Hullo, welcome to choitotheworld. I’m Mary H.K. Choi, a New York Times Bestselling Author, Essayist, screenwriter and AuDHD person living in New York (for some reason). I also identify as a person with a history of disordered eating. Join me each-ish week for a wee chat about brains and creativity. And lurk at my other hijinks here or else here.
Do you feel that ladies and germs? That delicious little fripple in the air (not a real meteorological word; but apparently a fishing one?). It is fall in New York and the weather is perfect. The breeze is cool and also portentous. Winter is coming. And this makes me feel preemptively depressed but in a bracing, deliriously relieved way.
(I’m also confident we will still have a few more days of batshit broiling before the full-tilt onslaught. Watch this space.)
It’s the culmination of fashion month and I’m excited about the elongated silhouettes, all those coats and dropped waists. And in thinking about clothes it’s easy to start getting really ambitious about how I’ll look this season. I love fall for the promise. The layers. That nanosecond where you actually want to dress cute for yourself before bundling into some gore-tex sleeping bag and shushing around in Uniqlo heat-tech with staticky hair until mid-March.
In the same way that I get HONGRY once the weather dips, like, Spirited Away famished as Sherry wrote about so beautifully, I also want to buy everything. Again, it’s the promise. The as yet realized hope. That moment where the realities of your soft, materiality hasn’t abutted against the unyielding silhouette of the shrewd little jacket you eyed online.
Right now I’m committed to ruthless discernment when it comes to shopping. I’m trying to only buy vintage or mending clothes that I love or letting them disintegrate and just wearing them anyway as a testament to mutual service, grace and devotion.
It helps that I’m also leaving for Japan in a few days where the vintage is beautifully curated and assiduously cared for so it’s a bit of a cheat, akin to skipping lunch before a decadent meal but I am set in my intention to only bring home a scant few grails. Scant meaning anywhere from three to twelve things (not including shoes and bags).
The truth is, for as much time as I trawl and lurk and shamble around online staring at images of clothes and shoes, setting time limits on my TRR and GemApp-ing, my online purchase success ratio is about 1/60 in that I can only successfully incorporate what I buy online one out of sixty times. It also doesn’t help that the returns window for most purchases make me want to lie down and never buy anything again.
I never seem to remember that my autism will not abide by most textiles. Anything audible, rough or heavy is a nonstarter. There are also seam finishes that create deep emotional conflict and I take issue with many kinds of sleeves. Especially the sorts that don’t stay rolled up properly when I overheat. Then there’s how the colors are always off in photos. I also can’t tolerate a sheen. Or the way certain buttons just look gormless in the placket like artless unfeeling eyes that are grouped menacingly close together.
In any case, I am hideously persnickety and am excited to shop inside shops. One of my favorite things about shopping in Japan is a level of pageantry that my friend lovingly refers to as, a bow on a bow and a box in a bag. Every purchase is so lovingly packaged that the thought of returning any of it is spiritually abhorrent which makes you extra judicious about what to leave with in the first place.
Plus, everyone in the shop is scrupulous about keeping the garment absolutely pristine. There’s never errant deodorant smears even at a high street store. You have to remove your shoes and put on a mesh face cover every single time.
Plus, there’s actual inventory. In J’s newsletter this week, they talk about the lack of anything in a shop, specifically in L.A. but it’s very much the eery unsettling vibe anywhere in the U.S. in a brick-and-mortar. It all looks terrific as the veneer of a shop, basically in photos, or as the backdrop to some activation, but there’s not often very much there.
Another friend of mine, the same friend who has the best apartment, only really buys completely solved outfits and edits her closet so that when she is tired of those outfits the whole outfit goes, usually through re-sale channels since she also tends to buy expensive, quality, occasionally designer items.
I aspire to be much more like this. Despite the chaos mongrel that rules my heart and insists we need 17 pairs of barrel legged navy trousers.
In any case, I am aware the solution is to spend at least two days sifting through everything to solve for outfits and then take pictures to remind myself of what preexisting outfits I enjoy already but honestly if I had enough time, presence of mind, and executive functioning for this, a whole litany of other problems would be solved and I would also be an entirely different person.
