Mirror me

I’m way too old to be rewatching Gossip Girl Thanksgiving episodes but I’m also too old to be partying all night and I do that anyways. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with reliving one’s teen fantasies while holed up in the Chicago suburbs. I know this because the night I arrived I met a woman in her sixties who’s obsessed with Dark Academia—which is very Gossip Girl if you think about it. “The kids are studying the classics,” she told me. I wondered out loud if it was just another TikTok trend. Someone else wondered if it was a new way of honoring white literature. I thought of Donna Tartt’s A Secret History even though I never finished it. I didn’t have the heart to tell the woman that no one reads these days.

When I first started at Interview a mentor advised me to find a go-to look, like that one editor who dresses like she’s enrolled at St. Jude’s. I was reminded of this the other day when I realized that I'd been dressing like my boss—but so had a lot of other people. Mirroring is a form of flattery, but TikTok says a uniform should be unique to you, which doesn’t really make sense if you think about it. TikTok also says it takes a lot of research to be unique. I say uniqueness is a scam to sell us shit we don’t need but I buy it anyways. Just recently I bleached my hair, then shaved my head, then dyed it dark brown then dyed it red…