I had found him a few months earlier through a short film priv.y agency made in New York - Noah Berg’s team, whose work I had been paying attention to for a while. There was something about him that caught immediately - the look, the way he carried himself in front of a camera, an ease - and I went home that night and dove into his music. Three hours later I had listened to most of the catalogue, sat with the range of his voice, the specificity of his lyricism, the architecture of his songwriting, and I sent him a message. We are the same age, and there was a strange certainty I had, before we had even spoken, that we would understand each other.

I sent him a quick message about Tibi Close Friends - that I produced this series, that I would love to collaborate if he was open to it. He was. I emailed him and his manager the next day, and we set up a call. From the very first conversation, Sid had a clear sense of what he wanted this to be - which is to say, he wanted it to be his. He did not want a standard live set. He wanted the project to paint a portrait that went beyond the music, to reveal something of who he is as a person and not just as a performer. Which was music to our ears, because Matt and I had been wanting to make a Close Friends project of exactly this kind for some time - something more all-encompassing, more documentarian in spirit, that opened the frame on the artist’s interior life rather than restricting it to the song.

It helps that Sid has had the kind of life that does not condense well into a one-line bio. He was born in Portland, raised in Sydney, went to school in Shanghai, and at some point in there dropped out to get in a van and drive across America. He is based in Brooklyn now. When you ask someone like that where they are from, the answer is a small autobiography. You cannot make a quick-hits live set about that person and feel like you’ve represented him. You need the longer form - the documentary, the conversation, the room to let the answers find their actual shape.

If you have read my piece on Evan Blix, you will recognize a thread here. I wrote in that one about a question I had been carrying for years - whether the soul of the music I grew up on, the music my parents played in the house, Bob Dylan and Neil Young and the Stones and Simon & Garfunkel, would ever come back through someone of my generation. Evan was my first real answer. Sid is my second. They are very different artists, and the comparison is not meant to collapse the difference between them - but they share something, a seriousness about craft that does not feel performative, a willingness to write slowly and produce carefully, an inheritance from another era that is being absorbed rather than imitated. Sid is one of the artists carrying this lineage right now. Listen for ten minutes and you will hear it.

We ended up making two things, intertwined. The first is a documentary interview - staged at 666 Studios, the questions written to get past music and into who Sid is as a person: where he comes from, what shaped him, what he carries, where he is going. He was generous with the answers. The one I keep returning to is the way he talked about songwriting - that a song he writes today might mean one thing to him in the moment, and then six months or three years later, after enough living has accumulated on top of it, the song will quietly turn into something else. The same words, the same chords, but the meaning underneath has reorganized itself. There was something honest about hearing him say that, because it cut against the assumption most people hold about songwriters - that the song is fixed at the moment of composition, that whatever it meant then is what it means now. Sid’s answer was the opposite, and that kind of statement, made by an artist about his own work, is the sort of thing you only earn through years of honest writing. It is the difference between a musician who is still learning his instrument and a musician who has started to learn what the instrument is for.

The most affecting moment in the interview was when he talked about Dirt. The song is about a friend who passed away, and when it first arrived, it was a heavy thing to carry - closer to grief than to anything else. In our conversation, however, he said that it does not feel that way anymore. That, with enough time and enough living, it has turned into something closer to gratitude. A way of keeping someone close, rather than a way of mourning them. There is a kind of seasonal logic to that - winter does not vanish, it thaws - that feels especially right for a project landing in May.

The second part of the project is a stripped-back three-song live set, recorded in a clean, wide, west-facing corner of 666 Studios, on an upright piano we found for free on Craigslist. Picking up a free Craigslist piano in New York City is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. The 500-lbs piano lived on the sixth floor of a pre-war walkup in Williamsburg. We got it down six narrow, slippery flights of stairs, into a van, over the Williamsburg Bridge, and into NoHo. Six hours, door to door. Our team of hero movers from Lugg (not a sponsor) deserves a shout-out for getting that thing through three doorways without losing a finger or a key. There is a version of Dirt within the live set - voice and that piano, very little else - that I think is one of the best things we have captured in the history of the series. I have heard it more times than I can count at this point, and it has not lost anything. If anything, it has grown.

