The Cut: A Busload of Fashion People Go to the Landfill.

The Cut: A Busload of Fashion People Go to the Landfill.

by | Mar 20, 2020 | style/mode

The Cut

In a landfill, shoes rise to the top, like cream in a cup of coffee. The buoyant rubber soles work their way through the tons of compacted garbage and layers of topsoil to float on the surface. On a recent trip to the Fairless Landfill on Morrisville, Pennsylvania, with a group of designers and FIT students, I saw three pairs of Crocs on a 20-minute stroll. Bobby Jones, who works at Waste Management, regaled us with stories of the weirdest things he’s seen come to the landfill. The winner? A whale, cut into half and delivered in two trucks.

Trash has been having a bit of a fashion moment. The New York Times heralded “trashion” as the new frontier — where designers would use discarded fabric to make gowns so beautiful you would never guess it was made with scraps. Upcycling is a buzzword at this point. But in order to conquer fashion’s massive waste problem, you have to understand what you’re up against. So that’s part of the reason why FIT students, Brooklyn-based designers, and I were hiking the Fairless Landfill last week. We were there because of the Slow Factory’s Landfills As Museums initiative.

Céline Semaan, a designer, researcher, and executive director of Slow Factory, started Landfills As Museums last year. She collaborated with adidas and partnered with Waste Management’s Environmental and Construction manager, Jay Kaplan, and Theanne Schiros, a professor of science and sustainability at FIT, to put together a field trip for the students so they could see, up close, where the majority of clothing ends up. Sustainable Brooklyn, a group that amplifies black and indigenous voices in environmentalist spaces, brought a group of designers, stylists, and small-business owners along, too. One designer, Akila Stewart, makes handbags out of old laundry-detergent containers, covered in scrap leather.

One student grew visibly upset as a recycling expert explained how only less than 10 percent of all plastic in the U.S. is actually recycled. Dominique Drakeford, the co-founder of Sustainable Brooklyn, offered ways to reuse those unrecyclable plastics, like turning berry cartons into seed planters.

“This part of the life cycle is rarely seen and rarely understood,” Drakeford said. “We are a culture of disposability. Being able to experience this part of the system is important so we can come up with ideas about how to manage waste and mitigate it in our own communities.”

Walking around the active landfill, clad in neon vests and hard hats to keep us safe from being hit by trucks or pecked by seagulls, it became apparent why the outing was called “landfills as museums.” The term museum is apt, because it opened a space for curious reflection and spongelike learning, rather than a symposium offering concrete solutions. “Landfills are the archeological museums of the future,” Semaan said. “We wanted to create a space that removes all stigma around waste, from shame to fear to guilt around end of life, and explore landfills as a cultural site.”

You can imagine a museum in 2150 picking up trash from Fairless to put on display like prehistoric ceramics — a faux-pearl necklace; a lone size 13 Croc; hell, maybe even the remains of the bisected whale.

Restaurants In The Metro Area With Curbside Pick-Up Or Takeout

Restaurants In The Metro Area With Curbside Pick-Up Or Takeout

by | Mar 20, 2020 | eat/drink

WCCO’s Jason DeRusha maps out local restaurants with takeout and pick-up options. In the midst of concerns related to COVID-19, health professionals are encouraging “social distancing”. Local restaurants are stepping up to offer curb-side pick-up. Here is a list compiled by WCCO’s Jason DeRusha offering this service. DeRusha has also compiled a text list, which can be found here.


by  | Mar 18, 2020 | business, buzz, news

 

City Pages: Everything in Minnesota is closed; time to get into nature.

City Pages: Everything in Minnesota is closed; time to get into nature.

by | Mar 20, 2020 | events/locations

When we started writing a special issue encouraging people to get out of their homes, it was… still safe for people to get out of their homes. The idea that our city, our country—the world—would go into lockdown to prevent a pandemic?

It seemed impossible. In many ways, it still does. Experts say we might be avoiding concerts and movie theaters and crowds of any kind until the summer (at least) to curb the spread of COVID-19. But there’s one thing we don’t need to avoid: the great outdoors.

“I think outdoor space… I think being outside will be really crucial through this period—getting fresh air, getting exercise,” Mass General physician Daniel Horn, who’s leading a team that’s strategizing to combat coronavirus, told the Atlantic. Minnesota State Parks are staying open (even if some buildings are closed). “Now is a great time to get outdoors,” said state DNR commissioner Sarah Strommen. “Parks are a great place to do some social distancing and enjoy the health benefits of nature.”

Don’t do anything that makes you feel unsafe; maintain distance between your hiking or bikepacking partners; and for the love of mother nature, don’t take a trek with friends if you feel sick. But when the blinds on your windows start to feel like bars on a cage, we hope this issue will help you find a place to escape, even if it’s temporary.