So in celebration of accepting my limitations and forgiving myself with surrender and good humor, I wanted to re-release an article that originally ran in New York Magazine over 10 YEARS AGO just to have it live somewhere.
For some reason it gets an error message when you go looking for it in The Cut but also I own it so here it is. For those interested, it also lives alongside several other essays in a Kindle Single called, Oh, Never Mind.
+ Sidebar 1: Is it me or does this article feel fascinatingly anachronistic? I just feel like everyone in the last decade has been trained to be staggeringly spendy when it comes to “luxury” and the prospect of buying an investment item that you absolutely can’t afford feels utterly commonplace which is so weird and wild to think about. I’d be curious to know how it persists when the entire economy falls into the toilet.
++ Sidebar 2: When I wrote this, I was splitting time between New York and L.A. And the first photo was taken in my old neighborhood in Mid-City. It was hot as shit and I remember I was sweltering in the jacket and feeling like a real dickhead dithering about trying to look smoldering for the camera. Then, hilariously, I heard my name called out in the dark and it was Earl Sweatshirt who was out for a stroll and who I’d just covered for Fader a few years prior. He took pity on my sweaty, old ass after I’d delivered my overlong explanation and just went: “No, you look cool. Don’t worry.”
The children can be so kind. Also, the children are dads now which is so thrilling :)
Anyway, wonderwall etc…
+++
A year ago I bought a $4,000 jacket. It took thirty minutes but seemed like much longer and the whole time I couldn’t feel my face. It was surreal. I walked into the store, tried on two things, looked at myself in the mirror and handed over my credit card with the lowest APR and a conciliatory cash-back policy. The Asian girl who helped me had blunt bangs, heavily lined eyes, and wore a distressed denim duster. Her name was Shelley. It was all super casual in the store.
Outside, on the blustery Tribeca street, I couldn’t breathe. My face was really, really hot.
My partner who was with me the whole time was similarly gob-smacked.
Holy shit, what did you do?
I was wild-eyed and furious that he hadn’t stopped me; he in turn was unmistakably impressed.
I had to sit down. I slid into a nearby café, figured alcohol would only make the day even weirder so I ordered a juice. I don’t even like juice. I’d just quit my job to become a freelance writer so it was extra-batshit that I’d bought two MacBook Airs-worth of lightweight coat. I also knew, with conviction, that I’d sooner eat a pound of hair than suffer the humiliation of returning it.
When the ginger pineapple “elixir” cost $22, I laughed. It was the dry hiccup of my brain breaking. Things cost what they cost in a nightmare. Clearly, the coat was a butterfly flutter in a deterministic nonlinear system that will result in catastrophe at a later state. It was Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” trying to get a breakfast sandwich after the allotted breakfast sandwich time. Or maybe the coat was the first time I’d noticed that everything was wrong and it was already way too late. Whatever the case, it had finally happened. In the eleven years of living here, New York had driven me nuts. If the rapture had cracked a fissure in the sky, I would have been like, Would you look at that? Those Caucasians in bad pants were right.
OK, so the thing you should know is that I’m not one of those people. I don’t shop like a crazy person and then feel feelings and shove all that dread in a drawer and back away. In fact, it’s a telling signal of egregious incompetency that my bank didn’t call me right then to see if shit was cool. Thing is, I’m way too practical and way too accustomed to being broke. I’m the daughter of immigrants who work in the service industry. My dad salts away shirts older than me and my mother mends them when they tear. They live in San Antonio, Texas, and will never see this jacket, and if they do I’ll lie about the cost in order to protect them. They’re not poor, they’re practical, and trying to be a writer in New York is a big enough crazy that you get just the one. Even I know that.
To make up for my dubious profession, I don’t loll around ordering garbage off the internet nor do I sashay into boutiques, cooing and air-kissing salespeople who refer to me as their “client.” I am not plied by overpriced gewgaws nor do I commission saberings of Jeroboams while declaring Macau the new Vegas. I don’t do “baller” things on Instagram and have never purchased anything that Kanye West [ed: lol] has ever yelled about. Which is why the day’s events were so loaded.