There is one creative decision that runs across all of it - the documentary, the live set, the photography - that I want to name on its own, because it is the through-line of the project: we shot everything in stark, high-contrast black and white. The choice was not aesthetic for its own sake. It is the same instinct that brought the live set down to voice and piano, now applied to the visual language. The piano without the band. The face without the color. Both decisions are about subtraction - about trusting that what is left, once enough has been taken away, is enough. Black and white refuses to do the emotional work for you. There is no warm orange light to signal intimacy, no cool blue to signal sadness. You have to read the person - the way Sid’s mouth moves on a long note, the way his hands settle on the keys between phrases, the small shifts color tends to bury under its own noise. Our reference deck was built around the photographers and filmmakers who taught us what the absence of color can do. Anton Corbijn, whose portraits of musicians look like the artists are standing inside their own songs, Gordon Parks, who insisted that black and white was not a constraint but a deepening, Ari Marcopoulos for the intimate proximity, and William Claxton for the patience of the frame. And on the moving-image side, D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back - a film that, more than fifty years later, remains the standard for what a portrait of a musician on the move can be - alongside the cinematic aspiration of films like Moonlight and There Will Be Blood, where the contrast and the composition do as much narrative work as the dialogue.

For the photography, I shot Sid across four worlds, all in that same visual language. The first was Niagara - from the night I described at the top of this piece, capturing his on-stage persona, the version of him that takes a room and bends it. The second was on the streets of SoHo, the version of him that lives inside the swirl of New York, styled by Emmalee in pieces from our Spring 2026 collection. The third and fourth were on set at 666 Studios - during the interview and during the performance - the most stripped-back of the four. These were the ones that illuminated Sid being Sid: just sitting with himself, talking honestly, not performing anything other than the bare necessities of the task. The four sets of images are different in tone, but they belong to the same person, and when you see them together they make a fuller picture of him than any one of them would on its own. Format as portrait, in four voices.

A note on the team. Matt and I produced this one almost end-to-end - the set design, the piano logistics, the production, the direction, the photography. Sadie, our production assistant, has been a force on the cutdown and teaser side, the work that does not get billed as the project itself but is, in a real sense, what makes the project travel. Seth, our audio engineer, did an extraordinary job on the song audio for the live set - the mix is clean and patient and sits exactly where it needs to, which is not as easy as it sounds when you are working with voice and piano in a studio that was not built for recording. Emmalee handled styling across all the shoots - crafting a beautiful narrative through the lens of silhouette and fabrication.

This is our ninth Tibi Close Friends, and it is clear by now that a shape has started to emerge through the production of each successive project. Bebe Stockwell taught us what a live set could feel like in our space. Brunello showed us what was possible when we worked with someone who runs his own label and answers to no one. Black Hibiscus (JayJay and Moye) and Leyla extended the format. Evan Blix gave me my first proof that the music I love most was alive in someone my age. And Sid, in turn, gave me the second. He is not at the start of his career. He is not at the peak of it either. He is in what I keep thinking of as the before-they-were-them stretch — the part of an artist’s life where the work is powerful, the craft is sharpening visibly in real time, and the larger thing they will become is still on the other side of a horizon no one can quite see yet. It is, in my opinion, the most interesting time to make something with somebody.

And finally, thank you Sid, for trusting us with this one, for showing up to a free Craigslist piano with the same focus you would have brought to Lincoln Center, and for the way you sang Dirt. The full project is live now at Tibi.com, with extended photography and behind-the-scenes available on the Tibi Creative Lab Instagram and the live set on YouTube. If you have made it this far, I would suggest watching the live set first. And then the interview. In that order.

