A place for the feathered fancies floating in my mind to come to rest …
A nest for my dappled musings and opinions, my style analysis, advice, and recommendations, and my miscellaneous tangents…
An all-encompassing and variable garment, a soft skin, and- I hope- a sort of home.
This is The Cote.
Doves and pigeons are, in point of fact, the same bird. I have developed an affinity for these plump, pretty, bright-eyed avians, who at once are symbols of love and beauty while also being scrappy little trash surfers, nonplussed by traffic, tourists, or the forays of other birds.
My day job is at a small consignment shop where I both style for social media and merchandise displays, while also spending whole shifts doing intake- quite literally sorting through and curating treasure from other peoples trash. Both in and outside of work, I also am constantly honing and improving a sense of well-informed good taste. For this combination of the poetry and prose of style, the plumed and multitudinous inhabitants of a cozy cote or a city stoop are, I think, a fitting mascot.
There’s also of course, the natural pun- cote/coat- that calls up the variance of the many garment styles we collectively call ‘a coat’. This is in very tune with the compendium-style assortment of content that I will inevitably include! But then the word also signifies something far more intrinsically innate- the coat of an animal. Be it mouse or lion, sheep or stallion, crow or canary, each exhibits and evokes some particular and inhabited quality that we’ve come to recognize in a sort of shared visual language. The way they look, then, comes to represent to us something about the way they are in an overarching sense- not necessarily as individuals, but as archetypes.
Good style, I think, is in many ways closest to this- it’s not just a consumerist, individualist mode of shallow self expression, but a way to speak without speaking, a way to convey good and true things, a way to be- not just look. But more on that in future missives!
Now, I don’t want to be too pigeonholed (ha ha) to ‘style’ as I share my thoughts in this newsletter. I also don’t want to be too tied to a writing schedule at first, so I won’t be launching paid content right away either. What I do want is to be at home in a little space where I feel that to voice my mind and musings will be to be met by an audience who is both interested and in tune.
So, if that’s you…
join the coterie xx