers. Life! Is! Hard!
I don’t have an answer for whether everything we do is truly for the goal of the aesthetic, but I ended up coming to peace with it when I realized that there are worse things to be addicted to than the visually pleasing or pleasurable. Maybe I’m hedonistic – maybe all fashion girls are. Dare I say I’m taking a page from Babitz.
Something I can’t get behind? Substack. Another quote:
“Why does everyone have a Substack these days?????”
Now listen, I know I am one to talk. But Gogo and I like to think of &tost as more of an experience than just a generic publishing platform. Our background is purple! Is it so unhinged to argue that Substacks are becoming just as social media-esque as Tiktok? Seriously,why is everyone creating a Substack?
Maybe this relates to the aesthetic quarrel from above – a sort of monkey see monkey do effect. We’ve come full circle in the media where mindless scrolling is out and blogs are back on the rise. People want to see the inner-workings of their favorite influencers’ minds, rather than a snapshot of their day. What is really throwing me off is the Liberal Arts to Substack writer pipeline. Maybe the new aesthetic isn’t just having 200 followers, but it’s also having a Substack with a witty and ambiguous title about the way that your dog drinks milk or something about your BK cashmere socks, for example.
The last journal entry quite exemplary of my past few weeks is as follows:
“God I am never doing laundry again fck this I hate clean clothes the machine is where beautiful fabric goes to die I hate everything fck I want to cry…”
I washed my favorite shirt, and it shrunk in the wash. It was such an awful day, it felt as though I was going through a breakup and had to mourn the “what could have been” possibilities of our future, stripped right from my fingers.
I had just come back from college teary eyed and had a mound of laundry to do. I deliriously sorted my whites, darks, and delicates. Immediate red flag: never do laundry when you’re tired, sad, or both. Luckily, I remembered that the last time I had done laundry when I was crying was during my first breakup, when I accidentally washed my favorite James Perse hand-me-down cashmere sweater that sent me over the edge into a blubbering mess. I miss that sweater still to this day.
Unfortunately, I have the world’s greatest mother of all time who surprised me by doing my laundry the next day to literally lighten my load. Little did she know that I wasn’t in the mental state to be sorting laundry, so I ended up including the magical top into my whites, rather than delicates. Long story short, I pulled my beautiful shirt out of the laundry and gasped as I saw that it had shrunk to the size of an American Girl Doll’s sweater, rather than a US 6.
To paint a picture of this shirt, I had thrifted it in London. It was the perfect classy turtle-neck tank that was funky enough to challenge all waspy stereotypes of the style. It had “LS” in a box on the front, tricking people into thinking it was YSL when really it just had my first two initials on it. It fit me like a glove, and I paired it with uber baggy jeans, a silver and brown belt, and my vintage bowling shoes during the day, or my staple pair of jeans from ***** ** (in defense of gatekeeping) and loafers. More than anything, though, this shirt had extreme sentimental value to me. I wore it to first interviews, a first date, and dinner parties. It was a shirt that made me feel mature yet sexy, and even though I’ve scoured the internet searching for it, it is nowhere to be found. A one of a kind shirt.
You can imagine my mental state writing, “God I am never doing laundry again fck this I hate clean clothes the machine is where beautiful fabric goes to die I hate everything fck I want to cry…” blasting Billie’s new album and memorializing all of the good times I had with this shirt. The aftermath? I have yet to do the giant mound of delicates I have sitting in a pile in my room. Cheers to a smelly summer because I’m not taking any more chances. Every load of laundry now is like exposure therapy, slowly building my confidence back up to finally wash my vintage Marni top and lace, rib-edged tunic.
So that is where my brain has been since my last article. Aside from finishing Junior year and starting my big-girl job in corporate America, I’ve been enjoying living in my apartment again with the promise of home-cooked meals and friend reunions. Sorry to call you out about my shirt, mom, but thanks for doing my laundry. You rock.
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