Heavy, Stormy, and Divorced
Laura Reilly selects her top Substack reads
This week’s digest is guest edited by New York–based fashion editor , who writes the fashion shopping newsletter Magasin on Substack. Laura’s most popular post is “Building a no-skips underwear drawer,” in which she shares the best bras, underwear, and socks found after months of research. If you’re into her selections here, be sure to subscribe to her Substack.
As a fashion writer, I’d probably implode if all the content I consumed was fashion-focused, given how much of it I absorb and proliferate several times a week through
. By Sunday night, my brain is waterlogged with sales and collaborations and collection launches, and I can expect to see my UPS guy sooner rather than later.For a balanced diet, I make sure I get a healthy portion of wellness—or something like it, as in Chris Gayomali’s health and fitness HEAVIES, one of my favorite new publications to land on Substack. I get my percent daily value of music through Matthew Schnipper’s Deep Voices—check out this collection of “under-loved” songs from his community—which keeps my Spotify primed with thoughtful new playlists whenever I need them. And my carb allowance comes in the form of The Cakewalk, Khuyen Do’s calorie bomb of CPG intel that does, admittedly, overlap with fashion. Similarly, Molly Blutstein’s Outfits & Interiors series marries a few passions of mine.
Naturally, I do adore fashion content—even when it challenges the state of fashion content itself, as with Emmanuelle Maréchal’s dig into Milan’s criticism scene. There is so much quality fashion thinking happening in my inbox, how could I not?
Below, find a few of my favorite recent reads hosted on Substack, including a guest spot of my own on Throwing Fits (James Harris and Lawrence Schlossman), who I’m happy to say just joined the platform. About time, guys.
FASHION
Can fashion criticism keep up with fashion weeks’ fast pace?
“Substack has not yet hit Europe to the extent that it’s swept the States, especially in the fashion space (I have high hopes and tell every writer I meet out there to be a pioneer). One under-the-radar exception is Emmanuelle, who’s doing phenomenal meta-journalism work, reporting on the fashion criticism scenes in Paris and Milan. It’s opened a window to the media landscapes in those hubs that I otherwise would not understand to the degree that I now do. I completely believe that, with more eyes on her in-depth interviews, she has the capacity to lift journalistic standards to a greater level.”
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in
Nowadays, instead, with the pandemic, we are realising that all the conversations around fundamental topics like inclusivity and diversity have been put on the back burner. And we have gone back to this idea of dressing like rich white American and European people from the ’60s. This shift hides a reactionary impetus, as it signs the return to a beauty and luxury standard that took over fashion and that we finally thought we had overcome. So, we believed fashion had become a welcoming space for many conversations. Instead, it all has disappeared.
DESIGN
Outfits & interiors
“The fashion-interiors connection is a strong one, and I’ve talked to many of my peers about their own relationships with the overlapping industries. More often than not, they find relief applying the visual skills they picked up in fashion to spatial design, relieved to no longer have to direct focus on their own physical form. Molly’s idiosyncrasy is her ability to make the arrow point the other way, taking inspiration from homes, hotels, galleries, and more to craft thoughtful, screenshottable, channelable outfits.”
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in
Today is my 28th birthday, which honestly feels wild to write out. I still feel like the little girl standing in line at Office Depot, before her first day of sixth grade, grabbing school supplies, wishing she were a grown-up already. Even now, I can perfectly recall the smell of a fresh new plastic pencil pouch. If you know, you know. I feel like that version of myself on days when I am scared or unsure about life. I want to make her proud by becoming a more confident and more fearless version she dreamt up at Office Depot.
FITNESS
Introducing HEAVIES, a modern newsletter about health and wellness
“Every new newsletter is more or less obligated to sell you on itself in its first send, but few do so as assuredly or with as much narrative flow as Chris does in his introduction to HEAVIES. Chris and I intersected in the menswear-newsletter space at around the same time—he with his viral essay in Delia Cai’s Hate Read series on Deez Links and I with the introduction of the menswear column on Magasin—but this new editorial venture proves Chris is capable well beyond the fashion parameters that fell on him in his former in-house role at GQ. In this case, fitness. It’s a muscle he’s more than capable of flexing.”
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in
I am very much not the type of person who ever really “spirals,” but I spent the next 72 hours feeling like a total piece of shit, floating in the swirly doom water of an existential toilet that my mind had created. I felt paralyzed reading WebMD and every other SEO-bait website that had colonized the first four pages of Google results, and was certain that this fragile container that was my body was going in the ground soon. I thought about what song would be funniest to have played at my funeral. (Saves the Day—At Your Funeral.) I remember joking to my fiancée, now wife, that I would do my best to not haunt her as a ghost whenever she was ready to find love again. (A regular talking point in our home: Why do all ghosts wear period dress like trad weirdos? Why aren’t any ghosts wearing, like, FBI: Female Body Inspector shirts? Didn’t people die in the ’90s?)
