Mod Lives?

Meet Tara Riesner, a writer in New York with a rigorous style plan.

This lady is hardcore. She wears tights through winter.

I am always interested in people who choose one aesthetic and stick to it.

There is a certain boldness and conviction in surrendering your image to a style of the past like mod.

Layering excites me. Geometrics and color mixes… I get hot just thinking about it.

When she unwraps herself, it’s like each layer is a new gift waiting for you underneath…

Medical dudes were all asking for her number because they saw how she owns it.

Shall we step inside her home?

Witness the total aesthetic immersion.

Note Mondrian peeking out

Only the hottest men

The most dashing aristocrats

Vintage pieces pinned up inside because she’s so petite:

As you can see we have a particularly gifted colorist here.

And is it just me or does the aesthetic enter her writing too?… An excerpt:

From the pool, I heard a sliding glass door open on an upstairs balcony, and I knew it was our balcony and Del, but I didn’t feel like opening my eyes.  He’d been reordering his records by album cover color.

“Roy G. Biv,” he’d said, slotting Madman across the Water behind The Beatles and Frank Ifield.

“Like the rainbow.”

“Like the person.”

“Good luck finding anyone that way,” I’d said, my back to him, unplugging the electric skillet and dumping leftover oil down the kitchen drain.

“I’ve got a photographic memory, babe.”  He sandwiched a foot between the records to hold his place while he tapped his head with his index finger.  “It’s all up here.”

In the pool I floated in a blank stillness and the water spread out under me, balancing the outstretched limbs of my body like a star shape or like something big, simplified to five points and drawn in crayon. I waited until the sun had moved on to open my eyes, and then I waited for everything to look less dark and sun-purple.

A mother had come out and settled herself in a lounger, pulling down the straps of her bathing suit and fanning through a magazine, looking for her place.  Her little boy stood near the edge of the pool’s deep end, staring at me, tugging at the elastic waist of his swimsuit, which was orange like a Creamsicle, even through my purple haze.  He moved a hand to hoist a stack of diving rings up the opposite arm, but they fell back down to his wrist and banged against his hip like a set of his mom’s bangle bracelets.

“Don’t throw them too deep, baby.”

He pulled his goggles down, his ears sticking out from under the rubber strap, before throwing everything in, all his rings at once, and jumping in after them.  I flipped over onto my stomach and opened my eyes under the water, watching his legs kicking thin and smooth, breaking the water open. Even in the dead underwater silence, I never heard the water churn.  The boy swam toward the reds and blues and yellows of the rings, and with an impossible reach, picked them up.

***

I will present some more aesthetic-immersion dressers for you in future.

If I myself did aesthetic immersion, I might go in a Karl Lagerfeld direction.

Anyway I was thinking about it all while reading Umberto Eco on Dandyism and I thought:

Are we the new dandies?

Eco writes:

Life was not to be dedicated to art, art was to be applied to life. Life as Art.

More on this next time.