For a living I predominantly write about fashion. I mention it only because for some people, writing about fashion can be hazardous. You’re constantly dealing with beautiful, louche, over-the-top baubles and their famously eccentric handlers and the results can be desensitizing. Over time it may seems reasonable to buy $500 sunglasses and $1,000 shoes and to treat yourself to a bangle with no diamonds for fifteen grand (“but it’s Cartier!”) that comes with a wee screwdriver for screws that you have to tighten and loosen yourself.
Not me though. I love the ridiculousness but have historically felt no need to participate. Like stats-obsessed sports fans who don’t play anything. It’s like how when I was 16, I worked at a high-traffic Red Lobster and couldn’t bring myself to eat the free Cheddar Bay Biscuits. I had no desire to consume what I could smell on my skin. I’d been on this fickle and zany beat for a decade, I thought for sure I was inoculated. Chanel, Bottega, Balenciaga I was immune to. Rick Owens would give me more trouble.
To this day I have no idea what possessed me to walk into his store. To call this flagship a store is hilarious. It’s a sleek, sparse, gleaming white encasement flanked by sheets of glass, and bisected by varying walls of mirror. It’s a miniature fortress of solitude constrained by New York proportions that shrewdly offsets the stark, jagged cave-witch clothes inside. It’s uninviting to the uninitiated and faintly hospitalish. Entering is akin to arriving at the cafeteria at a new high school, were said high school populated entirely by clones of Rihanna. It’s terrifying. The sort that sometimes inspires involuntary laughter.
The mystique has much to do with the designer. Rick Owens is a tall, sinewy, brilliant man, with a thin nose, Old World teeth and fantastic hair. He resembles an Egon Schiele subject and lives in a five-story Parisian mansion with his muse and wife and business partner Michele Lamy an elderly, pygmy-sized, polyamorous goth wife who hangs out with rappers. They have $800 shirts that look like lice-infested shrouds worn by medieval serfs.
Their coats appear rough-hewn, essentially untreated hides cut into fascinating shapes of seemingly extra-terrestrial origin. The moment you throw one on, however, the weight falls into a mysterious, life-affirming silhouette. Whoa, is Shelley smiling? Wait, is Shelley smiling at me or near me? The black, suede, fur-lined Rick Owens motorcycle jacket made me feel thinner, taller, and infinitely more interesting. I looked as if I were in on a secret. The coat was the distillation of everything I’ve ever found seductive about not only living in New York, but the prospect of belonging here. (As opposed to the Hollywood red carpet gown that makes tourists of us all by mandating a need for full-body makeup and a “flesh”-hued Spanx tourniquet to the knees.)
I dared myself to buy that coat and then dared that coat to rebuke me. I know it’s inane to assign such meaning to an inanimate pile of textile. Lord knows I’d made fun of the deeply insecure magpies that do so regularly. But I had something to prove. I could visit the tippy top of cool-rich-people New York (as opposed to tacky, evil, overwrought rich-people New York*), buy a souvenir and not turn into a hobo.
Let me explain. So, I know native New Yorkers complain all the time about how anesthetized New York is now. It’s a defanged, declawed, Disney Land strip mall compared to when they were kids. Sure, whatever. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me here (knock wood) is that I was once hit over the head with an umbrella by a 16-year-old girl in a residential neighborhood at dusk. She was being a total bitch and I told her so as I ran after her until my bullshit knees gave out. Still, I’ve always found living in New York deeply scary. Without a trust fund or famous parent (and even then, sometimes you need both), the odds of success here are ludicrous. It’s not just the fact that you don’t have any money. It’s that money no longer makes sense. This is the part that took me forever to figure out.
The soul-squelching indignities of exorbitant rent and health insurance become almost reassuring in that they are at least fixed. You must pay rent each month or you will be thrown away and you will never afford health insurance so don’t even worry about it. It’s the malarkey of everything else that’s the problem. The less you need something, the more unfettered access you’ll have to it. Only in New York could you keel over and die of malnutrition with your tote and pockets overflowing with energy vodka, gluten-free cake pops and $300 dollars-worth of hardcover art books.
