Three years ago, I wrote a Hung Up post that was one of my first ideas for this newsletter. Like any coastal woman with boobs to accentuate, three-dollar-sign cocktails to sip, weddings to attend, and a mother to say something was too short, I eagerly opened up every email from the clothing brand Reformation. I rounded up a few of Ref’s more-untethered from reality email subject lines: “YOUR BOSS IS AT THE CLUB.” The newsletter’s audience was a quarter of what it is now; I wanted to bump this for people who missed it.
All of those email subject lines felt like random texts from someone I almost became friends with once. “I have so many ideas about this character, who appears in my inbox every so often. I imagine that she really is someone I met once, but the details are foggy,” I wrote at the time. “We had one conversation, and the same day I get a push alert from Clubhouse1 asking me to “welcome her,” she’s sending me an invitation to her wedding with the gloriously clear subject line: “SECOND MARRIAGE.” She’s like your good friend’s other friend, the one you see once a year at a birthday dinner and have no plans to build a friendship with because why would you?”
This week, the brand launched a shoot with Monica Lewinsky and Vote.org that felt plainly idiotic.2 The empty cliched “Vote!!!!” language is depressingly 2016, a fashion fascicle of “Pokémon Go to the polls.” I run cold and am weak-willed, unfortunately, so I don’t think this will stop me from checking to see if one cardigan I like is ever back in stock. The brand’s emails have become marginally more normal, which is a shame. I had to scroll very far back in my inbox to find some of that original Ref magic, subject lines that were dizzying but awe-inspiring. More brand emails should feel like they are written by a person who didn’t get to work at OG Jezebel, someone putting a sticker on their phone’s camera for a truly horrific meal at Frog Club, or from a voice who is a pick-me of female friendship.
But there is still some of that old magic, like you’re catching a very disorganized but glamorous person with one earbud in, on her way to a restaurant you haven’t yet heard about, with a name you will certainly mispronounce.
First: God, remember Clubhouse. Second: anytime an app pulls someone from the recesses of your phone’s Contacts, it is embarrassing.
Does it seem to anyone else that the girlboss of the startup-DTC era has “evolved” into something sleeker, more corporate, more boardroom-consultant-impersonal? That’s what this shoot communicates to me. “The clothes look very … Anne Klein,” a friend said the other night at dinner.
Distracting myself in the parking lot of the vet after putting my cat Winter down I see this Ref email: RIP WINTER. Obvs selling linen dresses when it was definitely not even close to spring
the Clubhouse craze feels so long ago now lol the only person i ever knew who actually used it was a woman who my company hired as a freelancer to lead a project i was working on, and talking to her felt like meeting a real, true Girl Boss in the wild. once, on a zoom call, i mentioned that i have a lot of jaw tension and she sent me a link to a Vogue article she wrote about the practice of “primal screaming” and why it’s so good for our health
she kindly offered to get me invited to Clubhouse and i kindly did not take her up on it. miss her so much 💗