For as long as I can remember, I have always been the girl that everyone comes to for fashion advice. For the past twelve years, I have been a collector of magazines- both design and editorial- that transform me into a different universe; one that is filled with life, beauty, and perfectly crafted design. I would have heart palpitations at the end of each month, knowing that it wouldn't be long before my magazines, which were around fifteen per month, would pour in and I would get to burry my eyes in them for hours upon end, consuming and being consumed. Monday's are the day that the new issue of the The New Yorker arrives, so my friends know that I am not available for dinner and not to bother me, because I am at home, in bed, reading.
It wasn't a surprise that I would tab and tear each "wanted" page out of the magazine and file it away in a plastic sheet protecter, then when I was satisfied with my composition of tears, I would add it to my white 2" binder with a p-touch labeled, "Fashion", "Interior Design", "Architecture", "Design Objects", "Travel"- the list goes on. To say that I only had a few of these binders would be grossly underestimating how large my collection has gotten over the span of the past twelve years. To be frank, I have enough to fill an entire room full of carefully curated archives, that any person working in the archives of a magazine would respect.
I used to have a bulletin board hanging in my room, for reasons that helped me organize my hectic life on yet another visual layout that I could look at, reference and refer back to, at any point in time. There were photos of what I liked to refer to as, "A Wall of Hero's: Saints, Philosophers, Barak Obama, John Lennon, Natalie Massanet, My Mother, Richard Branson, Larry Page, Sergey Brim, Steve Jobs, David Bowie, Elon Musk, and Captain Kirk". I had a quote from Kurzweil on a white index card on the upper right corner, "What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make." and a print that I loved from Rothko on the upper left corner, No.61. I would then tack up my favorite, "best of the best" magazine tears that I would find that I just had to stare at on a daily basis, because it inspired me.
It was not until 2010, a year that seemed to have changed it all for me, that changed my once time-consuming archive hobby into an on-demand digital diary. I was working in Venture Capital at one of the top early-stage funds and in a matter of months, my at-home modern scrapbooking project took a turn. It was indeed 2010, a time when technology was cool again, or rather, starting to become cool again. I don't think the trend in consumer tech really started until 2011 and 2012, so being that I worked in a time where no one could convince LPs into giving them money for their funds, companies couldn't raise cash for their start-up, and we we're constantly left wondering how a company like Twitter was worth as much as it was, without having any revenue- I worked in the middle of it all. In 2010, we invested in a company called Pinterest.
Pinterest took my singular homemade scrapbooking obsession into the digital era. I didn't have an archive of my books anywhere and I could never know which one was in which binder, so I would manually have to go through it all of them and find the one that I was magically thinking of and referencing and then pull it. With Pinterest, I now had the opportunity to have a digital archive that could be tagged, organized, and compiled just the way I liked it. While I still love my homemade scrapbooking that derives from the magazines I still get monthly, Pinterest fills a different void.
I have been on Pinterest quite a bit lately, pinning away outfit inspiration and location tags for my holiday in Italy and the South of France that is coming up in just a few weeks time. I purchased this tan velour sweatsuit on the street in Hanoi, right before my flight back to America over the holidays. I was wearing a vintage hot pink mini dress that was my Grandmothers from the 60s, and it started pouring down rain and it was freezing (for Hanoi standards). I had already packed and the thought of having to open up my perfectly crammed luggage just to find a pair of leggings killed me, so instead I paid a little over $6 for this outfit and then ended up having a sausage and fish skin soup on the street corner outside with some locals. It's a little ghetto, but I quite like it, so I wore it again on a Sunday running around with my best friend, Bethany. We had brunch at Two Hands, then went to our new favorite cafe to work (as we usually do on weekend afternoons if we are both in town). What fun places are you heading to this summer? Will we cross paths?
Coco wears: Velour Sweatsuit from Vietnam, Vintage Python Bag, and Mexican Suede Slippers. Photography: Bethany Halbreich. Location: Chinatown, New York City. City Guide: New York City