*Sid plays the Bowery Ballroom on July 12, and we hope to see you there: tickets.*

“Our lives are shaped by what we love.” That is the name of the Odyssey track that opens this month’s curation, and it is one of those one-liners that has been passed around for so long that its origins have blurred. I came upon the song the way I arrive at most things that turn out to matter (to me), by accident, while watching an episode of The White Lotus - half-listened-to, the title alone enough to make me stop what I was doing. It is not often that we are handed a thesis statement in the form of a song name, so when we are, the right thing to do is to use it.

May, for us at Tibi, is going to be a month of motion. Cars and planes and the kind of late nights that fold quietly into the next morning without a clear seam between them. A playlist made for a month like this carries the texture of the times - songs picked between flights, in the back of a car at one in the morning, on a walk that was supposed to be twenty minutes and turned into ninety. Curation, when it is honest, is less a matter of selection than it is of listening - to where you have been, who you have been with, and what has been quietly playing while the rest of life happened. You do not build a playlist. You collect one. The shape of what you love does the rest.

Dirt, by Sid Simons, is the song I have been carrying for a while. Sid is a Tibi Close Friend (releasing 5.05.2026), and naturally a personal friend. He is one of those artists whose work does not posture - there is no performance of seriousness, no signaling, just the quiet evidence of someone who has paid attention to his craft for long enough that the craft has started paying attention back. He wrote Dirt about a friend who passed away, and when he first composed it, the song was a heavy thing to carry. He has said, more recently, that it does not feel that way anymore. That it has turned, somewhere along the way, into something closer to gratitude. I think about that often - how a song written from the deepest part of grief can, with enough time and enough living, become a way of keeping someone close rather than a way of mourning them. There is a seasonal logic to it that feels especially right for May. Winter does not vanish. It thaws, and what was frozen becomes part of the ground again, and the ground grows things. There is a version of Dirt (snippet above) on the way that I am not yet able to talk about in full - a stripped-down piano cut, voice and keys and very little else, recorded in a way that finds whatever was always underneath the production. I have heard it once, in a single room, and have not stopped thinking about it since. More on that soon. For now, the original is on the playlist, and I would suggest paying attention.

If Sid’s Dirt is the song I have been carrying, then Ronnie Lane’s Roll On Babe is the song that has been carrying me. Ronnie Lane is a patron saint of a specific kind of leaving - the kind that is not aggrieved or nostalgic, that does not need to make a scene of itself, that is simply the sound of someone making peace with the next thing while the previous is still in view. There is a gentleness in his voice that does not soften the truth of the song, which is that we are always, in some quiet way, on our way somewhere else. In a month built around movement, I cannot think of a better companion. I have been listening to it in cars, at the ends of nights, on the way to whatever May is becoming.

And finally, Whiskey Woman, by Flamin’ Groovies, which closes the playlist on purpose. The Flamin’ Groovies are one of those bands you discover late and feel slightly cheated by - like there has been a whole shelf of records you should have been listening to for years and nobody bothered to tell you. Whiskey Woman is the kind of song that does not announce itself. It just rolls in, takes the room, and leaves before anyone has the presence of mind to ask its name. Good for driving. Better for the very specific hour after the dinner has ended and before the night has decided what it wants to be.

A couple of honorable mentions on the way out. Bon Iver’s live take of HEY, MA from Pitchfork 2023 has a looseness that the studio version does not, and the looseness is the point - there is something about a live-recording that lets you hear the room. And, Agalisiga’s Tsitsutsa Tsigesv, sung in Cherokee, is one of those songs that does not need to be understood to be felt, a reminder that meaning is not always a matter of vocabulary.

Put it on in the back of a car at one in the morning. Or in a kitchen on a Saturday. Or on a walk you meant to be twenty minutes but turned into something greater. And let the things you love do the rest.

Knowing the color math of a destination helps get you in the right mindset, for what to pack, how to layer. I sucked at math in school, don’t worry, I’ve kept it all simple. The numbers in the two bracketts [ ] are the color rings that serve as the foundation for what goes in the luggage. The pluses outside the brackets are the add ons, and the smaller numbers indicate the accents. If there’s a little “f” by a number it means the accent is a “fashion friction” add-on, not a foundational. Things that give good ick.

