Letter of Rec #092: Gap is where it's at

With some thoughts on creative work, a great lurex duster and labne that tastes like olive cream cheese.

Monday was the kind of gorgeous February day when you don’t need gloves or a hat (lest they are part of the look) and the natural light is so golden that even the construction sites it hits look like a deliberate, creative choice. You can wear silk without worrying much about static friction —

Ray-ban sunglasses, Sessei plaid shirt, Polo Ralph Lauren silk shirt, Massimo Dutti pants, Emme Parsons loafers

And you develop a sort of winter amnesia, or maybe a re-foritification of faith, which reminds you that just as the sun always rises, after winter always comes spring.

It was inconvenient as hell out there again by Thursday morning, but the hit of warmth was enough relief this week to get me past the front door.

Also on Monday, Marc Jacobs showed his spring collection at the New York public library ahead of the formal start to New York fashion week. The clothes are often impossible, as they were on Monday, but they always remind me of a foundational principle of the creative process that I haven’t exactly been able to name.

I am convinced that when we’re drawn to someone else’s creative output, it’s not so much the work that attracts us as it is the energy that drives it — the confidence, emotionality, or sheer authenticity that underlies its production.

I have an insanely talented friend who has an incredible understanding of design and when he second guesses himself, I always ask: What is your biggest fear? His most recent response was that no one will get it and it brought me back to Marc Jacobs. I don’t think he (Jacobs) cares who gets it, because I think in a way he knows it’s not get-able. True creative genius rarely is because it’s a product of heart and mind: what we’re wrestling with, thinking through, trying to extract or parse out.

At best, what any of us can hope for with our creative work is to organize, clarify or more clearly convey the unnameable that lives within us. Marc Jacobs seems to intuit this in a way that gives permission to the rest of us to get weird and real with our expressions.

This is why I see him as such a crucial role model in fashion. He rallies for creative progress, the challenging of staid paradigms and this week he reminded me that when you stop anticipating what your desired audience wants and fully embrace what is most true within you, the best work so often emerges.

So maybe this is recommendation no. 1 — a reminder more than anything else that when you do it for you, it is for them.

The rest of what I have today is far more tactile, and starts with a range of hits from The Gap: