SSENSE

3 weeks ago | ssense.com | Sami Reiss

The long, slow reign of blobby lamps and way too neutral lighting is over. The sun is setting on harsh, noncovered overheads, and, while we’re at it, anything at all that flickers. No more LEDs, no more off-colored squiggles, no more cold, construction-white tones like in most offices. Well, in an ideal world, anyway. If the new age of lighting isn’t equally distributed yet, it’s bubbling up and can be seen in fits and spurts by individuals who pay attention to these things and who work in it.

4 weeks ago | ssense.com | Benjamin Taylor |Delia Cai

My high school friends in my hometown of Dunlap, Illinois, and I always agreed on one thing: Sunday mornings were for God, but Friday nights were for shows. At the end of the week, once everyone survived the total drag of home-cooked dinner with our families, we’d pile into someone’s Camry and head off to the latest concert we’d heard about from Myspace. The venue situation was never sketchy, but it was always rough around the edges.

1 month ago | ssense.com | Adam Powell |Eliza Brooke

When we met up for lunch shortly after Valentine’s Day, my first question for Rachel Tashjian was where she got her outfit. We were at a French restaurant in Midtown, near her apartment. Tashjian was happy to oblige, clothes being her business as fashion critic at the Washington Post: her shirt and jacket were vintage Romeo Gigli. She bought the pieces off Etsy, from a woman who was raised Amish.

1 month ago | ssense.com | Eva Losada |Eileen Cartter

For much of her memory, the women of Marie Adam-Leenaerdt’s family—her mother, her mother’s mother—all wore heels. Her maternal grandmother, “a super strong woman,” owned a shoe collection that became one of the Belgian designer’s earliest obsessions, and only stopped wearing them when her advanced age wouldn’t allow for it. She lived until 100. “She had a lot of humor,” the designer says, speaking via Zoom from her home in Brussels. “She was super chic, but always with a strange hat or something.

1 month ago | ssense.com | Morgan Maher |Alex Frank

You catch a whiff of her before you see her, as the velvet scent of her Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds wafts all the way down the hallway to the small elevator that opens onto the lobby of her floor. Amanda Lepore’s apartment—the space in which she transforms into the glittering celebrity we see on red carpets and club openings, with corsets and high heels and wigs and accessories that she bejewels herself —is just a tiny studio, decorated with Marilyn Monroe photos and animal prints.