Today’s newsletter is free, because it’s sponsored by Delta One.
Good morning, everyone.
I’m so glad we all got to convene under one roof (Cobble Hill Cinemas) last night for Feed Me’s horror movie screening series, Monday Scaries, and eat free popcorn and drink one small free drink. I woke up to this kind email:
My friend Ray, who chose and introduced the movie, Trick ‘r Treat, actually made the trailer that the above email references. “I wanted to set the tone of the movie and introduce Monday Scaries with a Nitehawk-style compilation,” he told me. “With limited time and editing skills, I ripped my favorite Halloween-y clips to set the tone for Trick ‘r Treat (and hint at some of its best moments to an unsuspecting audience).” You can all watch it here. There are still some tickets for next week’s screening, Creep (which I chose), here. I’m hoping to run this back for the holidays.
Today’s newsletter includes: JP Morgan is opening a members’ club, Emily Wilson on her move back to LA, ultra-wealthy households are going NDA crazy with staff, J.Crew’s latest marketing campaign makes penis jokes (hell yeah), wagyu sliders and sky-high sundaes to Delta One, skincare for your ass, Ignacio Mattos’s new restaurant, “luxury banana bread,” and MLB fans are getting sick of all the Megan Fox erectile dysfunction pill commercials.
Suite dreams. ✈️🍒
My favorite wedding gift I received last year was a set of multicolored Missoni beach towels. I know it’s summer when they come with me to the park and the beach, and it makes me happy to pull them warm out of the dryer. I’ve since given the same set to several friends as a wedding gift (some of you are reading this), in hopes that they, too, will wipe salty potato chip fingers on the zigzags while lying in the sun.
So you can imagine my delight when, at sunset last week, 72 floors above Madison Avenue, I slipped into one of Delta’s new Delta One suites and found myself surrounded by Missoni: textiles, plush bedding, and a familiar amenity kit. As for the salty fingers, Delta also has that covered. A new “sip and settle” ritual puts a hot towel, warm nuts, and drink on the console before dinner, so you can finish your laptop work without anyone hovering.
I wasn’t in an actual plane. Rather, I was in a luxurious mock-up of a plane, constructed by my new friends at Delta on the top floors of the skyscraper One Vanderbilt. The purpose of my visit was to preview everything new for Delta One customers coming later this year. As the sky turned pink across New York City (we were so high up that it almost felt like a window seat view), I spoke to uniformed Delta employees that help design Delta’s suites (the same person who designs the suites surprisingly also designs the uniforms), curate Delta One’s wine menu, and work as flight attendants.
The new Delta One suites have a dream set of new design features. On their own, each individual update seems small, but together they’re sky-high luxury.
In addition to the plush seat cushions and warm nuts, each cabin includes:
A purse hook. (Liana Satenstein, your prayers have been answered.) A Delta representative told me that Delta One customers don’t love the idea of strangers having access to their bags in the overhead bin while they sleep. Personally, I think Delta One is a pretty safe neighborhood, but, nonetheless, the bag stays at your feet.
A hook for your glasses. Welcome news to someone who left a pair of Thistles sunglasses on a flight home from London. Small hardware, sure, but it’s the kind of detail that makes you feel taken care of.
Wireless charging. So nobody has to pull a muscle fishing behind the suite for an outlet. Or worse, assigning yourself to a flight of “jostling and jimmying duty” for a phone charger that keeps sliding out of an older outlet.
An 24-inch TV screen. For you to watch Wine Games (which features Delta One’s Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson).
The city skyline lit up as golden hour went dark, and event attendees were called to sit for dinner. Delta rebuilt the Delta One menu with Simon Hulstone, chef of The Elephant, a restaurant with a two-decade Michelin legacy, around classics that passengers kept asking for. That means a wagyu burger, short rib with potato gratin, and mac and cheese with garlic breadcrumbs. There’s also a mushroom risotto engineered to hold its texture at altitude (we’re living in the future), which anyone who has eaten airplane risotto will recognize as an achievement. I’ve never eaten a burger in the sky, but the wagyu (shrunken down to a slider, for the purposes of this event) was very good. Licking a caramelized onion off my thumb, I started looking at flights from LAX, where the new menu debuts this fall.
Sauces now come on the side in little saucières, and pepper is cracked fresh at your suite. The dessert cart now has a dairy-free sorbet (that you can float Taittinger on) and Amarena cherries for the sundaes.
