Trends

Tuesday

James Panero

Inside the cult of Equinox

Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

Equinox

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

What will the ‘Colors of the Year’ be in 2024?

As we enter 2024 with trepidation, let us take comfort in the fact that this year’s “Colors of the Year” are actual colors. I’m an interior-design enthusiast who takes color very seriously. Over the course of seven years, I agonized over narrowing down dozens of saved paint samples to just five shades with which to paint the walls of a hypothetical cabin. Monet and I are simpatico — color is our “day-long obsession, joy and torment.” The online algorithms are well aware of my interest in interior decorating ideas, which may explain my impression that paint manufacturers put out a new “Color of the Year” every couple of months.

colors

Wednesday

Josie Cox

The rise of the lazy-girl job

To anyone who’s ever dismissed Gen Z as a cluster of feckless snowflakes, or shunned them as gritless, superficial posers raised on instant gratification and social-media filters; to anyone who thinks this juvenile rabble will never amount to more than bitter complainers about rising house prices and corrupt capitalism — I implore you! Take a moment to consider that these zoomers, these mini millennials, these whiny warriors of wokeland, have just instigated the labor market trend we didn’t know we needed: the rise of the lazy-girl job. If you instinctively recoil at any new phrase with “girl” in it — “hot girl summer,” “girlboss” — I’m right there with you.

Sunday

Kara Kennedy

The fall of the Birkin bag

If you had a spare $100,000, what would you spend it on? The deposit on a decent home, perhaps. Maybe a boat or a luxury car. For her twenty-fifth birthday, Kylie Jenner was given a bag worth that princely sum. The three-toned Birkin was one of just three made. By her own account, Jenner had “never even seen anything like this before.” Kate Moss famously used one as a diaper bag, Kim Kardashian, a gym bag. The Hermès Birkin bag was birthed in 1984, after Jane Birkin, the British-French actress and singer, sat next to Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on an Air France flight to London. The contents of her bag spilled out onto the floor, prompting Dumas to remark that she needed one with pockets.

birkin

Wednesday

Chadwick Moore

If the Croc fits

'I don’t get Brooklyn fashion,’ an out-of-towner said the other day. We were brunching at a French restaurant on Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, and eyeing a couple by the door — she dressed in faded black pipe-leg men’s jeans crudely cut off at the ankles above a pair of two-inch granny heels, he in a stained and tattered, burnt-orange Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt draped like a cobweb on his skeletal frame. ‘It’s all about looking as shitty as possible,’ I told the tourist. ‘They like to blur the lines between the guy who just crapped his pants shooting up on the corner and having $200,000 in art school debt.’ In my youth I too was a thrift-store aficionado. I loved the hunt, digging around for the amusing, exquisite, old and odd.

crocs