The Thirst for Merch

On Friday morning, a cloudless sky stretched above the Brooklyn Museum. As the sun marked the arrival of a sweltering July, clusters of people lined up an hour before opening to be the first ones inside. It was the first day that “Figures of Speech,” a multimedia retrospective of work by the designer Virgil Abloh,…

When a Bra Won’t Cut It

As Valerie Steele, the chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said: “It was a shift in beauty ideals from a very voluptuous, high Victorian ideal, to a younger and slimmer ideal. What one fashion writer in around 1900 called ‘the shift from Venus to Diana.’” Tape, in that case, would…

Have a Pizza Party

Good morning. I’d wager I cook more than your average newspaper editor. I enjoy feeding my family and appreciate the break it offers me from thinking about facts and figures, stories and consequences. But, man, Wednesdays are difficult. The weekends seem so far away. There was the last one, already remembered in sepia tones, when…