steven's Blog

 

You know that feeling: You just finished your lunch, perhaps a sensible turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread, but already, all you can think about are sweets. For me, it happens about two bites before my desk-side meal is kaput. I hear its whisper: "Peppermint Pattie." What? What's that? And then again, from the back channel coils in my brain, it hisses: "Pepper-mint Patt-ie." But I didn't grab a Peppermint Pattie when I bought my sensible lunch because, at that time, I thought I was in control of this operation. As it turns out (my body, on autopilot now, is barreling back toward the cafeteria in search of a minty sphere of delicious-ity), the food goblins in my head are in charge.

 

Turns out, I'm not the only one with a bad case of the food goblins.

 

Lauren Sambataro, the director of nutrition at New York's AKT In Motion (a private Upper East Side gym that counts Sarah Jessica Parker and Kelly Ripa among its clientele) says that our brain function—or lack thereof while eating—is complicit in weight gain. "You have to be really aware and present with your food," she tells me. "If you’re mindlessly eating, your brain is not acknowledging that there’s food coming in. If your brain is not acknowledging that, your digestion and metabolic functions won’t be working at capacity. You’re going to want more food and you’re going to start craving sweets. It’s going to be an endless cycle." And while Sambataro concedes that calories in versus calories out isn't exactly an old wives tale, she says there are ways around restrictive diets. "There’s a delicate balance of all of the functions in your body. If you have that balance, it doesn’t matter what calories are coming in or out."

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To get your body—and your body-mind—back on track for good, Sambataro has some easy fixes:

 

1.

 

Breathe: "People under stress just don’t breathe enough. Breathing brings oxygen to the body and that can actually enhance your metabolism." Sambataro recommends taking five deep breathes before beginning each meal.

 

2.

 

Cheat: Sambataro recommends a weekly splurge day to all of her clients: "You sort of have to trick your hormones into not knowing what’s coming," she says. "It’s good to have a cheat day and just binge—not on like cake and crap—but to have significantly more calories because that actually will raise your leptin levels, which is the hunger hormone. By having a cheat day, you actually sort of wake up those levels of leptin again. If you eat really consistently all the time, the leptin kind of goes to sleep."

 

3.

 

Don't food shame: Praising and celebrating your food, regardless of its caloric content (though, again, heed Sambataro, who warns: "I can’t say that if you’re happy about eating pizza every single day, you’re not going to get fat!") can aid in proper digestion. "It doesn’t matter what you’re eating, but if you feel guilty or have any remorse for what you’re eating, your brain is going to recognize that as a stressful event for the body," she says. "[Negative thoughts] can actually make cortisol go up, which is the one thing that we don’t want to do—it definitely shuts down the digestive organs, your metabolism. Nothing is really going to work correctly if the brain thinks that you’re under stress. By having guilty feelings about something you’re eating, whether healthy or not, you’re going to produce a stress response. That’s really the last thing that you want when you’re eating."

 

In an effort to give my endless overthinking a rest, I decided to employ Sambataro's strategy this weekend at an out-of-town wedding weekend I attended. I made sure to breathe before eating, order the sweet potato fries when they called my name, and praise every bite of late-night, post-party quesadilla that came my way. (I also realized that every lean person I know is the first to order the savory pasta dish at dinner, sample the homemade brownies a colleague made, or order a calorie-rich IPA. Save for a few worrisome exceptions, I do not know a single thin woman who orders the fish entrée and then spends dinner looking longingly at someone else's pappardelle the way I tend to do.)

 

So I went for it: I told the food goblins to buzz off. And I'll tell you what—it worked. By allowing myself the option of having a cookie if I wanted, I was more acutely aware of whether or not I actually wanted one. I didn't once hamburglar someone else's mashed potatoes and I actually left half of my quesadillas untouched because I was just kind of over 'em. I didn’t gain a single ounce.

 

But I did gain some perspective. A Peppermint Pattie is not going to make me fat. Especially if I don’t let it. I look forward to making your post-lunch acquaintance, you beautiful, smart, competent Peppermint Pattie, you.