“Nature is still there,” Minnesota’s DNR tweeted earlier this week. “You can be too.”

The Outdoors Issue:

Vogue: It’s already been a great year for readers.

Vogue: It’s already been a great year for readers.

by | Mar 20, 2020 | shop/share

If you’re a book lover, it’s likely your side table stack is still topped with reads you optimistically picked up last year (and the year before that), which can make it tough to select from what’s freshly hitting stores in 2020. To help guide you through all these literary riches, Vogue *editors and contributors are here with their selections for the best books of 2020, from novels to memoirs to artistic tomes.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January)

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If we must live in a surveillance state, it might as well be under the attentive eye of Anna Wiener, whose memoir, Uncanny Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD), is equal parts enchanting and subversive. The New York native graduated into a recession and found a job at a New York literary agency that paid mostly in prestige. Seduced by tech’s lucre and ostensible utopianism, Wiener moved west, where life proved eerily comfortable for a hard-driving millennial. Her account of living inside the Bay Area bubble reads like HBO’s Silicon Valley filtered through Renata Adler; Wiener is a trenchant cultural cartographer, mapping out a foggy world whose ruling class is fueled by empty scripts: “People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time.” The book’s author does the very opposite. — Lauren Mechling

Apartment by Teddy Wayne (Bloomsbury, February)

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Teddy Wayne’s noir bromance Apartment (Bloomsbury) is set in 1996, back when successful authors enjoyed godlike status, and the young men who dreamed of joining the pantheon had no social media platforms where they could act out their fantasies. The unnamed protagonist of this novel is surrounded by self-regarding professors and students who find no favor with his workshop submissions. The one exception is Billy, a charismatic Midwesterner who sees promise in his classmate’s pages. Billy sleeps in the basement of the dive bar where he works—until the narrator extends an invitation to live with him in exchange for cleaning and companionship. What follows is an amusing, increasingly uneasy account of an odd couple and their unstable power dynamic as Billy’s star rises, and his host, whose heart is “clamped shut like the shell of a stubborn pistachio,” comes to accept that their bond is not all it’s cracked up to be. — Lauren Mechling

In the Land of Men by Adrienne Miller (Ecco, February)

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The high-flying New York literary scene of the ’90s is also the backdrop of Adrienne Miller’s memoir In the Land of Men (Ecco). Miller was an erudite and self-possessed college graduate who came to Manhattan and found work in men’s magazines, first at GQ, then, at 25, as the literary editor of Esquire. Up against the industry’s unapologetic sexism and her own impostor syndrome, she developed a façade of unflappability. Two decades later, she recounts her years as “improbable gatekeeper” and spins an elegy for the glory days of American magazines, with cameos by Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Dave Eggers. The star of the show, though, is David Foster Wallace, who used to crank-call the young editor and quickly became her greatest confidant. So began a long-distance love affair that defied definition and, in the clear light of 2020, propriety. Their “rhizomatic conversations” were playful, fun, and vexingly slippery. What a treat to listen in. — Lauren Mechling

Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories by Fanny Singer (Knopf, March)

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When Fanny Singer was a baby, her mother, the culinary demigod Alice Waters, would take her to Waters’s famed Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, swaddle her in fresh dish towels, and place her in an extra-large salad bowl while she worked. Singer attributes her lifelong love of greens to these “early kitchen cribs.” “It was definitely an unconventional upbringing,” concedes the 36-year-old by phone from San Francisco. Singer’s memoir, Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories (Knopf), out this month, is a tender portrait of the woman better known to the world as the mother of the farm-to-table movement. — Chloe Malle

Live Beautiful by Athena Calderone (Abrams, March)

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For 14 months, Athena Calderone ping-ponged between the East and West Coast and farther off to Copenhagen and Lyon for her latest book, Live Beautiful (Abrams), produced with photographer Nicole Franzen. By the end, she was left with a collection of design magazine–worthy photographs, but also a number of shots that captured her from a less glamorous vantage. “I was looking at the behind-the-scenes photos, and there were all of these images of me in somebody’s shower,” she recalls with amusement. — Lilah Ramzi

 

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*All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
La Galleria: Art is a healing power! – Edina, MN

La Galleria: Art is a healing power! – Edina, MN

by | Mar 20, 2020 | art/design

And, although we won’t be able to operate our in-person business as usual, be assured that we will keep you engaged during  your ‘social distancing’ consult digitally.

Whether looking to purchase a new one-of-a-kind piece of artwork with La Galleria, or wish to schedule a FaceTime meeting to discuss an interior design project, we are here for you!  Connect with us, we wan to create a unique and genuine experience; share more about our female-founded and run art gallery and design business.

Our gallery La Galleria is now open on-line!

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