#7 dead week, a Parisian dream wedding and Emily's essays

Hello there,

It’s been pretty much forever (4 months) since my last edition, so I felt I needed to have one last Digest of the year! This one is pretty light-hearted. Unfortunately, I am not going out with a bang this year, as Covid decided to hit me on Christmas evening. Usually this period is spent in restaurants and bars, with lots of celebrations, drinks, dinners, parties, you name it. Now I spend it in full lockdown and in quarantine. But it is what it is. Despite everything, personally, 2021 has been a really good year. Onwards and upwards!

What I feel like

It is this weird period between Christmas and New Years Eve, a blank space where nothing makes sense and time loses its meaning. Where it feels like everyone, literally everyone, is spending their days in sweatpants watching Emily in Paris all day long.

Helena Fitzgerald calls it Dead Week and writes about it nicely here:

“American culture doesn’t have an official name for this time (though maybe Dead Week will catch on), but we celebrate it all the same, by eating cheese and cake for breakfast, getting drunk at inappropriate hours, not looking at calendars or clocks, forgetting what day it is, wearing outfits that make no sense, ignoring our phones, and falling into a pointless internet rabbit hole for hours. Lots of people have either just returned from family visits or are still there, stuck in the half-familiarity of being an adult in the spaces of childhood. We celebrate Dead Week by having no idea what to do during Dead Week and, within that confusion, quietly luxuriating in what might be the only collective chance for deep rest all year.”

(..)

“Even so, it is still the closest thing we have in our society to some kind of a communal pause. Nothing is ever as quiet as it is during those few days, cities emptied out and small towns sleepier than usual, people drifting around not interested in accomplishing anything. There is a collective sense that, for these few days, we are not going to do any more than we must. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t brush your hair, if you stay up all night, if you don’t send that work email. Many people aren’t checking email anyway, and nobody wants to be asked to do more work than they absolutely have to.”

(..)

“It is the only time I don’t feel like I am perpetually late to my own life, and that easing of guilt offers a deeper rest than any vacation would.

Dead Week is forgiving—everyone loses track of time; everyone forgets; everyone decides not to worry about it until January. These days at the end of the year offer a kind of grace, a time when simply existing is enough, outside the records of success and failure.”

What I want

If I ever get married, I want my wedding to look exactly like the wedding of one of my favorite French fashion icons, Camille Charriere, who recently got married in Paris. Her Celine couture wedding dress was already to die for, but her reception look really stole the show: a completely sheer lace up-cycled dress.

Honestly, the whole slideshow of pics featured here in Vogue looks like everything that I want my wedding to look like. A girl can dream, right?

What I enjoyed

Emily Ratajkowski long awaited essay collection My Body. A personal, beautiful collection of essays on beauty, power, abuse, money and motherhood. One of the best essays in there, Buying Myself Back, has been published on The Cut here. What I really liked was how honest and personal she writes about her experiences and how easy she makes it to relate to her. She does not have a regular life - dealing with paparazzi and being extremly famous- however somehow she manages to make her experiences and reflections relatable for so many women around the world.

Her essays demonstrate an admirable attitude of someone who does not pretend to have all the answers to the questions she poses to her audience. Questions on the ambivalence between her being a model and capitalizing on her ‘sexy’ body but also wanting to be respected for her ideas and politics. Many people deem those things incompatible. She puts those questions out there, shares her own unpolished reflections while staying close to her own experiences. She recognizes that her own personal experiences impact her politics and that this means that there will be contradictions. She is not afraid to openly change her mind about things and sets an example by admitting that she is still learning, changing her opinions every day as our culture and our norms evolve. I think this is much more liberating than had she started from her politics. We can make a choice to do something in our twenties while deliberately choosing not to do this in our thirties because it does not align with our values anymore. That does not mean we have to regret things we did in the past or that those actions will have to stick to us forever.

Obviously, like with everything that Emily does, she got quite some critical reviews (from women!). She is not feminist enough, or her ideas do not match with her actions because she criticizes a system while she has profited from it financially. Haley Nahman wrote:

“I got the sense that this piece wasn’t so much about criticizing a system as it was a brand exercise for Emily Ratajkowski. Not necessarily by intention, but by impact. There is no broadening of her point to include people other than herself; there is no genuine analysis of the complexity of modeling (a profession that is literally defined by selling one’s image) and female agency.”

And Sophie Gilbert:

“Writing a book that’s effectively a literary portrait of your own physical self, though, is to risk reinforcing all the preconceptions anyone has ever had about you. Ratajkowski is a graceful and thoughtful writer, and as I read her book I longed for her to turn her gaze outward, to write an essay about marriage plots or coffee or landscape architecture or Scooby-Doo. Or, beyond that, I wanted her to risk fully indicting modeling as a paradigm—to not merely note that her career took off after she lost 10 pounds from stomach flu and kept the weight off, but to probe what looking at images of so many skinny bodies all day does to girls as delicate and unformed as her own teenage self. To wonder not just how the inherently flawed bargain of modeling has damaged her, but how it damages everyone. To risk letting herself feel or uncover something that might be a catalyst for not just observation, but transformation.”

I disagree. I really do not understand why people have to project their own conception of what activism is on to other people. And why they judge Emily for what she did not write instead of what she did write. It is a book, an individual work of art. Of course, there are many unhealthy things going on in the modelling industry and probably things should change. This was not the subject of her book though and there are plenty of people out there fighting for those changes. What makes you as a reader feel so close is precisely because she sticks to herself and her specific experiences instead of trying to speak on behalf of other women.

What I will be wearing

Forget sneakers, I will be wearing loafers only in 2022. Honestly, the past half year I have worn my loafers to work, in the plane, to the super market and to the club. The best thing about a good pair of loafers is that they slowly shift and mold to your feet, so after wearing them for a while the fit will feel perfect. Plus, you will instantly look classy but still casual. They also never really went out of style. So you might want to check your parents or grandparents’ closet. I am telling you: loafers are the new sneakers. I am saving for these Prada ones.

What I am looking forward to

I initially wanted to make a list of things I really enjoyed this year, but they exist in abundance all over the internet, so instead I bring you two series that I am really looking forward to in 2022.

I really enjoy Dolly Alderton’s writing and I am beyond excited that one of my favorite books, Everything I know about love, her memoir about surviving your twenties, is being turned into a series by the BBC. And that Bel Powley is one of the characters (I really loved her in The Morning Show, one of the best series I watched in 2021).

The second series, also by the BBC, airing next year is Conversations with Friends, the adaption of Sally Rooney’s first (and my favorite) novel. The creative team is the same that was behind the BBC adaption of Normal People, Rooney’s second novel, which is definitely the best book adaption I have ever seen. Especially excited about the fact that Sasha Lane is one of the lead characters, who was magnificent in her debut film - and one of my favorite movies ever- American Honey.

What made me smile

Me:

What I cannot stop listening to

Probably the song I played and enjoyed the most this year. And still can play it on repeat forever.

As always, hit me up with anything to be featured in my next edition. Maybe I will write more often then (you know, you give a little you get a little).

Enjoy the final days of Dead Week. I hope you end 2021 with a bang! Stay healthy and I hope you keep reading in 2022.

Bisous,

Daphnie