If you need direction on reading the ring, you can reference the p. 138 in The Creative Pragmatist book here.

For my original story “color math by destination for packing” I gave the formulas for many destinations that I’ve visited throughout the world. I’ll keep adding to them - many of you have sent requests for additional recommendations. The math is to help a CREATIVE PRAGMATIST navigate wildly disparate destinations. When I visit a location, I build my suitcase around the TONE (the vibe of the people, the music, the hustle or lack of on the streets); the TEMPERATURE and the TERRAIN (are we talking burnt orange sunsets, grey clouds or turquoise skies?).

To give you an idea how your favorite item in the closet gets a switch up - depending - I’m going to build everything around this one suit:

Ok, let’s start with these two locations. It’s funny, when I’m sketching I can literally feel how I’ll be in these different places. I’ve chosen two destinations that are predicated on the idea of just really relaxing. There’s water, sports, and good food involved. But the terrain and the tone wildly different. Breakfast and a day lakeside at Villa D’este, there’s a casual ease but a polish to the area. Marble floors, green lawns, and deep blue water. The core of the suitcase is the classic 2’s, and accents of color and the refinement of a chic black make it feel just right. And whilst I’m always a fan of a good “ish” of ring 3, those neutrals that tone down any brights, at Lake Como I crave a bit of “crispness.” Here on Necker Island though, the water is a bright turquoise, the birds are brightly colored, iguanas abound, and poolside you’re apt to see some flashes of gold embroidery but decidedly chill. A bright colored bikini, the open jacket as a shirt and a straw hat (a bit of cowboy vibes for me, always) make me feel like I just nailed the moment.

Lake Como, Italy Necker Island

This same suit, broken up in myriad ways, takes me to many places and certainly don’t require bodies of water nearby to feel at home:

1. St. Barts. Lots of yachts, shoes that want to be chic but absolutely made for walking, a “touch” of bohemian - but just a touch, like beads but paired with a slouchy knit and ballooned seersucker - nothing that indicates I’m headed to a 3-day music festival, but the spirit is there all the same. The color math is a little different than Lake Como above, I found black really never made it’s way out of my luggage when I once made the mistake of bringing too much - but those ring 2 classics in styles decidedly more chill, maybe even a bit sexier and less tailored with pieces I picked up on the street, like beads, a fun mini skirt or bikini - felt just right.

2. Dinner in Milan. My simple black tube dress - a strappy minimal sandal feels just right with the “shirt blazer” tossed on the shoulders sitting outside devouring a bowl of pasta. This feels dressed up, but hardly, at the same time. During the day it’s important that a jacket like this is pliable enough to tie around the waist. Bonus. 1s and 2s rule Milan, the saturated 4’s are fashion moments, and the 3’s are just a very light touch - save those for places like Greve and Florence where you’ll wear them in abundance.

3. Nantucket. Preppy was invented here, it’s a way of life not a handbook. All the same, full stop it’s not a look for me. But there’s a reason why it defines the area - the crisp air, the racquet sports, clams by the water call for the sturdiness of fabrics like piquets, chinos, and canvas. Mixing in a slouchy polo shirt with the pant here gives it the good prep; the sneakers a must without fully conforming. An ironic nod to the color tropes feels just right. See?

4. Castellana Grotte. I’m staying at my favorite home/hotel abode Casa Caroseno -

   Think sandy white architecture, fields for picnics, a cow farm nearby that makes the local cheese, the most incredible dinners at Osteria del Caroseno, cobblestone streets in town and day excursions to Puglia.

5. A weekend in L.A, I’m picking the Beverly Hills Hotel - it’s an old school scene and I love figuring out how to feel just like myself no matter who’s sitting next to you poolside. There’s just a real ease that comes in knowing who you are and how to show it. Figuring that out by destination is just beyond. Truly.

