How Did I Get Here? Part 1: A Ghost in New York City
My lore and strange path into the design world... name drops included.
I always say that LA was the strangest place that changed my life. This is how I got there.
I finished college with a finance degree in 2008 in NYC, during the severe recession in the states that left me - and most of my friends - jobless and aimless in 2009. Why would I want to re-enter this industry after a brutal mass firing? I was done with finance. No jobs were hiring in any industry, so I moved to a cheap and horrible apartment on Thompson and Houston, with a wealthy little hoarder who left piled up plates in her bedroom, and went clubbing every night with "secondary characters" (I’m being generous) from The Hills.
I was being entirely useless and aimless, living off my company’s severence package - surprizingly more income than I was making as an employee - so I started searching for internships after a few months of waitressing at Riposo 46, a wonderful little bar in Hells Kitchen where the Broadway gays who were regulars taught me a thing or two about life (and poppers).
I got an internship for an evil fashion PR woman, I wish I could remember her name, where I worked under her assistant basically RSVPing to fashion week events (it must have been late summer 2009). I truly can’t remember a single useful thing I did there, or learned there, at that office on Varick Street. I was also seeing a scraggly guitarist who kept telling me how lucky I was that he was into me, as he was only attracted to Asian women. Yes, lucky me. A few weeks into my internship he was participating in a Battle of The Bands event at John Varvatos for a fashion week event, at the former CBGB venue on Bowery Street. I stole an invite from my fashion boss (who I never met) which gave me VIP access. I think I quit a few days later.
I was excited to go, and his band won. I remember the judges - John Varvatos; Perry Farrell; a famous photographer; and Sam Endicott. I knew the former two, the latter two I didn’t. We all ended up at Rose Bar, where I sat next to Sam and asked him question after question. "So, what makes you qualified to judge?" Sam told me he was the lead singer of The Bravery (and sang a bit of Honest Mistake which I recognized, of course), and then told me he had writted Shakira’s She Wolf which really perked up my ears. “Omg.. I am Colombian too!” Turns out we had a bit more in common, we were both from the same suburb outside of DC.
Well, the guitarist I was dating dumped me a week later at a bar because according to him, he was famous now (and no - he didnt get the promised record deal). I pretended to take a call after he broke the news, and just left him sitting there and whatever bar in Brooklyn I had trekked all the way to. (His career went nowhere - I checked.) I spent much of that NYC fall strolling around New York City like a ghost, going to clubs with sad male models, but also going to great concerts and hanging out with Sam and some of his friends at places like The Cabin Down Below, where all the local rockstars of the 2010s hung out.
Sam was becoming my closest friend, and my most grounded friend among my current group of insecure male models. My core group of girlfriends from college, who were normal and also very grounded, had moved back to their homes in the NY suburbs to save money, so I really felt completely alone during this time. The scene was shallow, and all about partying, and it was starting to feel really depressing.
Sam, as most of the NYC creative industry did, decided to pack up for Los Angeles and leave his cool Allen Street apartment behind. I continued being a ghost in the city. I was spending lots of time at bookstores which is where I discovered Domino: The Book of Decorating, which was published that year in 2009. The bookstore in Columbus Circle mall had a big promotion for it, and because I had spent a lot of my downtime finding furniture on craisglist and trying to make it prettier, it captured my attention.
Through that book, I started becoming obsessed with interior design and learning more about it on my downtime, which was all the time, really. My mother - in retrospect so incredibly patient with me during this time - finally called me out and said, “you have all this time, and your severence package, just get rid of your sad apartment and sad life, and go live in Paris for a bit. Improve your French, take classes. Just go.” Why did I think of this before! So I packed up and headed out.
Coming up: Part 2: Chairs & Cupcakes in Paris