I’m back with more bathroom reading for you. Last week I had a story in the Wall Street Journal (in print!) about the television show The New Look, which is a fictionalized depiction of Coco Chanel and Christian Dior’s lives in Nazi-occupied Paris. I wrote another piece for Vanity Fair about William Hanson, a 34-year-old Brit who is one of TikTok’s foremost etiquette experts.
If Hanson’s videos haven’t crossed your feed, I suggest you seek them out, if only to see what kind of reaction you have to them. Personally, I love watching him explain how to properly eat a cookie and what to do with your napkin when you leave the table. Alex believes that I’m overstating how much my manners atrophied during Covid lockdown, but even if I look like the picture of grace and poise, I still feel like a raccoon in a restaurant. (I know I’m a raccoon because, while feral, I am diligent about washing my hands.)
I watch Hanson’s videos because they make me feel more prepared for the outside world, but even more than that, I watch them because I’m fascinated with the aura of elegance he exudes. In our interview, I asked him how he thinks about his online persona, and he told me that it’s no persona at all: That’s his real voice (crisp) and his real posture (outstanding). “Posture, it’s just muscles,” he told me. “It’s like going to the gym. If you stand up straight all the time, your muscles get used to it.” This makes sense, but I still can’t imagine what it would feel like to move through life in this way. It’s so… self-respecting.
If I tried projecting the most polished version of myself to the world, would I feel more composed inside? More fraudulent? I’m not planning to run this experiment any time soon, but it’s fun to think about. During my reporting for this story, one of Hanson’s students told me that she’s always been drawn to elegance — as a value, as a way of life. (She’s French.) I love the idea of living for elegance.
The person who told me about Hanson in the first place is Aelfie Oudghiri, a home goods designer whose colorful rugs and decor you’ve seen in publications like Domino and New York Magazine. That reduces Oudghiri to a certain bicoastal archetype, so let me also say that she’s frank and funny and unafraid to talk about the strange and difficult aspects of producing creative work. I interviewed her a few years ago for a New York Times piece about the set design in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends — a book that’s very interested in the millennial impulse to covet other people’s home furnishings (and, I guess, spouses) — and we kept in touch after that. I also bought two of her rugs for my own apartment. I love them both. One is the color of an egg yolk, and the other is a vivid blue named for the painter David Hockney.
Last year, Oudghiri closed up shop on her business, the self-titled Aelfie brand, and went on sabbatical. During this time, she followed a friend’s advice to pursue whatever projects or topics piqued her interest, without questioning her instincts. Oudghiri worked on a documentary about her grandmother, an artist and Holocaust survivor; she made short films about trolling pedophiles on the internet and a 23andMe data breach; she created a podcast that, in a dispatch to her community, she described as covering “astronomy, magic, Las Vegas, and billionaire David Copperfield's plan to make the moon vanish”; she learned sleight-of-hand herself and taught magic tricks to her daughter.
Oudghiri announced in February that she would soon return to the business of producing “It-Girl textiles at Somewhat-Affordable-Prices.” (I told you she was funny.) Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I love interviewing self-employed people in creative fields, since I’m desperate to hoover up crumbs of wisdom about how to live my own life. So Oudghiri and I got on the horn in early March to talk about what the future holds for her.
Although she was planning to reopen her business — and has now done so — she was feeling ambivalent about it when we spoke. This was partly because her “actual, real, true creative self” is very different from the designer she has to be for her job. Aelfie the brand sells cheerful products intended to make your home a more joyful place. (I do feel happier when I look at my rugs.) Aelfie the person is, in her own estimation, a lot more moody, nihilistic, and mischievous. “The stuff that I do for my own pleasure and curiosity is incredibly dark,” she said.
The space between her personality and brand started to emerge after a few years in business. Oudghiri launched her first collection of rugs in 2012, when she was 26 years old. Looking back at that time, she said, “There's a reason that I wanted to create beautiful things that made people feel happy at home.” She grew up in a chaotic household, and as she got older, home decor became a way of laying claim to her space. “When I started the company, I was coming into adulthood and independence. I was kind of mood-boarding what kind of future I wanted to have, and creating the kind of world or interiors I wanted to see,” she said.
Today, design means something different to her. “I don’t feel the need to so intensely control my environment and make it happy. I used to always say that my house was a reflection of my interior state, and I just don't think that anymore,” she said. “I’m freer.”
Oudghiri and I didn’t reach any conclusions about how to reconcile these two things: the brand as it is, and the person who she is. That’s fine. It’s one of the many conundrums within the grand mystery of self-employment. In my own work, I’m as many writers as I need to be, because different publications have different house styles. I like moving between voices, but sometimes I spend too long in one mode and start to feel weird and unsure of myself. In Ursula K. LeGuin’s wonderful Earthsea books, a wizard can forget who he is if he spends too much time disguised as an animal. In Hollywood, an Austin Butler can get stuck talking like Elvis if he spends too much time in character. It’s the same principle.
This is why I like the advice that Oudghiri’s friend gave her: We all need a way of returning to ourselves, and following your niche passions is one way of doing that. I write this newsletter to remember how to write like me. And I will do that over and over and over, probably until I die.
The best part of Dune: Part Two is Austin Butler’s uncanny Stellan Skarsgård accent,
Eliza