She’s Come Undone (on Purpose)

If you see a young person strolling down the street, pants undone, it’s probably not an “examine your zipper” situation. Once the provenance of your uncle after Thanksgiving dinner or a practical adaptation to a pregnant belly, sporting unbuttoned jeans has become a fashion statement. Katie Pettit, 20, a model from Orlando, Fla., was visiting…

Willy Chavarria Takes It to Church

Fashion is no place for people without a stomach for contradiction. Consider the gorgeous, if occasionally lugubrious, Willy Chavarria show on Tuesday in Manhattan at Marble Collegiate Church, home pulpit of President Richard M. Nixon’s favorite clergyman, Norman Vincent Peale, the self-help pundit who wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Exalting and hokey, exhortatory as…

After a Fire, Rebuilding What Matters

On Dec. 23, 2021, Emily Thompson handed her grandmother’s solitaire diamond to a jeweler to have it incorporated into her wedding band. She and her fiancé, Stefan Kienle, had planned to marry in eight months. One week later, on Dec. 30, the Marshall fire ripped through their town, Louisville, Colo., and the neighboring town, Superior,…

Please Let Me Do More Laundry and Vacuuming!

I’d like to blame those minimal skills on an inability to read a cookbook, but I was fully sighted back then, afflicted only with an aversion to domestic tasks. Serious cooking felt like yet another tedious married-with-children chore, right up there with emptying the dishwasher, grocery shopping, making a bed and vacuuming. Invariably, this affliction…

A Relationship With Biblical Origins

“Hello, my dove,” Terence Lee said as he was introduced to Cecelia Claire Thornton-Alson at the wedding rehearsal dinner for their mutual friends, in October 2017. His riff on the line “O my dove,” from the “Song of Songs,” was hokey enough to put her at ease before their first run-through of the biblical text,…