I have watched people I love go through this - good people, talented people, the kind you meet and genuinely wonder why the thing they want has not found them yet. And I keep telling them the same thing, because I believe it with everything I have: stop looking. Focus on yourself, on your work, on the things that make you feel like the best version of who you are, and the rest will come. They tell me they are doing that. And I believe that they believe they are doing that. But I also know, in the way you can know something about a person you love without them having to say it, that they are not. I know this because I have been there, and still am there in some respects - performing the posture of someone who has let go while still gripping underneath, still scanning the room, still carrying the question in the back of their mind like a low hum they have mistaken for silence. And the thing that is desired - which I believe is coming, eventually, fully - can feel the difference.

The question, then, is not whether this gap exists - it does, in all of us, at different times and in different forms - but why. Why does the performance fail even when the performer is convinced? What is it about genuine surrender that cannot be faked, no matter how well-rehearsed the impression?

The answer, or at least the one that has settled most clearly in my mind, can be felt in water.

You cannot float by trying to float.

This is not a philosophical statement. It is physics. The human body is, on average, slightly less dense than water. We are built to float. The water wants to hold us - it is willing and able and has been doing this for everything that has ever entered it. Buoyancy is not something you earn. It is something you allow. And yet, for most people, the first time they try to float - and for many people, every time after - they sink. Not because their body cannot do it. Because their body will not let itself.

The act of trying to float is almost entirely composed of the things that prevent floating. You tense your core to stay rigid. You lift your head to keep your face above the surface. You kick, subtly, involuntarily, to maintain position. Every one of these instincts is rational - your body is trying to protect you from drowning - and every one of them is the reason you are going under. Tension increases density. A lifted head pushes the hips down. Kicking disrupts the very surface that was trying to hold you. You are fighting the water while asking it to carry you, and the water, patient and indifferent and honest in a way that humans rarely are, responds not to what you want but to what you are actually doing.

And here is the part that I find most relevant, and most difficult: you can fake everything except this. You can lie on your back with your arms out and your eyes closed and tell yourself, tell the sky, tell anyone watching that you have surrendered. You can look, from the outside, like the picture of calm. But if your jaw is clenched, if your core is bracing, if some deep and involuntary part of you is still negotiating with the water rather than trusting it - you sink. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but you sink. The water is not fooled by the performance. It is afraid of your wanting - not the wanting itself, but the tension it produces, the invisible rigidity that disguises itself as peace but displaces the very thing trying to support you.

I think this is how a great deal of life works, not just in relationships but in creative work, in careers, in the pursuit of nearly anything that matters. The paradox is almost cruel in its consistency: the thing you want most is often the thing most sensitive to the energy of wanting. A job you chase with visible hunger. A creative breakthrough you try to force by working harder, longer, more deliberately. A sense of calm you attempt to manufacture by performing the rituals of calm without actually being calm. In each case, the trying is the obstacle. Not because effort is wrong - you have to get in the water, you have to show up, you have to do the work - but because there is a difference between doing the work and gripping the outcome. The outcome can tell the difference even when you cannot.

The people I know who seem to attract the things they want - relationships, opportunities, creative momentum - are not lucky, and they are not passive. They work, relentlessly, at being the best version of themselves. But there is a moment, somewhere in the process, where they stop monitoring the results. They stop checking the surface for evidence that it is working. They stop clenching against the possibility that it might not. And in that moment - not before, not through willpower, not through affirmation - they float. Not because they stopped caring. Because they finally, honestly, stopped gripping. And the water, which had been waiting the entire time, held them.

The honesty is the hard part. You can tell yourself you have let go. You can say it to your friends, to your therapist, to yourself in the mirror. But your body knows. The water knows. The room knows, the work knows, the person across the table knows. There is a frequency to genuine surrender that cannot be replicated by someone who is still holding on and calling it peace. And the only way through - the only way to actually float - is to confront the wanting honestly, to admit that it is still there, humming beneath the performance, and then to do the genuinely terrifying thing, which is to let go of it for real. Not because you do not care about the outcome. But because the outcome is not yours to control, and your grip is the thing keeping it away.

