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The Olsen twins and their high-end label, The Row, have nailed the quiet luxury look for the past few years. I’ve loved this vibe from afar — I often find myself pinning The Row street style looks and wondering how/if I can pull it off. I typically run a little more tailored and feminine, but I have been taking styling notes nonetheless, and I admire the scaled-back power of each look. I know many of you lean towards this more minimalist aesthetic, so I thought I’d compile a post sharing thoughts on how to get the look for less. (Of course you don’t need to spend $5,000 on a trench coat to nail the vibe.) Start with well-tailored trousers, oversized blazers, and a neutral palette and finish with a “no makeup makeup look” and a middle part.
One item I did order while putting this post together: this SoldOut NYC Everything shirt in the tan color, inspired by the two gals at the bottom of the collage above. I already own it in white and red and it’s absolute perfection. Oversized (a la The Row) with the most gorgeous, high-end fabric and details. It looks like it could be by The Row, I swear! It is intentionally boxy/enormous by design — I took my true size and it runs BIG but that’s the style. (Use code magpie15 for 15% off at SoldOut NYC.)
Anyhow, all my top picks for the “quiet-luxury-a-la-The-Row” aesthetic below:
A little creativity exercise for this mid-week, mid-February day —
and a reminder that you, too, are creative. You, too, are poetic and artistic. Something happens as we grow up in which the impulse to pick up a pen and doodle is trivialized out of us. So take a minute to make space for a little color. We’re meant to use the entire box of crayons we’re given, you know?
Jot down the first few words that spring to mind when you take in each color and its name —
I did this just this morning. A few of my responses:
Tendril — delicate April, all second growth
Cornflower — the heavy hang of late August
Viola — archly drawn and delicately played
Cobblestone — the click clack of things leaving and lost
Willow — slowly, we remembered
I could use any of these to start a new essay, musing, rivulet of creative non-fiction. Feel free to share some of your own improvisational poetry in the comments, or just use to get the creative juices flowing this morning.
+This new Dillard’s collection has so many cute finds for kids – I’m considering this for my son’s Easter outfit, but how sweet is this for your mini me?! La Coqueta vibes for half the price. I’m weeping that my daughter has outgrown the sizing. Also love this swimsuit and this adorable duck stuffie for nursery decor.
+Loeffler Randall’s sale section is worth a visit: saucy peplum top, platform espadrilles for your next warm weather getaway, a pick-me-up scrunchie!
03. How elegant is this collarless wool jacket? I love it in the unexpected military gray. I’d pair with a more casual jean (lighter wash) or ecru to balance out its formality.
04. Skims look for less. I find myself needing more fitted tops with all these barrel, gaucho, wide-leg jean silhouettes!
06. I picked up a few items for my daughter with my latest order! They’ve released a couple of dresses that remind me a lot of Hanna Andersson. First was this one — she loves cats and this is the kind of dress we can both agree on for Mass — and the second was this fun cherry print. I also found this two pack of hoodies, and this two pack of flared leggings. (Does anyone else’s daughter want to EXCLUSIVELY wear flared leggings and hoodies?)
08. Mr. Magpie has really clipped into a fitness regimen this year. He has a lot of pieces from Rhone, but I noticed some simple fitness buys for men there that I’m contemplating adding to his collection since he now goes through his fitness clothes so quickly. This tee looks similar to the ones he has from Beyond Yoga, and these look similar to his Rhone shorts.
09. Have you seen Quince’s sunglasses selection?! So many on-trend / trend-forward shapes for $50 a pop. I like these, these, these.
During our entrepreneurial days, Landon and I used to joke that we were “jack and jill of all trades, and masters of none.” At the time, we envied our friends who had chosen more structured career paths, and had cultivated deep expertise in their fields. By contrast, we felt unimpressively generalist. I kind of understood design, kind of understood sales, kind of understood technology, but I was far from an authority in any of those areas. I am thinking now of a friend who, when asked whether she could help with a technical issue on my site, responded: “Sure. I mean, I know enough to be dangerous.” Ha! Like, I can do something that will either implode your site or catapult you to the next level — we’ll see.