The bar has also been advanced. Starting December 1, Delta will be the first and only airline pouring Blanton’s, a bourbon that’s famously hard to find here on the ground. The wine list was chosen by evaluating 1,600 bottles, which was narrowed down to 13 labels from 11 winery partners with Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson and a panel of SkyMiles members. Silver Oak (a Feed Me favorite) made the cut. Hugo Spritzes and Palomas, each with a non-alcoholic version, arrive next year.
The most thoughtful changes are for people who just want some sleep. You can now skip breakfast for a coffee and croissant before landing, and pre-order your entrée up to 18 hours before departure, closer to takeoff than any other U.S. carrier allows. There’s a new Missoni Mini pillow, which will be introduced in early 2027, alongside a winter amenity kit called, fittingly, Winter Elsewhere. More than 200 flight attendants spent 14 months and 36 trial flights testing each new addition, down to the tea service. You can read more about Delta One in Delta’s news hub.
FOR YOUR CALENDAR
👔 Brooks Reitz and Erin Reitz will be in New York this weekend for an E.M. Reitz pop-up at 180 The Store in Tribeca. (Friday 10/23 and Saturday 10/24 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
🥿 There’s a major closet sale happening at 102 Frankling Street in Tribeca this weekend, with 16 sellers including Allegra Lorenzotti, SORBARA'S, The Endless Hunt, and more. “Prada, The Row, Chanel, and so much more.” (Saturday, 10/24 from noon to 6 p.m/)
🥪 Annie Faye Cheng is making lamb belly porchetta sandwiches on ACQ Bread this weekend. Onion jam! Fennel Relish! (Sunday, 10/25 from noon to 2 p.m.)
📖 Delia Cai is hosting a mixer for publishing and book people next week at Monsieur. “Whether you’re interested in working in publishing, want to meet other folks who already work in books, OR just love reading and talking about books, we’d love to get to know you.” (Tuesday, 10/27 from 6 to 9 p.m.)
🎤 Tiny Gun (Kareem Rahma’s band) has a show next month at Night Club 101. (Thursday, 11/5)
The Angel’s Emily Wilson is moving back to Los Angeles. The food writer announced this via a bagel collaboration with Gertie. I reached out to her this morning to find out the reason behind the move. “I’m from New York, so I’ll always be a New Yorker, in a way, but this past year back in Brooklyn I’ve deeply missed the community I built in Los Angeles. The LA food world is a well of inspiration for me, and I can’t wait to get back to it. I already have so many ideas I want to move on and stories I want to tell. And if I learned anything from experimenting with The Angel in New York, it’s that it belongs in LA.”
J. Crew’s latest campaign focuses on their suits and stars Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy. I watched the campaign video in front of my Moccamaster this morning, and laughed out loud. The video shows Ben, John, and Martin as goofy J.Crew employees – there are penis jokes, there is coffee spilling on customers, and Ben does a Paul McCartney accent while pretending to be James Bond. Before my coffee finished brewing, I emailed J.Crew’s CMO Julia Collier for comment.
ES: Why are you choosing this moment to market suits? Is it a big time for them sales-wise?
JC: “We are seeing real momentum around our suiting, especially in younger men, who are wearing suits in so many ways: casually, formally, for work and beyond. This campaign was our way of embracing tailoring with a renewed spirit. Suits are becoming an expression of personal style rather than simply a uniform and J.Crew has a storied history in this category that we wanted to celebrate.
The Ludlow was one of the defining suits of the 2010s, and tailoring has always been core to the DNA of the men’s brand. The fact that we offer an approachable entry point, both in experience and price, while having incredible quality and fit really is something to feel very proud about.
This campaign is about reestablishing that authority and reminding customers that J.Crew is a destination for suiting. This is not a flash-in-the-pan moment for us; it is a long-term commitment to one of our most important categories.”
ES: This campaign feels a little edgy for J. Crew (penis joke, sales people slacking off). What was the math that went into working with these guys?
JC: “Suiting can feel intimidating or overly serious, and we wanted to loosen up the category and remove some of that barrier to entry. Please Don’t Destroy has such a specific comedic voice and a strong connection with the younger audience we want to reach, so it was important that we gave them the freedom to be themselves and push the idea.
We didn’t want to work with them and then water down their humor until it sounded like something written by J.Crew. The starting point was simply the guys working as suit experts in the store fitting men in their first J.Crew suits, and they took that premise and completely made it their own.
It also gave us a fun way to play with the very relatable experience of buying a suit: not knowing your measurements, trying on the completely wrong size or figuring out which fit is actually right for you. There was a great level of trust and collaboration throughout the process. The humor pushes the edge, but it makes the category feel more accessible, more memorable, and much more relevant to their audience.”