You will be lousy with neon designer jean “samples” and you can wear them to sit for three hours at the free clinic where you make your bi-yearly visits. It’s the interminable gyno appointments that fucked me up. After six years slogging in super-credible independent publications and two at a heartbreaking attempt to start my own, I just wanted a waiting room devoid of entire families eating takeout while I fretted about venereal disease.
At 29, when “selling out” was still a thing, I took a secure, unglamorous publishing job not only with health insurance but dental (!) and a retirement plan. Six months later, I was laid off. The year was 2009, a subprime mortgage market correction had resulted in a third of all the people I knew getting downsized.
I took odd jobs — writing speeches for corporate executives, transcribing, and copy-editing two separate car magazines. I learned it didn’t matter how good you were at anything. Or how ambitious you were in your spare time.
I began writing gratis for a friend’s website. He and another friend had started it for something to do. The day we hauled his massive change bowl to the CoinStar was a happy one. We ate Australian food at the new Australian lunch counter that only served meat pies and prepackaged chocolate cookies. There was also the time the other founder bought us tacos with his SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) card. We ribbed him as we ordered and looked away when he handed it over.
The strangest part is that it was also the first time since moving here that I knew I’d be OK. Nobody knew anything and you only looked the hick if you pretended otherwise. Astoundingly, I was also professionally fulfilled. I was challenged by whatever work was available and there was no such thing as a lateral move. I’d strived in fear for so long that relinquishing the notion that I had any control over anything came as a huge relief.
Less than a year later, I’d land a high paying job at an enormously successful broadcasting company. I paid off my credit cards, went to all kinds of health specialists, took my still unemployed friends out to eat, celebrated with the friends who’d also landed on their feet, feathered my savings account and then quit the following year. I wanted a different job — to write full time — and I felt no fear or hesitation in pursuing it.
This is when I bought the coat.
Being a writer is stupid. If civilization were devastated by a viral pandemic [ed: whoa] and a ton of people died but some survived and we were just slogging away—doctors alongside construction workers—rebuilding and courageously refusing to eat each other, you couldn’t bring up how you should get to be the writer. You can’t broach that shit until year 100. Anything less and they’d bash your head in and take your shoes. Nobody would ever admit that they knew what mimes and molecular gastronomists were. That’s how things are now.
Which is why you have to accept the urge and have that be that. The coat didn’t turn to dust when it left its home atmosphere like some Shangri-La paramour. It hangs out in my crappy closet mashed in with my other stuff. It still looked awesome in my mirror in Brooklyn and when I pulled it out from the tissue that first day, I realized I’d been given two metal pucks of Rick Owens mints as a gift. The mints looked like Nerds made of pencil lead and tasted like crematorium. It was like a Zoolander prank and I loved the conviction.
The coat has since been ripped off by countless less expensive brands and when women tell me they have the exact same one, I don’t correct them. I figure it’s like tithing.
When I was little, I’d always known that I’d live in New York. Thirteen-year-old me thought I’d be rich. Like, fuck-off soignée rich. Rich with an e—riche. By the time I turned 30 I’d have everything. I’d have a crackerjack career but I’d marry well too. I’d possess sundries you couldn’t collect with a single income, like a dishwasher and a kitchen island with a sink in it and artwork and maybe a boat but only if our friends had one.
I was a kid in the ’80s where the height of glamour was a bitchy business blonde with a brick cellphone and an ultramarine Bill Blass power suit with predatory shoulders and loud, square gold buttons. As far as I was concerned, the only no-nonsense way to tell a boy you like them was showing up at their hotel room with a fresh perm and red lingerie under a Burberry trench. Maybe with some gloves if you’d just helicoptered in from the opera. I feel good that real New York isn’t like that at all. It’s far sillier. Unless, of course, I’m wrong. And if that’s the case, please don’t correct me. I hear Lexapro is expensive. And I refuse to go generic.
*I don’t actually know that there’s a significant difference.
mary this was such a DELIGHT to read with my morning tea. it reminded me of the time i got talked into opening a banana republic credit card, that blank "wtf did i do" feeling. the "old world teeth" description was hilarious
Alex Jung and I were fanboying about how much we loved this essay the other week and I went mad trying to find it online again lmao. SPOOKY. Thank you