my roommates are cooler than me
we talk about shopping a lot
I guess I’m kind of seeing this guy whose roommate is a SoundCloud rapper. We went to see his roommate perform and he had this line that’s like “I’m not a content creator, I’m a formalist.” I’m not a content creator, I’m a fiction writer. Aside from being a fiction writer, I have two jobs: one is the most entry-level art job ever, where I sit in the gallery space of a contemporary arts nonprofit and make sure nobody touches anything. The other job is as a shopgirl at a clothing store. At both these jobs I have a lot of time to just sit around, but I’m not allowed to be on my laptop, and I can only write fiction on my laptop. So the idea here is that I’ll be writing these posts on my cell phone while I’m at work. I’m not supposed to be on my phone either, but it’s easier to get away with.
I live in the Chinatown, Lower East Side area with two roommates, both of whom I knew in a cursory way before we lived together. My roommate M is way cooler than me. She either knows everyone, or seems as though she knows everyone because all of the people she knows are relevant in some way. It was through one of these people that she got the phone number of our apartment broker who found us one of those insanely cheap Chinatown apartments that isn’t listed anywhere online. We pay rent via check and our broker was upset that I filled out my application documents online.
“I need the hard copy,” he said.
“There is no hard copy, I signed it digitally,” I told him. “It’s still legally binding, it’s the same thing.”
He shook his head. “There needs to be a hard copy on file,” he said. “It’s the oriental way.”
I couldn’t really argue with that. Nonetheless, I still have not given him a hard copy, and in fact I still owe him a decent chunk of his broker’s fee, which I unfortunately incurred before it was ruled that the onus should be on the landlord and not the tenant to pay the broker. My other roommate, C, and I each pay $1,000 for our rooms, and M pays $1,200 because she has two windows and enough space for a queen sized bed. Also, I feel like I need to state that I’m not a gentrifier because I am a third generation Manhattanite, which is basically as far back as it gets nowadays.
M and C are both photographers. They’re both much taller than me, both exceptionally beautiful, and both have excellent taste. M embodies a certain studied carelessness. All summer, she wore this Blondita bubble skirt and see-through tank tops, her hip bones and clavicle being her best accessories. Now that it’s cold out she wears this drapey, asymmetrical, black, suede, fur-lined jacket that she alleges to have purchased for $20 on the street, grey sweater tights, legwarmers, and a skinny scarf. Over the summer, M sat me and Zoey down and made us listen to Bassvictim. Neither of us had heard of Bassvictim before, and then Air on a G string became the defining song of our summer.
“People I went to high school with know about Snow Strippers and Bassvictim now,” C declared recently, in our kitchen, in a heavy tweed skirt from the Grotesque Archive. I didn’t know who Snow Strippers were either. In any case, it appears that it only took five months for Bassvictim to go from underground (M) to known by people who live with cool girls (myself) to known by people who went to high school with people who live with cool girls (the people C went to high school with).
C is cool but in an esoteric nerdy way. She’s responsible for the decor of our living room / kitchen, which includes an antler lamp with a doily draped over the lampshade, a knockoff Mactan stone coffee table purchased for less than a hundred dollars in Kingston when she was at Bard, cantilever chairs, a hunting rug, little cups of carved horn, a bauhaus-looking coffee pot that her boyfriend says likely contains aluminum and should not be used, a plastic tray covered in stock photos of roses and poorly translated aphorisms, and a coffee table book on soviet folk art. She’s a big fan of Green River Project LLC, who did the Bode store and Desert Vintage in our neighborhood.
Beyond interior decor, C has incredible taste in clothes. She put me on to some of the lesser known Japanese designers: Tsumori Chisato, Tokio Kumagai, Zucca (founded by a former employee of Issey Miyake), and Limi Feu (Yohji Yamamoto’s daughter). @greyroomshop on Depop sells a lot of this stuff. C is really good at Depop. When I described this handbag I was coveting to C––grey leather with a long, grommet-covered flap––she immediately identified it as the sort of thing Sara Yukiko would sell. Sara Yukiko is this vintage dealer / artist who just had a solo show at Gern en Regalia (also in our neighborhood). I had no idea who Sara Yukiko was, but when I checked the Depop listing I liked, I saw that she was indeed the seller. The bag was $180 and I Klarna’d it.
Sara Yukiko has like a million of these bags. Kind of amazing to buy out a whole market. It’s like what Mika Kol @trustfundgoth did with the YSL Mombasa (C has an amazing knockoff that the algorithm fed her when she searched horn bag), though I guess Liana Satenstein might’ve beaten her to the punch with this Vogue article in 2022 (does anyone know which came first?). I met Liana on Canal once with a friend who knew her and she graciously complimented my Balenciaga City Bag, which is totally played out at this point. Also, I remember Mika K. posting about the Chloe Nile bag, a Phoebe Philo classic. C found a tank top with similar beading at Harley’s, like this but in a green, which would’ve matched this bag. It was only $30 and she regrets not buying it. When I worked at this amazing vintage store, Wayward, in Philadelphia, the fabulous proprietress sold this exact crescent-shaped beaded bag––which I’m amazed I was able to track down given that it’s not branded––to a stylist for And Just Like That… except there was a matching bracelet that this listing seems to be lacking.
M and C and I are rarely at home at the same time, but when we are, we talk about shopping. Lately, it’s shoes. C got a really good deal on a pair of Isabel Marant Beketts, the original wedge sneaker, but they totally fell apart upon wearing them, hence the low low price. My Italian coworker at the clothing store was recently wearing a pair in an amazing taupe color. She said she got them four years ago for thirty euros on some amazing continental resale site because “people in France have them.” They go for a lot more in America in 2024. Reminds me of the time the guy I’m seeing, Z, took me to a noise show in a basement in East Williamsburg and we met this funny, glamorous, tragic DJ from Warsaw who was wearing Uggs. Z was like, “nice Uggs, did you get them in Poland?” And the DJ scoffed and said, “They’re from Romania.” Apparently a lot of stuff on Vinted ships to Poland and Germany from Romania. Z was nodding and vaping like, “nice, nice, Romanian Uggs.”
The shoe M and C both want now is the Jeremy Scott wing shoe, which isn’t too hard to find as a sneaker, but there was a limited edition ballet flat in collaboration with Adidas that’s difficult to source. If you wear a size 6 women’s shoe, you should snap these up. I think because we’re all in our twenties we want the pieces that seemed cool when we were children. It’s funny, you know, C was recently speculating about all the time we waste thinking about shopping, but then we got to thinking about the men we know and how they waste time. Because it’s impossible to be productive all the time. And we realized men are always watching movies. Z told me he watched approximately 700 movies in 2020. C told me her boyfriend watches a movie every day. “Men like movies because it’s kind of like hunting,” says C. “You know…watching the moving object.”