EVERYTHING I WORE ON VACATION
A carryon, a dream, a glass of rum on the rocks, a vintage haul, a pink and purple addiction, a Knicks win, a holy hush of ancient sacrifice, and hella Emily Dawn Long.
I am not Joan Didion packing in pursuit of sartorial anonymity. I am me and I’m going on a 2 week family vacation to Greece. This is an entirely disparate set of circumstances—contact v. no contact sport, different laws of gravity—which is to say the same rules do not—cannot—apply. Two shirts and a typewriter simply will not suffice!
Conceptually, I pack under the pretense of practicality. In reality, it’s spur of the moment with a loose sense of scaffolding. From my boxy bedroom in the East Village, what can I picture myself wearing atop a mountain in Odysseus’s hometown of Ithaca? At the acropolis? Drunk stargazing in Santorini?
Despite the semi-impracticality of my packing process, I managed to pull off two impossible feats: I 1. wore everything I packed, and 2. fit it all in a carryon. Here’s everything I wore on vacation.
2000s Abercrombie boxing shorts I painstakingly hunted down after seeing them in the Spring Break A&F Quarterly. For Love & Lemons little prairie girl peasant dress that makes me feel, unsurprisingly, like a little prairie girl peasant. But in a glam way. I started reading My Brilliant Friend but decided I wanted to save it and started Loved & Missed instead. My sister and I drank espresso in the hot tub and stared out toward the horizon repeating “I can’t believe this place is real” so many times that each individual word lost meaning.
I am someone who is always cold even when it’s warm AF. Perhaps I should have listened to Joan Didion after all when she said to pack a pullover sweater and a mohair throw. I was freezing so I wore my Raimundo jeans + this sparkly shimmy top from EMILY DAWN LONG.
Brandy tee + With Jean skirt for the day we toured Santorini with Christos. Christos believes in miracles and is inspired by drone footage, forcing my family to carry out his frankly insane visions. Here we are on the roof of his home. He gave us wine and left us unattended, and when we finally found him an hour later, he’d conducted an outfit change replete with skinny white pants and a fedora. I miss him bad.
Something about me is I’m gonna dress like my books. I hadn’t read The Lightning Thief since 8th grade and it was better than I even remembered. So good that I was taking notes—insane things like “Ares pulls up on them on a red motorcycle with a seat “that looked like…well, Caucasian human skin” (p225.) NEED to know how a 12 year old would have deduced such a thing.” and “Hades looks like Snape but also Hitler (p309)…noted. Unique!” Bathing suit from Tropic of C, shorts from Free City that I cut myself, book from my childhood bookshelf.
Wearing EMILY DAWN LONG at The Grove! (The olive grove.) This was our first night in Athens and I was as starstruck by the Acropolis as I was by the butter yellow cabs. They matched my mom’s nails <3
I wore Free People & Golden Geese to the Acropolis and successfully answered all of our tour guide’s mythology trivia because I had finished The Lightning Thief the day before. My sister and I went on a wildly successful vintage shopping spree in Athens after. Haul to come at a later date. Can’t give it all up at once…
Outfits my dad & I wore to the Acropolis museum. I went for Statue of Athena. He went for Country Club chic. Dress is actually a Paloma Wool skirt I refuse to ever wear as a skirt and this fab metallic belt from Interlude. The best part of the Acropolis museum was the not-to-scale lego replica, which featured, for some undisclosed reason, Elton John in concert.
Wasting no time to put the Miss Sixty dress I scored in Athens to work. Addicted to the built in necklaces, even though after one (1) cocktail I feel inclined to put them in my mouth. My dad and I drank rum on the rocks all night at a bar called Boom Boom. My new summer drink AF—they served it with orange peels and chocolate. All things should be served with orange peels and chocolate.
Forgot to take a single pic in this fab dress that I saw I got from the cutest store on Orchard Street. Featuring my sister and my mom, who is randomly wearing a scarf my french exchange student gave her circa 2013. We’re in Ithaca, home of Odysseus, where we had our favorite dinner of the whole trip (my mom got the rooster? And it was better than any meat I’ve had in recent memory.) My sister and I took edibles in the bathroom and I stared out the window the entire way down the mountain thinking about the holy hush of ancient sacrifice, a line from a Wallace Stevens poem that gets stuck in my head with frequency.
I made my sister sneak into a private access rock outcrop then swam to shore while she walked my dress and shoes back on the road. We’re both rather afraid of swimming in the sea but I was trying to be brave <3 Dress from Cou Cou of course & bathing suit from Frankie’s, also of course.
At this point I’d actually begun reading My Brilliant Friend, which was probably my favorite book I read on vacation. We’re in Fiskardo here, and I had read so much at this point that my brain was firing out thoughts exclusively in prose. I loveeeee when this happens, the lovely shape the sentences take on inside my head. Top is from Susmies, skirt I saw in the window of Zemeta on Orchard Street and went back for. No shoes, very few problems.
My Knicks outfit <3 I have never had such visceral fomo in my life here on earth than to not be in NYC for Knicks finals games 1-4. I would wake up at 3:30AM Greece time to watch on a website called “Crack Streams” that, by some sheer miracle, never gave my computer a virus and worked perfectly every time.
Another thing about me is if there is an opportunity to wear pink and purple, I will seize it with the grip of an arm wrestling world champion and refuse to let go. This little purple swim material skirt is SO SHORT but SO CUTE. Sometimes you have to feel the breeze on your cheeks, the proverbial air on your G-string, and let it rock. Wearing my mom’s Tom Ford sunglasses she stole from my crazy uncle who has surprisingly good taste!
EDL addict and I will not apologize for that! My sister and I randomly called every single cat we saw on this trip “Andrew” and this one particular night I saw 19 cats assembled atop a dumpster and coined it “AndrewCon” and made my sister laugh so much she almost peed her pants and we had to beg a random restaurant for access to their restroom. If my sister laughs hard enough she always pees or has to pee in her pants. It’s one of my favorite things about her and always will be. I did abuse this power when we were children but I don’t anymore <3
I am terrified of Sharks. And yet I taunted fate by wearing this Staud Shark top on a boat, then proceeded to go night swimming after (I survived!) My skirt and bag were perfect color matches for the water. I became so transfixed by the state of the stars this night than I accidentally stared at them for 2 straight hours. I woke up at 3:30am to watch the Knicks win Game 4 and immediately after, two goats walked onto the beach and climbed a mountain straight into the sunrise. Jalen Brunson and OG in another ancient life <3
This random skirt from a vintage shop in L.A. that I will only ever wear as a dress <3 Felt like the right thing to wear to celebrate the Knicks win.
Pink and purple for our final night <3 I’d been searching for a Greece snapback all trip and finally found it. We flew home the next day and I went straight from JFK to Dimes to watch the Knicks win it all.
Your beautiful and perfect mind
Obsessed. What’s your Venus sign?