I have so many thoughts on this now. First, I think that many people in their 20s and 30s, especially those who switch or shift career paths a few times, feel this way (“the unimpressive generalist”), and don’t yet see that they are building up a unique register of insights and experiences that will eventually serve them in surprising ways. For example, I am shocked by how much design thinking percolates my approach to my writing, to my business, to even the everyday administration of my life. Product design was a short chapter in my life, but it has touched almost everything that followed. The same is true of writing, of course, although it only occurred to me in the past few years that I could consider myself any kind of specialist, or tradesperson, in it. (It takes a long time to become.) And yet how I think about writing, how I practice it, conditions everything else I do. It startles me that everything — how I experience beauty, how I read, how I make my way through times of irresolution — is rooted in wordplay, and the patience required of drafting and editing, and the specific kind of listening that goes into writing a sharp line.
I also think that entrepreneurs must, as a matter of survival, be “practicing generalists” whether they want to or not. No one else is going to clean the toilets of your restaurant when staff is out sick; no one else is going to figure out that billing issue. You don’t have enough money to pay for a full-time CMO; you’ve got try something on your own.
And, finally, I think there’s merit to Elizabeth Gilbert’s “are you a jackhammer or hummingbird?” question — the notion that some of us are consumed by a singular passion, and others move from tree to tree, trying this and that. No one approach is better than the other. And the most surprising thing of all is that I have thought myself to be a hummingbird for all my life, but it turns out I’ve been jackhammering away at writing the entire time. I suppose that happens when you take a hobby and make it a career.
What about you, friend? Do you consider yourself a jackhammer or a hummingbird? A jill of all trades or a master of one? Has that evolved in your life?
It occurred to me the other day that you can experience “greatness” as a hummingbird or a jackhammer — that you can be great at a specific skill and also great across a career, or a lifetime. I know several people whose jobs have changed over time but who have consistently demonstrated what I would classify as “greatness” — talent, commitment, curiosity, leadership, ambition. I am thinking first of my dad. He is an attorney by trade but it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when I talk about him — it doesn’t define him. He bring intensity and passion to absolutely everything he does, whether it’s woodworking, flyfishing, philanthropy, casual mealtime conversations (my brothers-in-law used to joke that they’d read the WSJ cover to cover before meeting him for lunch). What does it mean to be “great”, after all? And what can we learn from it?
I’m realizing as I write this that I’ve made a lifelong, informal study of greatness. I mean, haven’t we all? Isn’t this the point of reading memoirs by the successful, subscribing to James Clear’s newsletter, tuning into the Olympics, listening to podcasts by experts, watching live performances by the most talented people on earth, studying your boss while she effortlessly runs a high-stakes phone call or your mother while she magically cares for everyone around her without seeming to notice she’s doing anything, all the while leaning forward and asking “how do they do it?” What have you learned from this reconnoitering?
Some of the lessons that have stood out to me:
There are no big breaks. In an interview, comedian Dana Carvey commented that people often ask him “what was your big break?” and he replied: “There was no big break. There were lots of micro-breaks — getting the interview, getting the callback, getting to be in my first skit on SNL, etc.” Don’t mistake the foothills for the mountains, and vice versa. Celebrate every small victory, but never get comfortable. Everything is an audition for the next step, and everything is also “a good break” on its own.
Make everything the most important thing. From actor Mads Mikkelsen: “My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. There’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.”
When you lose, you learn. Failure is inevitable, but it also enables forward movement. Thomas Edison tested something like a thousand combinations of gas and filament before creating the light bulb. You grow when you’re out of your comfort zone. You improve when you’re running forensics on why something hasn’t worked.
How you do anything is how you do everything. Bourdain talked about “the bathroom test” — if you walk into a restaurant, and its bathroom is not clean, it sends a signal. If you can’t get the small things right, the big things will be impossible to pull off.
Inspiration will not always find you, so you must learn to be disciplined. Move the dirt! Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule applies here (according to research by Anders Ericsson, it takes approximately 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to become an expert in a given field).
The only thing standing between you and your goals is effort. Nothing changes if nothing changes; you are in the driver’s seat.
