best in show

ambition as a concept

if you want to avoid having your ear talked off, don’t ask me about addison rae. i love her and strongly believe she is the pop star we need to bring us back to a time where the most important things in life were juicy tracksuits and starbucks frappuccinos. this is actually not about addison rae though, so i’ll digress soon. i have been thinking a lot about the latest campaign for i’m sorry by petra collins which features addison. i found the entire concept perfect, somehow in tune with the zeitgeist yet refreshing at the same time. regarding clothing itself, the most commercial items of the collection (in my opinion) are the “miss i’m sorry” trompe l'oeil t-shirt and sheer white dress featuring a similar “i’m sorry” sash. (the t-shirt is ominously lingering in my ssense cart). i started thinking about why i loved these two pieces in particular and referenced my notes app of “things i want to buy but can’t” - i highly recommend doing this because it allows you to recognize patterns in what you are drawn to and make smarter decisions regarding what to actually invest in. i noticed that i had added the jw anderson “best in show” tote bag and rosette t-shirt, a simone rocha rosette sash button-up, the sandy liang pony pin and filenes dress in black, the bode x nike jersey and a silver sequin vacquera sash that i would love to get my hands on for my birthday in december. safe to say i’m into sashes and prize ribbons and boutonnières as sartorial details and i don’t think i am alone in that.

at a surface level, references to beauty pageants, ribbons and sashes rising in popularity make a lot of sense, it seems to be a natural iteration of girlhood troupes like bows which seem to be exhausted both visually and in essay form (perpetuated by yours truly). state fairs and proms feel appropriately nostalgic, evocative and quintessential americana, i can already see an editorial shoot take place at the NY state fair my friends would go to in college. pageants in general are extremely campy and feel like catnip for creative directors. i personally happen to find these motifs extremely cute and i hope to see girls prancing around downtown in sashes and prize ribbons on their t-shirts in the next year. if that sounds crazy, who would have thought that the sandy liang school-girlification would have had the lasting impact that it did?

aside from it simply just feeling fun and easily commercially adoptable, i find it interesting and intentionally ironic that performance and competition are being used as a concept when it feels like our definition of what it means to the “the best” is a revolving debate that will never cease to change form. living in a post-girlboss world means it can feel unchic/uncool to be overly competitive. take charli xcx for example, her entire brand is built on being an aspirational party girl who posts on tik tok/twitter/instagram off-the-cuff and makes it seem like she doesn’t take anything too seriously but what is not built into her archetype is that she is someone who doesn’t like christmas because no one returns her emails. expressing the desire to be the best no matter what it takes is so looked down upon we’ve turned it camp… i want to be clear that i do not think this is a bad thing, decentering work and unravelling the myth of meritocracy is GOOD. but i don’t think we will ever be able to truly quell our competitive impulses.

i was in the middle of writing this piece which i initially intended to solely be a trend report that ended here and coincidentally sent this text to angelina regarding situation that was on my mind this week:

i’m selectively competitive, i tend to dislike habit tracking apps like goodreads and myfitnesspal (i will say i do like letterboxd and just downloaded beli after asking my friends if they’ve been somewhere for the 2938483 time). i find setting goals for hobbies purely designed for enjoyment overly laborious and unnecessary. i hated sports as a kid because i didn’t understand why everyone cared so much, i just wanted to have fun and could care less whether a ball goes into a goal or not. in college i was usually fine with getting an average grade when it didn’t have anything to do with my major and never stressed about whether or not i had a formal date. i tried to compete in the conventional realm of being “pretty” in adolescence and ended up feeling exhausted, hungry and dizzy from spray tan fumes and decided it wasn’t worth it.

all of these things would probably make you assume i am a “chill” person. i am not a chill person. the one thing i am extremely driven about is my career, i teeter between taking pride and feeling embarrassed by my own ambition. my dad recently retired, he worked a lot, and his job was quite stressful. i was at his retirement party and read an email that caused me to panic (it was literally so fine)- the irony of celebrating my dad concluding his professional life paralleled to my entry-level corporate frenzy over an excel file i couldn’t find momentarily is not lost on me. i asked him if it was all “worth it”- the late nights and long trips and stressful meetings etc. he thought about it for a minute and then said “you probably don’t want to hear this, i think it was. but this is also the only thing i know and what everybody did, i have nothing else to compare it to.” i don’t know if this is refreshing to hear, terrifying to face or just simply antiquated.

i struggle a lot to manage my ambition in a healthy way, my perception of what it means to be the “best” changes depending on the room i’m in. i will excitedly accept a stretch project that would require me to work a lot more with the same enthusiasm as when asked if i want to go to a party of a friend of a friend of a friend’s cousin: “absolutely, i’m so excited. thank you for thinking of me”. i value being challenged and i value having fun. some people who meet me are surprised i have a job where i create decks and use terms like “strategic agility” without even thinking about it and others are surprised when i randomly decide to dye my hair pink or get a tattoo because i feel restless or write this slightly-too-vulnerable substack that always has typos. i’m sure this is an example of “balance” in a way, i prioritize both my professional and personal life but i can’t help but feel at odds with what i want and my fluctuating definition of success. i feel perpetually anxious that different people in my life perceive me as caring too much about the opposite ends of my values.

i struggle with substack in that way, i feel like i should want to exponentially grow my subscribers and build out a robust paid tier, but if i’m honest i really love the readers i have now (<3) and enjoy being able to write whatever i want without the tension of being perceived at “the top”. this inclination is not a natural one for me, but one i think best aligns with how i actually feel and want to live. maybe i struggle to accept my own duality because there is so rarely an ambitiously nuanced person portrayed in movies/tv/books. it feels easier to capture a hot mess party girl and an uptight ambitious cold woman as it easier to categorize myself in those two neat buckets.

i don’t think i even registered the whiplash in my brain trying to calculate an accurate measure of my worthiness to a specific type of person in front of me before i sat down to write this. what i need to do is somehow accept that my values and priorities will always be fluid and proprietary to myself, at my core i am a responsible party girl who loves to work even if when that’s uncool to admit- that’s my own personal best. and i’ll always be #1.

can you tell i’m a capricorn?

THANK YOU FOR READING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it means a lot to me.

this felt a bit more carrie bradshaw-esque than usual (rambly and a bit of a stretch) so let me know if you liked this or hated this (respectfully please).

dear angel cake is BACK this week i promise- send in anything you want advice on to angelcake@substack.com with dear angel cake in the subject line.

xoxoxoxoxo