2016 Style / Lifestyle Writing Highlights
Over the course of this year, I’ve tried to think a lot about what “lifestyle” writing means. There are so-called lifestyle magazines, which create a vision of an ideal life through an editorial voice, article text and art direction. There are lifestyle media verticals online, informing you as much about how to behave as what to wear. Then there’s the word itself. In the early 20th century in the context of psychology “lifestyle” meant an individual’s approach to life’s problems: love, friends, and work.
I don’t have any more than a provisional definition of lifestyle today. I think it retains a sense of communicating how to live, presenting methods of coping with existence. It often comments on the domestic or routine. But it is also driven by commodities, concerning material consumption as well as a philosophical (or moralistic) viewpoint. Proposing a right way to live means that there is also a wrong one, correct ideas and goods to consume versus incorrect. This genre more often documents an acceptable, fashionable lifestyle than it does the other side (part of its appeal is aspirational voyeurism). Good taste instead of bad.
The best lifestyle writing (IMO!!!) includes a whiff of the action of life as it is lived, The Way We Live Now, either through the personal narrative of the writer or the vicarious experience of its (often atypical) subjects and characters. It pinpoints what culture at large perceives as valuable or important at a given moment as well as questions it.
Lifestyle writing occupies a niche. Cloistered as it is in gendered print magazines and left as a category off of high-profile best-of lists even in the more literal form of “fashion” or “style”, it deserves more consideration. Below is a slew of unordered and only haphazardly curated pieces that have stood out to me and other people I asked as representative of great lifestyle writing in 2016. Please argue, add pieces, or submit your own definition.
My Son, Prince of Fashion by Michael Chabon (GQ)
The Holiday Lunch by Kim France (Medium)
Say No to the Dress by Sapna Maheshwari & Beimeng Fu (BuzzFeed)
Patagonia’s Philosopher King by Nick Paumgarten (New Yorker)
Panty Raid by Noreen Malone (New York Magazine)
Inside Glossier by Nitasha Tiku (BuzzFeed)
The Joy and the Horror of Vest Couples by Rebecca Jennings (Racked)
On Female Fuccboi Style by Mary HK Choi (Racked)
Making House by Rachel Cusk (NYT Magazine)
The Wife Monsters and Me by Miranda Popkey (Catapult)
One Wild Week with Bon Iver in Berlin by Steve Marsh (Pitchfork)
My Wine Accumulation by Navneet Alang (Hazlitt)
David’s Ankles by Sam Anderson (NYT Magazine)
Meet the Mysterious Socialites Behind LA’s Wildest New Party House by Hadley Meares (Curbed)