Get outside. Literally and figuratively! Sometimes the best way out of a creative problem is taking a huge step back, and looking for inspiration elsewhere. Cross-pollination is powerful. And on a literal level, I am thinking of Whitman, who wrote: “Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, / It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
Share your thoughts below! What have you learned while observing the great?
+I own these wide-leg crops in a brown wash from fall but I think I need them in this ecru. Run TTS but denim is very rigid, FYI. Look for less with these.
+I am loving (!) this top I got from Tuckernuck. (I took a size 0.) I wore to a girls dinner last weekend — she is so dramatic but still wearable. While you’re there, check out this pretty resortwear find.
+My kids are obsessed with these reading lights. They are inexpensive but the battery lasts an eternity, and I love that it promotes bedtime reading!
+I really want to buy a pair of Le Monde Beryls for spring. You may have noticed that almost any time I’m putting together an outfit collage, I feature one of these two styles I’m torn between: these Lunas (look for less here) and these Mary Janes (OMG, the butter yellow…!; look for less here). I think the brown suede of the Luna would be actually a great transitional shoe — imagine with white jeans, spring blouses, etc. Kind of helps blur the season. But the Mary Janes!
+This style from Le Monde Beryl is usually the most difficult to find — they always sell out! — and I love them too but think they’d be less versatile because of the hardware. (You can get the look for less with these.) It depends on what you’re looking for, though. Sometimes a bold shoe just makes the entire outfit. Pair with jeans and a tee and you’re done. Other times you want something you can mold to the statement pieces in your wardrobe that aren’t quite as noisy.
+Chic Toteme pants, on sale! Pair with an oversized knit like this (look for less with this).
+Mr. Magpie is good about reusing baggies, especially for things that leave little residue or crumbs like bread — I found this baggy dispenser to contain them all!
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation.
For decades now, Zara has been my go-to for finding fashion-forward pieces at a great price. I first fell in love with Zara when I visited Paris with my parents as an eighteen year old, and then when I lived in Lyon when I was 20, Zara fashion was my entire personality. I can recall a birthday where a very young Mr. Magpie bought me a bag I’d wanted from there! This season’s current offerings are fabulous. Lots of Chanel vibes for less, including the gorgeous structured longline jacket above. Some standouts below!
At Mass yesterday, a priest I’d never seen before delivered the homily. He announced that our parish’s pastor had stepped down due to declining health. It was both a shock and not — our pastor has been sick for some time, and yet I was still throttled by his overnight withdrawal. The visiting priest, who turned out to be a longtime mentee and friend of our pastor, delivered the most gorgeous and vulnerable reflection on grace in times of change. His words have been nesting snugly with me since.
He talked first about how challenging it must have been for the priest to decide it was time to step down. I know many people struggle with retiring from a career that has more or less defined them, but — I can’t imagine the particular intensity of stepping away from parish life as a priest. This is not a job but a vocation. What might it feel like to be unable to do what you are good at, or what you’ve been called (by God!) to do in life? I am thinking also of Grant Achatz and his tongue cancer. I know you don’t stop “being a priest” (or “stop being cook”) because you’ve stepped away from your core duties, but I imagine it must feel like a splitting away, a vestigiality. Maybe that’s a miscast, though — maybe he instead feels chrysalid. In transformatio. Or perhaps he has the purity of trust that I often lack. Perhaps he sees that things are unfolding exactly as they should.