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"ARTFUL CLASSICS" is the term Julia Leach uses to describe the sailor-inspired striped T-shirts she designs for her label, Chance. It's a particularly apt choice of words given that collaborating with artist friends has become something of a tradition for the four-year-old brand. For Ms. Leach's spring ode to Sweden's seaside lifestyle (each collection is inspired by a destination), she enlisted Laurie Rosenwald, "one of the eccentric icons of the graphic design world," said Ms. Leach.

 

Ms. Rosenwald created 35 different stripe designs for Ms. Leach to choose from. "She went over the top, but it was really fun," said Ms. Leach, who settled on a quieter, slightly jagged stripe that blends Chance's signature minimalism with the artist's trademark playfulness. Those charmingly imperfect stripes, now on Chance's long-sleeve T-shirt, are offered in two color duos—white-and-blue and blue-and-red.

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The forces behind espadrilles brand Soludos and jewelry line Miansai also share a nautical obsession. "We often look to classic Mediterranean culture for our designs," said Soludos founder Nick Brown. "Miansai puts a fresh spin on classic New England nautical style. Working together has always been on our minds." Now, Mr. Brown and Miansai founder Michael Saiger have come together on a capsule collection of women's espadrilles: three versions of Soludos' rope-soled styles, each laced-up with Miansai's signature sailing cord and finished with the brand's trademark curved fishing-hook hardware.

 

While the collection (offered in a classic palette of red, white, gray and shades of blue) channels a patriotic spirit befitting of the Fourth of July, it's intended to have a longer lifespan. Said Mr. Brown, "It's about chasing those unforgettable summer moments no matter the season."

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"Five decades later — here I am again, surrounded by Charles," says R. Couri Hay. “And I like it.” Hay, a longtime friend of Charles James, is standing in the living room of his Upper West Side townhouse, flanked by dozens of sketches by the late designer. The frames are stacked against the baseboards of the room — fantastical, abstract visions spanning three decades that would become blueprints for the couturier’s complex gowns. Four additional drawings, including James’s famous Figure Eight gown and his puffer jacket, are currently across town, on loan to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its James retrospective. (Hay, the society publicist, columnist, and owner of a namesake public relations firm, is planning a show of the drawings at the National Arts Club in the fall.)

 

Hay was a teenager when he first met James, in 1966, at the designer's 60th birthday party at Max's Kansas City. The two went on to have a long, somewhat unlikely friendship until James died from pneumonia in 1978. With James back in the cultural conversation, Hay invited me to see his collection of sketches.

 

James is a designer trapped in the amber of a bygone era: synonymous with pastel bell skirts and white gloves, suits with impossibly tiny waists, and swan-necked socialites. His was a picture of glamour rooted in some of the biggest society names, including Paleys, Hearsts, and Whitneys. While his heyday as “America’s couturier” extended through the 1940s and ’50s, he continued designing well into his last decade. And while we might associate him with a Cecil Beaton photograph of staid socialites in pastel gowns, by the late ’60’s he was rubbing elbows with the punk crowd. Toward the end of his life, he lived in the Chelsea Hotel and spent nights at Max’s and Studio 54; he spent time with Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, Truman Capote, the illustrator Antonio Lopez, and Lou Reed. “I was there when Lou Reed came down and started to sing the original verses of 'Walk on the Wild Side' to Candy Darling in Charles James’s room,” Hay recalls. “[James] was like a punk-rocker. He was a real rebel. He would go down [to Studio 54], and he had platform shoes on, he had leather jackets; he was like a rebellious punker.”

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“This whole idea that Charles was holed up in this room, miserable and forgotten, isn’t true,” says Hay. Like Andy Warhol and his Factory, “Charles had his own court at the Chelsea.” (James dabbled in the drug culture of the epoch, but only slightly, Hay says. “Charles would send me to Max Jacobson,” better known as Doctor Feelgood, “to get ‘black beauties,’ he called them. It was never heroin, it was never cocaine, but there were amphetamines. That was it. He didn’t really drink.”)