I am not immune to this. I have spent long stretches gripping things I swore I had released - projects, expectations, versions of my life that I was not yet willing to let dissolve. And the grip always felt like discipline, like focus, like caring enough to hold on. It never felt like the problem. But the water does not distinguish between holding on out of love and holding on out of fear. It feels the tension either way, and it responds the same way either way. No amount of convincing yourself otherwise changes the physics.

The people who float are not the ones who stopped wanting. They are the ones who stopped pretending they had.

I’m going to begin here with an excerpt from Almost Reckless. This will help frame the mindset behind this discussion:

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. We were like free-range chickens, allowed to wander, explore. Peck around at various opportunities. All ones that individually made no sense and were no indicator of my future. But totaled up, they told a far different story. No one asked me at age 12 what I wanted to be when I grew up, and they certainly didn’t craft my extra-curricular activities and align my tutors to ensure the right college so I could get the right advanced degree for the right job in the right corner. And somehow, at the same time, I wasn’t aimless. Somehow all of this added up to founding Tibi, what’s now America’s largest and longest standing independent designer fashion brand.

Jim, my brother-in-law, has his own law firm after spending 25 years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office. My sister called me recently, she was watching Jim in closing statements at trial. She said watching him pace in front of the jurors, every skill he’d honed teaching high-school history in between college and law school to earn money for tuition was brought to bear on a jury that had very complex information broken down for them as if they were 15 year old students. Couple that with Jim’s time spent coaching his son’s basketball leagues, the jury was fed this information with the enthusiasm of an NBA half-time locker room session. And yes, Jim went to Princeton undergrad, but so have thousands of other lawyers. Yet he’s one of the most successful lawyers in the country, while others are not.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review titled “Soft Skills Matter Now More Than Ever” articulates that companies prioritize this skill set when they’re hiring for long-term retention. Remember, companies, the great ones, are never stagnant. Truer now than ever. Because for someone to stay and thrive at a company, they have to be able to see the bigger picture, pivot, and grow.

If you look up the definition of “softskills” it’s presented as the non-technical, intangible personality traits that determine how someone interacts with others and behaves in a business situation.

I asked AI how I can acquire them:

Utter bullshit.

I wonder, is the specificity of this so enticing to people? The answer above wraps it up so neatly. Yet I’m 100% sure this is not where life happens. And softskills can only be acquired when you’re living your life, they can’t be preordained. They’re happening at you when you don’t even know it. But, in order to receive them, you have to be in the right state of mind. Present. Almost Reckless lays out a blueprint for how to get in the right frame of mind to collect, identify and codify your soft skills.

And think on this. If softskills are that important to a company, maybe you can understand how important they are for us in our lives? If you are the company of you, then being able to learn, grow, and pivot is an essential skill set. Especially with the acceleration of change. Clear-eyed and steady wins the race, simply because if you are those two things, you’ve already won.

If you love supporting independent booksellers (we do) then you can order the book BY CLICKING HERE:

Joking, but not really….

Powell is the manager and pastry chef of The Wren, the pub she opened in early 2025 at 1712 Aliceanna Street in Fells Point with her husband, chef Will Mester, and their business partner Rosemary Liss. Mester is one of the more decorated figures in the Baltimore food scene — culinary school dropout, former cook at Woodberry Kitchen, co-founder of Le Comptoir du Vin, which earned a Bon Appétit Hot 10 nod in 2019. He is also, by his own account, a man who had been falling more and more out of love with restaurants - bored by the demands for sleek presentation and show-offy technique, drawn increasingly toward something simpler, more honest, more in line with the kind of place he had come to love while traveling across Europe.

The building helped make the decision. 1712 Aliceanna Street is a circa-1890 rowhouse in Fells Point that had spent 44 years as Birds of a Feather, a beloved hole-in-the-wall Scotch bar with a devoted local following. When its owner retired, Mester and his partners bought it with a commitment that seemed both obvious and, in a neighborhood that has lost more than a few of its defining places to gutting and reinvention, genuinely rare: to leave it mostly alone. The original 19th-century wooden bar remains. The pressed tin ceiling — amber-hued, extraordinary — remains. The terracotta tile floor, the oak millwork, the back-lounge fireplace. What changed is relatively minor, and deliberately so.