Still, to have the strength and wisdom to know when to step away is no small thing. Even in the more trivial avenues of my own life, I struggle with this. I was just talking with a girlfriend on the phone last week about how challenging it is to make a change in your 30s and 40s. We have been building up a massive weight of responsibility and contingency for years now. The fear of butterfly effects. And yet this particular friend recently moved not for career but for quality of life, and has also reinvented herself professionally multiple times — from attorney to travel agent to entrepreneur to stay-at-home mom. Just one of these changes takes incredible conviction to pull off; it is much easier to stay put. I told her that it has often felt like there are thousands of invisible hands keeping us in place. Do not move to Bethesda; do not hire an intern; do not part ways with your nanny; do not switch your child’s school. Each of these decisions are totally normal — routine, almost inevitable! — in the grand scheme of things, but it can feel as though you are the only person on the planet that has ever done them before when you are in the throes. (How can buying a home feel so complicated, even necromantic, and high stakes? Am I the only person who has ever had to figure out what to do with my child during that crescent of time between end of school and end of work? Etc.) Relatively recently, my Dad was trying to transfer ownership of an account from himself to me and it took multiple hour-long, in-person visits to accomplish it. During this process, it occasionally felt as though we were speaking a different language. (“You want to do what? For what purpose?”) My father was livid — how was it possible that he, the account owner, couldn’t simply transfer it? It’s as though we were the only people in the history of the world that had tried to make that change, which simply cannot be true. I think that most of the time, though, the world is designed for B-A-U (business as usual) and does not have the energy to contemplate fringe use cases, or end-of-use cases. Which, you know, makes sense in its own way. (Why would you dedicate even a fraction of time to rare situations? More impactful to rally resources toward maintaining status quo that serves most customers.) All of this to say that making even a small change can feel overwhelming to the point of debilitating. You are met with so many error messages, so many invisible hands keeping you where you are. I have had to rally a string of mantras around myself just to make my way into the change-making arena. Some of the mantras that have helped me get out from underneath those forces pinning me in place: you’re not making a decision yet, you’re just giving yourself options; be willing to change paths when you become the bottleneck; and listen to your instincts. I am sure that our pastor had powerful prayers he leant on as he came to his own decision. I wonder what they might have been? (What are yours?)
There is the other side of this conversation, too — how to accommodate changes other people have made. The priest on Sunday shared the most human account of his experience watching our pastor step down. He said that the first emotion he experienced was sadness. It had been difficult to see the pastor so unwell, so remote from his former responsibilities and the energy that he’d brought to them. He went on to explain that over the course of visiting the pastor several times in his new living arrangements, he gradually found happiness instead. He discovered he was happy that the pastor was comfortable and cared for; able to rest; and had had so much time doing what he was good at. There is so much to say about this chronicle of the heart during a time of change, but I admired the way he modeled emotional openness and resiliency. He let himself experience true sadness while also making space for that emotion to change over time, to melt into other things. No feeling is final, or inapt. I find myself leaning on this truth a lot as I age: “it only hurts this much right now.” Acute pain passes. And, if we are patient, can eventually give way to softness or warmth.
Sending good energy out there if you are making, or contemplating making, a change. Get out from underneath those invisible hands!
+Loving La Ligne’s new arrivals — especially this cotton striped rollneck, this tweed mini (I’d style over a black turtleneck!), and their iconic striped mini marin in new colors. (10% off with code MAGPIE10.)
+Two spring floral dresses I’m obsessing over: this and this. (Vibe for less with this $229 beauty! And this is a different color situation, but she’s SO gorgeous and flattering! I have this exact style in a winter tartan and I felt so cute in it.)
+Uniqlo has some seriously cute finds for little ones. Love these striped tees.
+Pottery Barn just released a collab with Rifle Paper featuring the sweetest Easter collection for kids — these melamine plates and bowls, these cork placemats, and this sweet cutlery!
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation.
My children have been bathing in our bath tub the past two weeks, much to my husband’s chagrin. “They have their own bathroom!” he insists! Which is true! And it is full of toys, and their shampoos and bubble baths, and their tiny towels. And he has always been disciplined about keeping a boundary between our bedroom and the rest of the house. This has admittedly been the saving grace of our family sleep hygiene. I am such a softie and would whisk them into bed at the first sign of a whimper, but unless one of our children is visibly throttled by a nightmare or physically unwell, he will return them to their rooms immediately after addressing whatever issue they bring to our doorstep. I suspect he implemented this boundary because I refused to sleep train them when they were young. I know — gasp! Do not come to me for sleep advice! But for whatever hell I put us through during those early years by insisting on getting up to tend to them any time they cried, we now have fantastic sleepers who sleep through the night and rarely knock on the door. All thanks to Mr. Magpie’s consistency in returning the children to their rooms. But I digress. The point is that they have now found a way, through their tender-hearted mother, to infiltrate our bathroom for bath and shower routines. It started when Landon was out of town and I found the shower diverter that converts the stream of water from the bath tub faucet to the showerhead stuck. I couldn’t get it unlodged! So I let them bathe in ours, of course. And then the floodgates opened, and they have begged each time for another bath in our inner sanctum. “Ooh it’s just so comfy,” my son will say as he swans around our tub, a veritable Thomas Eakins painting. “I like the water in this tub,” says my daughter thoughtfully, as if it’s drawn from a separate well in a separate world.
