A paywall-free stretch of summer.
Plus: Austin is getting a bathhouse/members' club, and New York gets a new tick-borne illness.
Good afternoon, everyone.
In between every hundred or so keystrokes for this newsletter, I’m eating a handful of blueberries from my favorite farm stand in the Hamptons, Comfort Farm. I spent the weekend watching Meryl Streep and Robert Redford fall in love on the plains of Kenya in Out of Africa. It was unsurprisingly nominated for an Oscar for Best Costume Design. I mistakenly thought many of the outfits were Ralph Lauren or YSL, but after reading about the reception to the film, I learned that costume designer Milena Canonero’s work actually inspired Safari collections from those designers after the film’s release.
Before we get into today’s letter, I have an announcement!
For the first two weeks of August, Feed Me is on PTO — that doesn’t mean I’m logging off and leaving you with nothing to read in your air-conditioned office or on your parents’ couch. It means I’ll be publishing as usual, but the Paywall is Turned Off.
Starting August 3, free Feed Me subscribers get access to the entire newsletter (the chat and comments will remain paywalled). This is a temporary gift to both new and longtime readers who have been reading Feed Me over the last four years, but haven’t made the jump to paid. Think about the conversation starters you’ll bring to your late-summer first dates, and to the awkward lulls at meet-the-teacher night.
Today’s newsletter includes: Austin is getting a new members-club-slash-bathhouse, The Met’s controversial new exhibit, I found Dave Portnoy’s next business investment, where to get a good salade niçoise in New York, a popular Jackson Hole après-ski bar opens a private club, a dream job for a Gorpcore-obsessed fashion writer, OpenAI’s Hudson Valley brand trip, and an untreatable and potentially fatal tick-borne illness comes to New York.
Posting and browsing the Feed Me Job Board is free. This week’s roles include:
🎨 Almost Summer (a creative venture and advisory firm) is hiring a Freelance Graphic Designer. Clients include MAC Cosmetics, Caffè Panna, and Monte’s Fine Foods.
🏕️ Field Mag is looking for an experienced writer/editor to join their team. The role requires a bedrock consisting of a deep understanding of the current fashion-outdoor landscape and the ability to communicate thoughts and opinions about it clearly.
🎂 A “High-End Multi-Location Bakery” is hiring a Fractional Head of Brand & Marketing.
🎤 The Cutting Room Floor is hiring a Managing Producer. This role will be accountable for the execution of everything The Cutting Room Floor publishes.
Mangy Moose, a popular après-ski bar in Jackson Hole known for its local beer and grail-status merch, is opening a new members-only ski club next week for the upcoming winter season. The rest of the bar will remain open to the public, but this new exclusive area will be open to the people who fill the 100 spots in the members program. Some people are calling this trend paywallification or airport-ification – airports were the first place to price discriminate against everyone in public life. Gold lounge for you, silver lounge for you, Shake Shack in the food court for you. The Mangy Moose club includes a private locker, a dedicated valet to store boots and skis, and a members-only après bar and restaurant. A full-season pass is $9,800. My question for all of you: Do I need to get out to Jackson this winter?
Over the weekend, OpenAI invited tech-adjacent influencers on a brand trip to Wildflower Farms, a $2k/night hotel in the Hudson Valley. One founder called it “summer camp for creative techies.” Unsurprisingly, audiences are angry — while data centers divide the country, OpenAI is aligning themselves with imagery of the countryside and blue sky. One comment reads, “Nice greenwashing strategy @chatgpt @openai - funny to see the influencers avoid to mention the sponsor and cropping out the logos from any photo, video.” What I didn’t get about the trip is that the content I saw didn’t show attendees using or interacting with the product in any way.
Lots of perfect white tees in HTSI’s perfect white tee roundup. Including Re/Done x Hanes from Sofia Coppola and Fruit of the Loom from Clare de Boer. After recommending his own, Rick Owens said: “People assume I only wear black but actually I wear deeply low-cut white cotton V-neck T-shirts all summer at the beach to tediously display my tanned cleavage, which isn’t going to last forever. My rule of thumb is to always wear a soft white that isn’t brighter than your teeth.” If you want to go deeper on the chic t-shirt economy, dive into this episode of Nymphet Alumni that unpacks THE SUMMER OF THE BOATNECK or watch this in-depth Throwing Fits breakdown.
A nostalgic response to J.Lee’s review of Michael’s last week: “I used to be an assistant for an Editor-in-Chief at Condé Nast - Michael’s was THE place for a corner table lunch reservation; we would scan Page Six and WWD for editors spotted there daily.”