The name carries, as names tend to do, a story. The wren holds a particular symbolic weight in Irish culture, and this is not an accident of branding. Mester has said of pubs that they are “one of the only public spaces left where anything deep or interesting happens,” and the concept of a pub as a vital third space - not work, not home, but somewhere in between, where a community gathers after christenings and funerals and nothing in particular - is what drove every decision made here. No QR codes. A chalkboard menu that changes daily, sometimes mid-service. No reservations were taken initially. And yet: The New York Times named The Wren one of the fifty best restaurants in America in 2025, the only entry from Maryland. Bon Appétit followed with its list of the year’s best new restaurants. Both publications essentially wrestled with the same delicious contradiction - this was never supposed to be a restaurant, and the food is far too good to pretend otherwise.

We were there on a Saturday evening in April. The room filled in the way a 40-seat pub fills - not crowded, but dense with warmth, every stool at the long oak bar occupied, conversations layering over the low crackle of the record player. Pints of Guinness and glasses of Scotch catch and absorb the amber light of the tin ceiling above as Mester himself is stationed at the end of the bar, moving with the deliberate calm of a man who has made his peace with exactly where he is. The chalkboard menu reads like a letter from somewhere in the pastoral British Isles: twelve dishes in chalk — Country Plate, Cold Roast Lamb with Bitter Leaves & Broccoli, Poulet Rouge & Boudin Blanc with Ramps, ½ Dozen Madeleines — written in a hand casual enough to suggest they might change before the night was out.

The Country Plate set the agenda for everything that followed. A white plate bearing a slice of an herb-studded, chicken terrine - tightly packed, a cross-section embodying patient work done earlier in the day - alongside something richer and closer to headcheese, a generous mound of butter dusted with fleur de sel, cornichons tumbled alongside, a dried prune, two radishes, a pool of grainy mustard. Nothing on the plate announced itself. It sat there asking to be eaten slowly, with bread, with conversation, with whatever was in the glass, in whatever order seemed right - and this is precisely the quality that separates great pub food from its approximation. Not the sophistication of the ingredients, though the ingredients here are sourced with genuine care, but the total absence of anxiety about how the food is received.

The Cold Roast Lamb, Bitter Leaves & Broccoli moved the table to a different register entirely. Radicchio and broccolini arranged with quiet authority above broad slices of beautifully pale, cold roast lamb, adorned with peas and capers, and a creamy dressing to pull everything together. The bitterness of the radicchio against the richness of the dressing, the lamb cool and yielding, the capers offering the occasional sharp punctuation. This dish was emblematic of the specific discipline that is the execution of cold food, done with intention, and requirings as much confidence as it does technique. This plate had both.

The Green Salad arrived the way a good green salad should - simply, without ceremony, as a kind of palate reset between courses - a thing easy to overlook and quietly essential in the way that only the most confident kitchens understand. It did its job completely.

And finally, we were greeted by the Poulet Rouge & Boudin Blanc, Ramps, the dish upon which the two burners in the back corner of the kitchen make their fullest argument. A pale boudin blanc, pan-seared to a golden skin with the kind of gentle snap that tells you the interior was made with care, curved over a pool of lentils that had absorbed the deep and patient jus upon which sat a piece of poulet rouge, its skin crisped to the russet color that only a heritage bird achieves, the fat having done exactly what it was supposed to. A streak of mustard on the side, an invitation rather than a directive. The whole thing landed on the table with the assurance of something that did not require explanation, and we did not offer any - just ate it, in the quiet way you eat food that has earned your full attention without asking for it.

