Luxury

What does luxury really mean? Contributing editor Romany Williams kicks us off with this open-ended question in her article for this issue. Inside, you’ll find a chorus of answers, each an equally valid interpretation of a word that is unusually charged.

For Steff Yotka, head of content at e-commerce platform Ssense, “true luxury is something that stands the test of your emotional time” — that shirt you bought with your best friend, your big brother’s soft sweater that you’ve kept since childhood. For contributing writer Dave Schilling, it’s the ability to tailor a piece of clothing until it perfectly molds to your body. For author Melissa Febos, luxury lies in the freedom to dress as you please, something she’s found in midlife.

Luxury, as defined by the writers and artists in these pages, is personal, intimate and within reach. The most luxurious objects and experiences pierce the surface, change us from within. Luxury is something we feel, both on a physical and emotional level, as Alyson Zetta Williams writes in an essay about the transformative effects of layering your lips with slick gloss.

A sub-theme that came up for this edition of our Luxury issue (our second to date) was beauty — how we care for and tend to our bodies. Photographer JJ Geiger went around L.A. to capture an overlooked luxury: the private world of bathrooms, places of ease and escape, where we bathe and soak and primp ourselves. And staff writer Julissa James spoke with artists and aestheticians around the city about their own beauty rituals, which became portraits of who these people are and how they’ve chosen to live. As Julissa writes: “A skin, hair or makeup routine is never just a skin, hair or makeup routine.”

Hair artist Tanya “Nena” Melendez has a memory of being a child and being confused by her mother’s habit of dyeing her hair and switching up her makeup all the time. “Why can’t she just be normal?” Melendez asked herself. It wasn’t until later that she understood that grooming was a form of “shape-shifting” for her mother, to gain access to spaces “she wouldn’t otherwise have been able to access.”

Melendez describes the two stunning hairpieces that she made for this issue as a kind of “armor” that both protect and heal their wearers as they move through the world. Drawing on her spiritual practice, Ifá, she incorporated imagery from nature into the pieces: an alligator and bee carved from gold, a stream of beads like a cascading waterfall, a rose in full bloom. It is the stuff of this Earth that gives us life, which is really the ultimate luxury.

Elisa Wouk Almino
Editorial Director

Image logo by Melissa Deckert For The Times