And a helpful suggestion from charlotte for a reader looking for more restaurants with a good salade niçoise on the menu: “Off the top of my head… Pastis, Balthazar, La Mercerie, Marcel, La Bonne Soupe.”
Demand for European vacations in historically cooler climates is on the rise as the summer of extreme heat persists. Bookings to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are all up significantly year over year: “While we’re not yet at the point where the map of European summer travel is being redrawn, the edges are certainly shifting.” Many people—at least in this FT article—are calling these “coolcations.”
Last week, FIFA united the soccer world by proposing something so unpalatable that seemingly all nations involved in global soccer revolted. The proposal—a plan to set up a $20 billion commercial subsidiary and more or less sell a multi-billion-dollar minority stake in the bundled commercial rights to the World Cup to private investors—prompted UEFA, the governing body of soccer in Europe, which represents 55 national associations, to threaten an emergency boycott of all FIFA events, including next summer’s Women’s World Cup and future men’s World Cups if the plan moved forward. (For non-sports fans, 6 of the 8 quarterfinalists in this summer’s World Cup were European teams; UEFA has ultimate leverage.) Consequently, FIFA backed out of the proposal in 72 hours, but the move may cost FIFA president, Gianni Infantino (the bald guy palling around with Trump during the Final), his job. Also tied up in the fallout is Josh Kushner, who planned to lead the investment group. UEFA has threatened legal action against both Infantino and Kushner over their thwarted plan.
John Galliano is about to become the third living designer ever to get a solo show at The Met (the other two: Yves Saint Laurent, 1983, and Rei Kawakubo, 2017). In 2011, Galliano became internationally cancelled after making racist and antisemitic slurs in a Paris restaurant. He was immediately fired from Dior, where he was the creative director from 1996 to 2011. The Met’s press release states: “Alongside Galliano’s extraordinary creative accomplishments, the exhibition will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception.” Vanessa Friedman from The New York Times called the choice “thorny.” In the comment section of her story announcing the exhibition, Friedman wrote, “I have known for a long time Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, was interested in doing a John Galliano show, but when I learned he had decided to do it in 2027, at a time when anti-semitism is on the rise, I was surprised.” What’s interesting is that since that incident, he has gone on to work at Margiela and Zara, so the industry has welcomed him back, although a museum exhibit like this is a different level of endorsement.
An untreatable and potentially fatal tick-borne illness, Bourbon virus, has been found in New York. Great.
The photos in this listing for a Gilded Age estate in Sharon, Connecticut should be taught in freshman year film classes. They really say, “Let’s shoot this house just like the music video for Total Eclipse of the Heart.” (RIP Bonnie Tyler.)
MML Hospitality is opening a members’ club in Austin called Timberhouse. The private club (and bathhouse, of course) will be housed within The Blanco Hotel at Sixth and Blanco. Per a deck reviewed by Feed Me, Herzog & de Meuron – the same firm that designed The Tate Modern in London, and New York’s 56 Leonard Street “jenga building” – is designing the project. There’s a limestone hydrotherapy circuit, members’ wine lockers, a pretty tricked out gym, and several restaurants on the property. A founding membership to Timberhouse will cost you a $30k initiation fee, $12k annual dues, and another $20k if you want your spouse to come (do you want your spouse to come?).
The Times paid tribute to the literary haven that is Syracuse. Considered both the rainiest and the snowiest city in the US, Syracuse produces bleak winters / great writing conditions comparable to Russia — or Iceland, where, according to the NYT, “roughly one in 10 residents will publish a book in their lifetime.” Syracuse literary giant George Saunders has gone even farther, suggesting the “romantic Syracuse ambience” is responsible for him falling in love and getting married to his wife.
It might be raining this morning in New York, but it’s a beautiful day for one of you who has always dreamed of running a pizzeria on Nantucket. After running Pi Pizzeria for 25 years, Evan and Maria Marley are looking for a “buyer who wants to take Pi to the next level.” The business is being sold for $12.5 million, which includes the Pi Pizzeria business, the commercial property on West Creek Road, as well as the staff housing property on Nobadeer Farm Road. It would be cool if this doesn’t get taken over by a mainland business like Fini or Frank Pepe, and instead becomes a passion project for a restaurateur who has always wanted a pizza business on an island. Nobody is going to want to hear this, but the obvious buyer here is Dave Portnoy, who purchased a $42 million compound on the island in 2023 (which is where the cover for his book, Cancel Me If You Can, was shot), and who has spread a pizza gospel that has developed die-hard fans.
My Mangy Moose t-shirt (tagline: Get loose with the moose) is full of holes but I refuse to throw it out.
I'm truly not surprised that influencers etched out OAI during the brand trip. I also wonder if WF also had any say in politely requesting them do so...