Mr. Magpie, meanwhile, dramatically announced the unlodging of the the shower diverter a few days after his return: “It works perfectly fine now,” he declared, as the children filed by him en route to our tub, a towel rolled under my daughter’s arm. I already know that the next bathtime, when they are reintroduced to their paltry and pedestrian tub, will elicit a chorus of complaints. I know too that my children don’t really care; they simply enjoyed the novelty of doing something normal in a different context, one typically verboten. And my daughter — well, she spars for sport. We call her “the family attorney” and I’m already curious as to what careful arguments she will trot out about the injustice of being barred entry to our bathroom after a full week of access.
But when I went to hang the bathmat over the edge of the tub this week, I noticed a tiny trail of toy trolls lining the interior. Cryptograph: Emory was here. And I thought all at once of how our children leave imprints of themselves throughout our daily lives, and spaces, and thought patterns, and how essential those imprints are to my sense of happiness, and purpose. They leave tracks of joy; signatures of play. What a gift, you know? To have these signposts scattered throughout the mundanity of the everyday. Reminders that this, right here, even the conversation about the shower diverter and the anticipation of my daughter’s litigiousness, is the main event. There is no other thing. Before Tilly died, I wrote: “are we in the good ol’ days?” And I think of that a lot now. How these years, with the children home and healthy and desperate to bathe themselves within my earshot, are exactly what I have always wanted. Life with them, while busy and demanding, is also magical and in its own way simple. It is governed by play, and cuddles, and reading new books together, and resisting and then accommodating new foods, and learning to lose at Uno, and crying over lost pets, and tying shoes, and suspiciously consistently forgetting elements of the uniform that they wear every single day upstairs. Motherhood can sometimes feel like a too-fast rush in which I am stretched too-thin, but then I see the little trolls in my tub and I think: no, Jen, focus. This is it. We aren’t in the waiting room. We aren’t at the appetizer course. This is no dress rehearsal. We are smack dab in the middle of the main event.
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Also this week…
Our interior designer Kelley Proxmire stopped by to drop off these beautiful console lamps and ended up rearranging some of the decor to more prominently spotlight my Love Prints!
New morning routine: meditation, LED mask, coffee, and a little poetry/reading on the floor of my studio.
Keep coming back to this WCW poem, “Of Asphodel.” There is something each revisiting. Some earlier thoughts on it here.
I had a set of our Love Prints float framed by Framebridge (I did the Irvine Slim style). I’m obsessed with how they turned out! Going to hang these in my studio.
Frost on our trees. Reminded me of Robert Frost’s “Birches”:
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
If you are a sour candy lover, these really hit the spot. Found them at Costco. Super tart.
He’s five, but there’s nothing more delicious than a freshly-bathed, freshly-pajame-ed baby! Here he is wearing his Petite Plumes.
From Maggie Smith’s Good Bones book! Loved this poem — such a responsibility and privilege to be your child’s first cipher.
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation.
This week’s inspirations —
+THE MESSES OF LOVE AROUND LIFE: I keep a journal filled with words, quotes, random lines that skitter through my mind — it’s always on the left hand side of my desk. This week, I added Magpie reader Molly’s comment on this recent essay: “I love the way you are exploring the messes of love around life.” The expression was perfect. I immediately imagined footprints from muddy shoes at the back door; a smattering of markers on a coffee table; spilt coffee and crumbs on the tablecloth. Proof of life. (Per Mary Oliver: “listen, are you breathing a little and calling it living?”). Life, and love, are messy! Imperfect! Happening right now!