Gone Bananas Bread has opened a banana bread shop next to the Rockefeller Center skating rink. Their site says that they’ll also be opening a Bryant Park location soon. In a conversation with New York magazine earlier this year, Estee Stanley – interior designer and founder of Gone Bananas Bread – described her loaves as luxury banana bread. “It’s Gucci.” Where the site lists ingredients, the answer is: “Not telling you!” Where it lists calories, it says: “It’s better you don’t know.”
In a world where personal chefs become viral TikTok celebrities who land Netflix deals and write about the waste generated from yacht trips for independent literary magazines, the next logical step in wealthy households is to have more staff members sign NDAs. Guy Trebay reported on the uptick in landscapers, housekeepers, butlers, tutors, and private chefs being asked to sign lengthy NDAs by wealthy homes. This doesn’t surprise me – with group texts and Close Friends on Instagram, it feels like it’s easier than ever to share details about strangers’ homes. The NYT quotes Dara Yates, the founder of the Seaside Staffing Company, a California-based, national employment agency specializing in providing nannies and other domestic employees to the wealthy: “I’ve been in this space for 43 years. What was once a contractual agreement a paragraph long can now run 15 pages.” This reminds me of something an unnamed source said in Bridget Read’s New York magazine story about internet privacy earlier this year: “Everyone who is smart is paranoid right now.” There’s an uptick in people – even not famous people – buying their apartments with LLCs and shell companies, restaurants are banning Meta Glasses, brides are asking guests not to take photos, and I heard about some Hamptons homes who had a cell phone basket at the front door last summer. Last month, Derek Thompson wrote an excellent essay about the death of hosting in America – the share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70% since 1975. Although Thompson doesn’t emphasize the idea of paranoia, I wonder if this extreme focus on privacy makes it so socializing/hosting no longer feels worth it to some people. The top comment on Trebay’s Times story reads: “Billionaire tech bros are selling and buying our information to train their AIs while they want their workers to not even speak of their names. We should demand payment from billionaires for appropriating our information and humanity knowledge and history for their selfish profit.”
Alex Hartman, the creator of viral meme account Nolita Dirtbag, is starting a media company called Dead Horse in hopes of going “Rupert Murdoch mode.” Dead Horse has four initial launch projects: “A talk show in which Hartman mock-scientifically analyzes whether guests are more millennial or zoomer, a hyperlocal news show with a Claymation host, a subletting service and a members-only video chat he’s pitching as Raya meets Chat Roulette.” Hartman’s partner in Dead Horse is Jacob Price, who is also Ben Dietz’s consulting partner.
This morning on Fashion People, Lauren Sherman and designer Emily Dawn Long discussed the concept of butt cleavage (a sartorial suggestion in Long’s newest collection). As part of Long’s recent NYFW show, she also showed a short film called The Crack of Dawn. A few hours after listening to the pod, I read a story on SSENSE about butt cleavage. Bodycare brand Soft Services was onto this trend early — plenty of their original imagery featured instructions for using their products to clear and exfoliate your butt. You can get a $240 butt facial at Bespoke Surgery in Greenwich Village and Raquel New York offers a $660 back facial. I already said this yesterday, but my vision of 2026 Holiday Party Season is getting clearer and clearer each day.
Work for Lynette Nylander! Harper’s BAZAAR is hiring a “culturally fluent, style-obsessed” Fashion Writer.
Interior designer Christine Gachot (who has worked on restaurants from Jac’s on Bond to ACME) has teased some of her upcoming projects, including Igancio Mattos’s new spot and a new members’ club for JP Morgan Chase. God, I love being a Chase Sapphire customer, but I’m fine with drawing the line for JP Morgan members-only spaces at the airport lounge.
Coldhealing, a right-leaning anonymous Twitter account that provides commentary on topics around tech, dating, and how a certain slice of 20-somethings live, is publishing their first novel, First Kiss. Some people love them, some people hate them. Curious what kind of book they’d write.
1) need to see the delta amenity kit! 2) Angel spa food collab was mostly LA for a reason!!!
Annie is so talented. I think about her lapsang souchong ice cream all the time. It haunts me. It tastes like secrets told over campfire, wrapped in cream, revealed in hushed voices as it melts… For the last two summers it has the been the best ice cream I’ve had all year. Well worth the trip to the edge of the earth (where the BQE cuts off Carrol Gardned and Red Hook).