MUSIC
The readers’ under-loved playlist
“My taste in music is as good as my taste in people who have good taste in music. That is to say, music was not my chosen passion into which I throw all of my spare hours, so instead I rely on a select few around me (and yes, The Row’s monthly playlists) to guide which tunes dock in my ear ports. Matthew’s newsletters usually offer playlists he himself has built around a certain mood or theme, but for his 100th send, he invited his community to share their favorite ‘under-loved’ songs. I was too shy, maybe too embarrassed, to send mine in, but I think that makes me even more attached to this cumulative list from those I share a degree of separation from—my sister wives of good taste.”
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in
Until last week, I’d never heard of Tom Demac. Now, I’m obsessed with him. Specifically, his song “Serenade.” It’s a quiet house song, the type of slow-churning track that feels engineered to make you wistful. Much of that comes from its spoken-word vocals. “The music comes in on the thick heat at dusk,” says a British man. “You can hear it rising out of the grass like a chorus of crickets calling to the approaching night.” It’s the kind of corny stuff I live for. Demac himself knows this.
FOOD
(Hot) dog days of summer
“The fashion and food—especially fast food—connection is stronger than you’d probably guess if Khuyen wasn’t doing the hard work of gathering all of the collaborations, synergies, activations, and pure coincidences that tie the two together. Think: Loewe’s viral tomato tweet to product rollout and this July 4th–themed hot dog curiosities assortment. Stay for the shopping picks at the end.”
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in
’Tis the season for sticky fingers, ice cream for breakfast, mosquito spray in place of perfume, long days and even longer nights, “Strawberries & Cigarettes,” road trips, funny-looking tan lines, fleeting crushes, (sometimes) unrequited love, salty skin and even saltier snacks, and overall, just a grand ole time.
CULTURE
The new Storm King
“Kyle read me for filth in this piece, providing a measure for a career’s worth of New York relationships in a single graf about upstate museums (this is what Kyle does: he defines universalities in the culture in a way that you can’t unsee). But then, despite the glaring stock-issue-ness of my past failed dating stages, I’m ultimately charmed by his no-ill-will observation of the habits that bring us together.”
—Kyle Chayka in
There’s a particular NYC-area dating ritual in which, perhaps around the two-month mark when both parties are definitely serious and want to lock it down, the nascent couple takes a trip up to Storm King, a sculpture park in the Hudson Valley. They might hold hands strolling past the monumental Calders and di Suveros. A few dates more and then they have to make an appearance at Dia Beacon, the enormous minimalist art museum conveniently located off Metro North. There they gaze into the blank eternity of Gerhard Richter’s reflective panels.
DECOR
Finding your “divorce aesthetic”
“I’m a sucker for a vintage interiors edit, but what’s most impressive about this piece is that it landed on a throughline that’s entirely legitimate as a unifying aesthetic perspective that had previously been left largely unaddressed. Leonora tends to suss out this kind of thing in her posts (think: menstruation furniture, Polly Pocket’s role in the tiny home movement, actual gems from Where America Shops), so even though I almost always find something practical and beautiful I’d want to add to my home, I’m never bored reading through to discover them.”
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in
Divorce has proved to be quite zeitgeisty in the first half of 2024. Emily Ratajkowski gave herself a “divorce ring”; Joanna Goddard of the blog Cup of Jo and now Big Salad regularly discusses life after divorce; Emily Gould found freedom in toying with divorce. Even if those names mean nothing to you, the topic is still present for 40-50 percent of you. And so this week and next, we are taking the time to explore how humans confront their spaces post-marriage.
SHOW
The Laura Reilly interview with Throwing Fits
“Shameless plug of my own podcast interview with Throwing Fits now that the boys have landed on Substack (excellent move!). This was one of my favorite experiences speaking about running Magasin and my career trajectory. As a reader more than a listener, usually, I’m happy to have them contributing more written word moving forward.”
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inOur interview with Laura Reilly is a W, chat. Laura—writer and founder of the Magasin newsletter—shared some of her day in Greenpoint to chat with us on why every brand is trying to be or at least sound French, what sets her newsletter apart in an increasingly crowded and noisy space, maybe not going back to the apartment of a dude who’s got a copy of American Psycho on his coffee table, The Weird Real cosign, and what the hell are the High Sport Kick Flared Stretch pants that have the girlies in a headlock.
Recently launched
Coming soon
Congratulations to the following writers celebrating publication.
is offering a pre-order giveaway for subscribers: shares a first look at her new book, out in August:
Notes from our guest editor
Noteworthy
Inspired by the writers featured in Substack Reads? Writing on your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and this week’s edition was curated by , who writes on Substack. You can also follow Laura on X and Instagram, and Magasin on Instagram. Substack Reads is edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
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