+THE LITTLE DESK THAT COULD: Speaking of the imperfect now, I am sitting here writing at the same crappy little white desk I’ve had since my second year of college. It is rickety, and its surface is chipped and water-warped from years of heavy use. It’s also too small (I often throw my notebooks off the surface in frustration when I’m feeling too hemmed in while writing); the monitor dwarfs the writing surface. And I’ve always hated the one narrow drawer in its center — too shallow to be of true use. I have thought about throwing it away, or covering the surface with something (I am sure there are solutions), but I find myself irrationally attached to this little desk, at which I have discovered so many version of myself. (“We write to find out what’s inside,” per Vonnegut.) The distressing, the imperfections — battle scars. And they’ve never once gotten in the way of me finding myself in words on the screen.
+AYR RARE 20% OFF: This weekend only, AYR is offering 20% off. A perfect time to buy a first (or second or third) Early Mornings Tee. I’ve lost track of the number of times people have written to say how much they love this perfect heavyweight top layer — somewhere between a tee and a sweatshirt. This is “Magpie Core.”
+A MEDITATION ON PURPOSE: Do you have Apple Fitness? Landon and I love the cycling and core videos (specifically the ones by instructor Sherica), and I recently discovered they have an entire library of meditations. I’ve been listening to the 10-minute ones while wearing my LED mask in the mornings, and the combo is incredibly grounding. I loved this specific meditation on purpose from Joanna. In it, she talks about setting intentions, and suggests jotting one down on a piece of paper to keep at your desk — to keep at eye level. I’ve kept two at my desk this week: “go with grace,” and “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself” (a quote from Virginia Woolf). The latter is more of a triptych of intentions, but they all flow together, don’t they? My life is happening at the exact right pace. My direction is more important than my speed. What’s meant for me will not miss me. Etc!
+EYEING + BUYING: This week, I finally bought a pair of Birkenstock Bostons. Lord knows why I’d resisted for so long. I’m a Birk girlie! (You can get the look for less with these.) I also picked up this wrinkle pen — I’m impressed! It’s not going to like dissolve your wrinkles but it does sort of smooth and blur and tighten everything. And this simple habit tracker. I sort of organically started to do this to incentivize myself on my new approach to exercise (i.e., shorter daily workouts vs trying to squeeze in a few perfect, long, full sessions, which I was finding easy to talk myself out of; I talked about this mindset shift in the context of fractionality — something is better than nothing!). I’d cross of any days I completed a workout on my desktop calendar. Then I realized I also wanted to do this for my red light therapy and meditation and a few other things. I tried to find an app for this but they were all so overwrought and cumbersome! This inexpensive notepad makes it easy for me to jot down and visualize my progress.
+WHICH EMOTION ARE YOU WILLING TO ACCEPT? From a vulnerable essay by Lauren Martin: “My therapist asked why I was anxious when I arrived…I told her when I got home from therapy it would be 3:30. The kids would be home by 5. That gave me an hour and a half. Before I left, I noticed the pile of laundry hanging out the dryer. The unpacked dishwasher. The dirty kitchen. I told her I felt I had two choices. Either I go home and do all the chores, clean the house, and feel resentful and annoyed I didn’t write. Or I write, and ignore the chores, and feel guilty.
Well, she said. Looks like you’re just gonna have to choose which emotion you’re willing to accept.”
I was drawn to the concept of approaching tricky tradeoffs by recognizing that I have the power to choosethe resulting emotion I am willing to accept. Not the emotion that I’m more comfortable with, or better at handling, necessarily. But, when I get down to brass tacks, which is better in line with my core values, my goals?
+BESTSELLERS: The clear bestseller — my prints with Inslee! We are beyond thrilled; these were so popular that we have placed additional print orders to keep up with demand. “Marriage Is” has been the favorite so far — a lot of you told me you ordered to frame in your bedroom, or to gift your husband for Valentine’s Day. I have been walking around on a cloud — I am beaming, and so delighted!
The other major bestseller was my CurrentBody red light mask! I was so thrilled so many of you bought this — I just know you’re going to love it (thoughts on it here). I meant to add that a few Magpies recommended the skincare account Goals to Get Glowing as a reference point for learning more about red light therapy and evaluating the different brands. She’s a social scientist but applies her research skills to skincare, and is a red light therapy enthusiast as a result of that analysis. (CurrentBody is a top rec!) Use JEN10 for 10% off the mask. As an aside, this week, I’ve been using my 10 minute red light mask sessions while listening to meditations on Apple Fitness. It is such a powerful combination — a pause, a reset, a grounding. I can’t tell you how impactful this has felt during a particularly busy and intense time.
