The SSENSE 2021 Year In Review

In her profile of Mina Kimes, Emma Carmichael describes all the reasons the ESPN senior writer and NFL analyst has amassed her own fan base: an easy conversationalist, a great listener, an incredibly distinct and infectious laugh, hair that looks created in a lab to be seen on television. Kimes is, as they say, a natural.

Much of Los Angeles-based photographer Reynaldo Rivera's work is about portraying parties—or, as he tells writer Devan Diaz, "people that really made use of this city." Here, Diaz recalls the greatest party she's ever been to with 36 hours in his beloved city.

On babies, flowers, and poetry that exists outside of time, Tau Lewis speaks with Taylor Renee Aldridge about creating work that's always generative.

“Obviously,” writes Rachel Seville Tashjian, “the most romantic movies are the ones in which someone is trying to kill Michael Douglas.” Obviously, indeed! In this Valentine’s Day collection, six writers gave us six love letters to friends, lovers, films—anything that can speak to the facts that hold their hearts and the fictions that can break it.

Come for the lip gloss, stay for the gossip—Haley Mlotek unpacks the truth about having a face: “As I sit with what I estimate to be nine dollars worth of purple conditioning mask combed through my hair…I am speaking on the phone with Geoffrey G. Jones, a business historian at Harvard University, who studies the globalization of the beauty industry.”

Synthesizing clay and textiles, a visual dialogue between ceramicist Sharif Farrag and the best of FW21.

“I do wear a designer, but then I have to wear something that's more casual to balance it out. It's always the balance and why I never want people to assume any one thing about me when they look at me. I want them to question what I am or what I'm trying to say.” Costume designer Miyako Bellizzi unpacks her styling ethos, from personal to scene-stealing.

Are you good at keeping secrets? Like everyone, sometimes yes and sometimes no. 21 questions with the late Eve Babitz, and an intro by Natasha Stagg.

Here, in homage to the eternal joys of I Spy—of seeking and finding—we’ve asked Mat + Kat to compile still life images with highlights from our FW21 offering. Can you spot them?

The air dancers created by Daniele Frazier and shot by Todd Oldham are made of atmosphere, in every sense of the word — buoyed by air and billowing in wind, these large beauties contain the playfulness of flying a kite, the silliness of one of those big car wash guys, and then, somehow, the seriousness of contemplating what it means to make a piece of art that is larger than life.

What does it mean to be a kitchen person? Not everyone might recognize the quality in themselves, but everyone knows where to find the ones that do. To make a kitchen your own, writes Dayna Tortorici, means something more than the simple fact of nourishing your body: it is both comfort and the promise of same.

Keep your clothes, cherish and repair them, so that you can wear them forever. Writer Naomi Skwarna on the unlimited potential of the mending renaissance.

“I’ve taken an odd sort of comfort in the figure of the spiral,” writes Sam Adler-Bell, “which seems to represent my fear, my desire for control, and the means of escaping them both.” Follow him as he goes round and around, exploring this ever present shape.

“In conversation, he stays open, moves on in nothing flat. It’s the Jacobs way. ‘I think there's a kind of audacious, active pleasure I get out of saying: Yeah, I have had three hair transplants. Yeah, I go to a dermatologist to get filler. Yeah, I have been in rehab. Yeah, I was a heroin addict. Yeah, I had orgies. Yeah, my mother was in Bellevue. Come for me now,’ he tells me.”