And a curated list of secondhand textured handbags for your picking.

Welcome to the Sunday newsletter.

An every seven days curation of touch sight taste and sound in relation to fashion and beyond. An accountability marker to maintain the never-ending curation of style, and to stay in contact with the senses through fabulous things.

For this week’s Light Bites, a little bit of everything is on the menu.
I’m fully entrenched in the project of rebuilding my wardrobe post-move. I’m collecting inspiration and looking to anything and everything to satisfy my brain and outline what my dream fall wardrobe will look like. This means paying extra attention to the physical sensations I enjoy, the fabrics I’m drawn to, and the food I like to eat—which will probably end up falling on said fabrics anyway.

I hope you enjoy.

Light Bites

Textured bags

As I’ve been focusing on the shift in fabrics my wardrobe will take on when it cools, I’ve also been thinking about the accessories needed to make these fabrics truly pop. I am a creature who yearns for contrast—just like everybody else. If I’m wearing a soft sweater, it must be paired with a hard leather bag, for example. Nothing makes an outfit pop for me quite like the constant battle of feelings, textures, or dress codes. When each individual piece of my outfit is waging war against its neighbor, I am at my happiest.

I’ve been searching for an oversized, soft suede clutch for quite some time, but I recently came to the realization that it would only be happily paired with a trench coat or leather jacket—of which I have only one. So, in the irritating pursuit of practicality, I shifted the hunt to some type of structured, hard, or embellished bag to lay coyly under my armpit and atop my sweaters. Something with wooden details or straw materials. The more jagged ones, I can see really spiffing up a T-shirt or trench coat.

A simple outfit formula, radicalized by individuality.

You can shop these bags and more here

The little shoe that could

I have a rule: when a new piece enters my closet, I spend an intimate thirty minutes with it alone, building as many outfits as possible before the high of a new toy wears off and I’m left with just another thing I own.

And may I say—this shoe outdid itself.

You can read more about my hunt for the perfect Sunday School Wedge here.

The shoe is from the brand Maryam Nassir Zadeh

NYFW

It’s currently Fashion Week in New York, which means this is one of those blissful times of year when I don’t have to go searching for inspiration and instead it lands right in my lap.

We’re only halfway through NYFW, so a more detailed analysis will be in next week’s letter. But for now, here are a few standout moments: Collina Strada sent both light and dark versions of every look down the runway; Campillo introduced some of the boxiest, most satisfyingly difficult-to-chew pieces I’ve ever seen; and Ashlyn’s layering magic is pure styling alchemy.

So far, this Fashion Week is shaping up to be one of my favorites in a long time.

The Great Re-Brand

Inspired by Fashion Week—and Fall itself—I’m currently filming a six-part series titled “Rebuilding My Wardrobe in the Style of a Creative Director Debuting Their First Collection.”

Slipping out of sync with your wardrobe is natural. As humans, we’re constantly changing while our wardrobes remain stagnant. One day, we look up and realize we haven’t enjoyed getting dressed in weeks. Who we were at one point, and the clothes that dressed us, can feel years away from who we are now.

Sustainability adds another layer of discombobulation. One of the great costs of identifying your personal style is that shopping to express it becomes more complex. Where you once could walk into a mall and grab anything with your eyes closed, you now spend hours sifting through racks of vintage clothing, only to come up with nothing that feels just right.

When we stop buying in big hauls from major retailers, and instead let pieces trickle in one at a time, we can easily lose sight of the big picture—our personalstyle.

It’s been about five years since I last truly evaluated mine. And after major life changes—like a cross-continent move—my wardrobe simply doesn’t reflect the current version of me anymore.

I’m now in Phase 1B of the great rebrand: collecting inspiration. This week, I’ve been sifting through photos of extravagantly spiced coffees, vintage J.Crewcatalogues, expensive wools and cashmeres, and images that evoke the feelings I want my clothes to carry.

Because when you’re looking for style inspiration, outfits should be the very last thing on your mind.

Sunday Breakfast

Since the beginning of Nina’s and my relationship, we’ve had a ritual of Sunday breakfast. This stems from my urge to preserve my adolescence, and Nina’s urge to coerce me into cooking for her as often as possible.

For me, growing up, Sunday always came with the same familiar routine.

After whatever long, boring sermon Mom forced us to sit through was over, we’d come home and Dad would grapevine into the kitchen to get started on Sunday pancakes as an apology on Mom’s behalf. While she changed, the rest of us flopped on the couch, fighting over the comics section of the paper, waiting to be fed. Breakfast always meant bacon served on paper towels, orange juice, sausage links, and about thirty pancakes.

Sunday breakfast is a tradition I still take very seriously. There’s something about waking up on a day infamous for being devoid of plans, and sticking one right in the morning that makes me smirk to myself. Call it my aversion to authority or my inability to sit still, but it provides exactly what I need on Sundays: a little freedom, a little planning, and a lot of nostalgia.

This week’s menu was poached eggs on mushroom toast, Turkish eggs with a spicy browned butter sauce on top, and pastries from the bakery downstairs.

Skin on skin on wood

There are a few extremely specific physical feelings I have a deep admiration for. One, for example, is waking up in the morning and placing your bare, sleepy feet on freshly mopped hardwood floors. Another is slipping a silk dress over your head and feeling it slide like water down your freshly shaved legs until it pools at your ankles.

The feeling of my body placed atop another while we sit on a wooden dock near the water reigns supreme. A beam of sunlight heating up a patch of skin so intensely it starts to melt into your cells and gets trapped under the hair on your arms. When I get a light sunburn like that, I like to throw a sweater on top of it as an added layer of security—so I know it absolutely cannot escape. I then carry that sun with me until it dulls.

The only thing better than the end-of-summer sun’s attempt at branding you for one of the last times is when I’m catching it with a loved one: the soft sound of water lapping beneath the wood, sweat starting to collect in the crevices of our arms.

I don’t have much else to say about it, besides that when I got to experience it this week, it stuck with me for days.

Outfits of the week you may have missed

Style Exercise of the week

In the spirit of contrast lets fine tune a way to play with it. '

Go to your wardrobe and identify your favorite type of clothing. Is it casual pieces? Knits? Patterned items? Clothes with robust color palettes? Choose one piece to start building your outfit around.

Now, choose your next piece based on something you’d identify as the opposite of your first piece. For example:

Casual clothing / Formal clothing
Summer clothes / Winter clothes
Knitted pieces / Leather pieces
Clubbing clothes / Office clothes

Then seesaw back and forth between these two styles, adding one piece, then another.

Next, add three accessories you don’t normally think of: a hat, socks, necktie, jewelry, stockings, brooches, handbags—something to remind you that an outfit can go beyond just a top, bottoms, and a jacket and see what new combinations reveal themselves.

That’s all for this Sunday. Make sure to stay tuned for all of the NYFW coverage, wardrobe rebranding, and shoe styling to come!

The little shoes that could, the great re-brand, NYFW & more