+RILEY GREEN SINGS “SLOW DANCING IN A BURNING ROOM”: It’s actually impossible to outperform John Mayer on this one, so I’m not even going to compare, but I did enjoy country singer Riley Green’s rendition of this Mayer classic, just launched this week on Spotify. (I know a lot of you are Mayer fans — still shocked by how many comments this random, roaming essay collected last year.) Of course, the O.G. version made it onto my romantic playlist.
+FRAME X SIENNA MILLER: Did you see the ads Sienna Miller did for Frame (with her boyfriend)?! Um! I need these jeans from the shoot. Iconic!
By: Jen Shoop
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation.
I’m back with more icebreakers! I know we all love this series. I absolutely treasure reading your answers. (You can read — and respond to! — previous installments of our icebreaker series here, here, here.) Here are this month’s —
01. What is the backstory behind your username (or if you’re more of an offline Magpie, one of your nicknames)?
02. Something that made you swoon recently.
03. A “dead giveaway” you can’t help yourself from noticing in other people. This could be something like — “I always know someone’s a fellow mother when…,” “I instantly know if someone worked in the service industry when…,” or “I get a leftie vibe from someone whenever…”
04. What do you like less and less as you get older?
05. What do you like more and more as you get older?
06. Vending machine snack pick.
07. Your best scar story.
08. Habit you’ve picked up from a loved one that you now can’t shake.
09. Popular food combination you can’t stand.
10. Something that moved you today.
Copy and paste this list into a comment below with your responses!
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I’ll go first!
01. What is the backstory behind your username (or if you’re more of an offline Magpie, one of your nicknames)?
I initially chose the name “Magpie” because of the myth that magpies are drawn to shiny objects. When I first started this blog (previously titled “The Fashion Magpie”), I was hunting for and curating pretty things, and the magpie seemed like a sound avatar. I later learned about more resonant characteristics of the bird, including the fact that they can thrive almost anywhere and are incredibly resilient; are tolerant by nature; and are voluble in their vocalizations. I associate with, or aspire to, a lot of those traits.
02. Something that made you swoon recently.
“Blue Valentine,” with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. The movie is gutting, but there’s a scene where Ryan Gosling’s character has been thoroughly dressed-down by Michelle Williams’ character’s parents, who clearly think he’s unqualified to be dating her. RG says: “Look, I know I’m not good enough for you,” and she says: “No, stop saying that; it hurts my feelings.” He says: “No, but no one is good enough for you. And as long as that’s the case, I’d like the job.” (…!!!)
03. A “dead giveaway” you can’t help yourself from noticing in other people. This could be something like — “I always know someone’s a fellow mother when…,” “I instantly know if someone worked in the service industry when…,” or “I get a leftie vibe from someone whenever…”
Being married to a man who studied electrical engineering, I can almost always pick an engineer out of a lineup. It’s the way they approach problems — everything broken down into smaller parts, then arranged sequentially, including simple things like “let’s order wings and a few sides for everyone coming by on Sunday.” He’ll turn this into a series of estimates and measurements, arranged incrementally — “OK, how how many wings per person per hour do we expect them to eat?”, “how many wings come in a single order?”, “what are the volumes of the side dishes in ounces?”, “how many ounces of food would look like a normal amount to a normal male when arranged on our plates?”, “how many sides does the average person want?” Also, they love problems in general; they thrive on them. A Magpie recently wrote that the quickest way to mobilize an engineer is by saying, “I wonder if we could do this more efficiently?”
04. What do you like less and less as you get older?
Being busy.
05. What do you like more and more as you get older?
So much. 1) People’s idiosyncrasies — I feel like your teens and 20s are a cult of normalization. Now I’m drawn to people who do things differently, who have weird passions. 2) Poetry — used to feel overwrought and academic; now it’s a major creative lifeblood for me. 3) Places I don’t need to perform, and can just let my whole self hang out. 4) Looking out my window — who knew how much time I’d spend looking through the glass, asking Landon ‘whose car is that?’, commenting on birds, observing the weather?