 

“Oh, this is funny,” says Hay, picking up one framed sketch from beside the mantel. “Here’s a picture of Halston.” He spins the frame around for me to see: It’s a drawing of a cockroach. Halston and James were what would now be termed “frenemies.” On the back of the frame, in James’s neat writing, it reads, “Portrait of Halston Frowick.” (Hay explains that he and Halston were romantically involved for a time; their relationship eventually ended, in part, because he didn’t approve of Halston’s treatment of James.)

 

“This whole idea that he was deeply embittered and miserable and poor just isn’t true,” says Hay. Yes, the designer relied on help from friends who paid his rent now and again. But, he says, James always preferred to work in hotels. “Everyone keeps painting this hotel and his life as so downtrodden, yet he had a suite of three rooms in the Chelsea … I think when he died he was only five months behind on his rent [it was, in fact, six months] which, for Charles, was phenomenal.” When funds ran low, Hay treated him to meals at the automat on 14th Street and, one winter, bought him a coat.

 

Eventually, he became not just a friend of James, but a collector of his work. “Charles was very proud, and I was a little shrewd,” he says, so he started to buy drawings from the designer, eventually amassing the collection he has today. Today, he has over 100 drawings — abstract sketches of gowns and even some erotic drawings, mainly of homosexual couplings and male nudes — and has lived with them as a memory of James throughout his life. Other than for the Met show, he hasn’t lent them out and has no plans to sell them.

 

Despite James’s cachet within socialite circles, his public profile dipped sharply in his later years — a fact, Hay says, that was deeply upsetting to him. At one point, he sent a transparent blouse to Henri Bendel, but they rejected it. “Finally, what happened was people caught on," Hay says. "And who did it take to do it? It took a museum. It took the art world. And so why was Charles forgotten? No advertising. No big conglomerate bought his name. Nobody kept the legend alive, because they couldn’t make any money out of it ... How many times has Marc Jacobs gone bankrupt and been saved? But there was no LVMH to save James.” (Now that Harvey Weinstein has bought the rights to James’s house, Hay says he is optimistic about its legacy.)

 

For his National Arts Club show, opening in the fall, Hay plans to show not just James’s fashion sketches, but those never-seen erotic drawings, which, appropriately enough, he takes me into a basement room to see. Again, the subject matter doesn’t really jibe with James’s straitlaced image; they’re mostly of men in the course of various sex acts. But, points out Hay, “Beneath the Charles James dress, you find one thing: sex. If you look at some of the ball gowns that fold down the middle like a vagina, how much more racy can you get?” Not to mention the taxi dress, so called because a woman could remove it in a taxi.

 

And while their excursions were usually to the ballet, the opera, and nightclubs, sometimes things got seedier. “I took him to a sex club once with Prince Egon von Furstenberg, and Charles disappeared. And I went, ‘Charles, where have you been?’ And he said, ‘Well, I nourished someone.’ That was a little strange, because he was probably 68 or something, at that time. [The club] was called Hellfire,” he recalls. The designer mingled with the celebrities of overlapping eras. At one point, Hay claims that James, distraught over a love affair, attempted to hang himself and “Jean Cocteau came and cut him down. How fabulous is that?” He dressed Gypsy Rose Lee for a fashion show where she stripped as she walked down the runway. Marlene Dietrich wanted to buy one of James’s gowns at Elizabeth Arden, but Arden thought she looked “vulgar” in it. “Years later,” Hay recalls, “when I talked to Dietrich in Paris, she told me that it was one of the most wonderful dresses she had ever worn.”

 

Even though James was often working in obscurity during the ‘60s and ‘70s, he never abandoned his perfectionism. “He once spent, he told me, five years and $20,000 on a sleeve to perfect an armhole,” Hay says. “He always had great confidence in who he was and what he was doing. He never doubted himself for a minute. He sacrificed, in the end, his family. You could say he sacrificed his children, his wife, his lovers, his friends, all for art.”

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