IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with The Face magazine, songwriter-producer Jack Antonoff—who has counted Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde in his enviable stable—went on a rant against the NYC scene in general and Dimes Square specifically. “Well, what’s the export?” he asked. “What’s the book, what’s the band?”
Good question! For books, one could do worse than those of Natasha Stagg, a cool person in downtown New York who writes about the same. She is so plugged in that she nearly titled her new book Name Dropping, as she warns us up front: “one of my favorite pastimes, you’ll see.” Coming to New York after college in Michigan and a fiction MFA in her native Arizona, Stagg quickly rose from odd jobs at thrift stores to a column at underground art magazine DIS. Within a year, she was working at fashion glossy V, where she eventually became senior editor. Along the way, Chris Kraus, the I Love Dick author who shares something of Stagg’s arch aloofness, commissioned her to publish with Semiotext(e). Her first book was 2016’s Surveys, a novel about a twenty-three-year-old woman who gets famous on the internet, leaves dull Tucson for shiny LA, and suffers terribly. That same year, Stagg moved from magazine editing to brand consulting. Getting jobs through design firm 2x4, she wrote freelance press releases in addition to incisive and sometimes brutal literature and criticism. Kraus encouraged her to bundle some of that into her second book, 2019’s Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019, an eclectic mixture of fashion writing, art criticism, and autofiction that reflects her strange relationship with fashion. In some ways, she hates it: hates its superficiality, its ruthlessness, the way it turns every part of life into a status competition. But she cannot—economically or otherwise—live without it. Nor does she want to.
Read Full Article »