06. Vending machine snack pick.
Chips of any kind. I love a Frito.
07. Your best scar story.
Generic, but my c-section scars! I don’t love the way they look but they brought me my babies. (BTW, I always feel the need to add: they are routine, but C-sections are intense!!! A major surgery, and you’re awake, and the recovery is brutal.)
08. Habit you’ve picked up from a loved one that you now can’t shake.
Cooking / preparing food by weight. Mr. Magpie (engineer!) uses a scale in everything — even measuring how much cream to put in my coffee and how many ounces of kale to put in our morning smoothie. Now I do the same, too.
09. Popular food combination you can’t stand.
Strawberries and chocolate. It never tastes right to me — yuck.
10. Something that moved you today.
Mr. Magpie mentioned that one of his colleagues had just suffered the loss of a beloved pet, and asked whether he could send my essay on losing our dog to him, as a gesture of solidarity. I was standing in my husband’s office next to him while he was asking me this, and I happened to glance at his computer and see the exchange he’d had with this colleague about the death of his cat. The colleague had written: “The apartment feels so empty without him.” My eyes filled with tears. I remember that painful silence too well — for weeks I thought I heard Tilly’s paws, her collar, and would strain for her footfall and displeased grumbling growl whenever the mailman approached. If you are in similar shoes: it does eventually get easier. But those early tender days are rough seas.
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Post-Scripts.
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+This chic short anorak just launched at Everlane and is already selling out. Love the red.
+My daughter’s first communion isn’t until April but I think I’m going to grab this dress. It’s so beautiful and I feel like such a classic that it will sell through!
By: Jen Shoop
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation.
I’m loving this new pair of block heel ballets from Margaux, seen above. I’d been contemplating buying a pair in this silhouette ever since Veronica Beard started styling outfits with their similar Cecile style (select colors on sale there right now!) a few season ago, as I really liked the way they tended to offset kick flare silhouettes with them. (Above, wearing a VB denim vest — look for less here, here — and Mother jeans to channel VB’s styling notes.). You can get the look for less with these (love the red!) or these.
Some additional favorite current shoe styles and silhouettes to contemplate, with an emphasis on pairs appropriate for everyday wear:
I have been sitting with this poem, by Mary Oliver, all week (graphic via):
The poem is difficult to read aloud — “haul out all” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue — the middle “out” does weird things to the mouth; the line breaks make for confusing breath work; the visual delay — not to mention figurative break — of the word “shadow” at the beginning of the third stanza makes us work overtime for meaning; she’s elided all punctuation in the phrase “without direction management supervision.” By the poem’s end, we are as knotted as the copse of litter and leaves itself.
But the birds loved it.
(!)
As in: are there things we perceive as mess, or parenthetical brushwood, or spaces to fix or shape or impose some kind of temporary order upon, that in fact need nothing at all? Things that might be better off unvisited — that might be more hospitable, or joyful, or just more fully themselves, if left to their own devices?
I am thinking mainly of my children and their easy ways of being. The way my son watches a movie while draped at odd angles on the couch. The way my daughter leaves her hair wavy and wild. Their squinting, silly jokes and exaggerated noises. There is nothing to correct. This morning, over coffee, a friend told me something that had sent her heart echoing: “Listen when your children are telling you who they are.” Let them be those little blackberry thickets.
I am thinking also of my own writing. Editing is one thing, but — may I always make room for the unexpected. May I not be drawn to tame the weirdness out. Sometimes I weedwack my way through a dense spinney of words with the red pen only to realize that the coppice version is less appealing to the nest-building mind. Not everything is best pared back. The imagination thrives in shadowlands, or at least in spaces with many branches from which to fly.
When I went birding in Colorado last summer, the guide told us that when looking for birds, a good place to start is on the barest branch towards the top of a tree, as birds like a good a view — for hunting, for visibility. Sure enough, we scanned the trees and found a raptor on the one craggy branch extended at an odd angle from the pine. That crooked limb made the perfect perch.
+You might remember that I’m obsessed with this luxe detergent. I use it for our sheets and towels. I also just noticed this brand has a whole other line of items — hand soap, linen spray, etc!