The Wren is, by several measures, the least likely entry on any best-of list. No front of house. No tasting menu. No designed moment. Will Mester on two induction burners, Millie Powell baking madeleines to order in the back, Adam Estes pouring Scotch at the bar. What it has instead is something harder to manufacture and easier to recognize: the sense that the people running it genuinely believe in what they’re doing, that the food emerges from a set of convictions about what food is actually for, and that none of it requires your validation to be complete. What The Wren proves, quietly and without making a fuss, is that the strongest argument a place can make is simply to be exactly what it says it is. Mester has spent fifteen years figuring out what that looks like. Here, he finally found it

Dinner Tuesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. Bar seating first come, first served. Lounge via reservation. Minimal table service - eat your food when it arrives, before it’s cold. The menu says so, and they mean it.

I shot a live show a while back, an artist I had been working with for a Tibi Close Friends project, and when I sat down that night to scroll through the images, I felt the whole thing collapse. The anxiety hit almost immediately - this was wrong, that was out of focus, I missed the moment, I ruined it. I closed the laptop convinced I had wasted the night. A couple weeks later, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, I opened the folder again. And what I found in there was not what I remembered. There were images I had no memory of taking - or, more accurately, images I had looked directly at and failed to see - that were, genuinely, some of the better photographs I have taken. They had been there the whole time. I just could not see them when I was staring.

Last summer I wrote a piece for my Substack about spider webs and fear, and I remember the feeling after I published it - that uneasy sense that it did not quite land, that the analogy was reaching, that maybe I should not have put it out. I moved on, wrote other things, forgot about it mostly. Then, almost a year later, I went back and read it, and my first thought was - did I write this? Not in a self-congratulatory way, but in genuine confusion, because the piece I was reading did not match the piece I remembered making. The distance had not changed the words. It had changed my ability to see them.

I have been thinking about why this happens - why the moment directly after creation is so consistently the worst moment to evaluate what you have created - and the closest I have come to an answer is in the way we see stars.

There is a technique that astronomers have used for centuries called averted vision. When you look at the night sky, the brightest stars are easy - you look directly at them and there they are. But the faint ones, the ones just barely bright enough to exist, behave differently. If you stare directly at a faint star, it disappears. Your eye cannot pick it up. The harder you focus, the less you see. But if you look slightly to the side of it, if you let your gaze drift just a few degrees off center, star appears in your peripheral vision, clear and unmistakable, exactly where direct focus failed.

This is not a metaphor. It is physiology. The center of your retina, the fovea, is optimized for detail, for color, for bright and obvious things. It is the part of your eye that reads text and recognizes faces. But it is not the most sensitive part. The edges of your retina are lined with rods, cells that detect light the middle cannot. These rods are quiet, they do not announce themselves the way the center of your vision does, but they see what the center misses. The faint star is not invisible. It is invisible to direct focus. The star has been there the entire time. You were simply using the wrong part of your eye to look for it.

I think this is exactly what happens when you finish something you have made and immediately try to judge it. You are staring at it with your fovea - the part of your awareness that is optimized for detail, for comparison, for the bright and obvious gap between what you intended and what you actually produced. And in that mode of seeing, the faint thing - that which makes the work actually good, the quality that lives in the margins, the accidents/choices you made without thinking - disappears. You are looking too directly. The signal is there, but it is not the kind of signal that direct scrutiny can detect.

I have been training for a competition lately, about five weeks in, and something has started to shift that I did not notice until I stopped looking for it. The runs are not easier. The workouts are not lighter. But there is a smoothness that was not there before - a fluency in the movement, a rhythm that I did not plan or earn through any single session. It arrived peripherally, the way a faint star does, in a moment where I was not asking whether I was getting better. I was just running. And the adaptation, which had been building invisibly for weeks, showed itself the moment I stopped staring at it.

Last week, while filming with Sid Simons for a Tibi Close Friends project, we placed his head directly in the window frame to catch the sunset behind him - that part was deliberate, the composition was ours. But what we could not have planned, what no amount of obsessing over angles and setup could have controlled, was the timing. The exact moment the light hit during the final song, the trajectory of the sun across the sky lining up with the take as if it had been choreographed. That was not us. We did the work to be in position. We framed the shot, we chose the window, we pointed the camera. And then the thing that made it extraordinary arrived on its own timeline, in a way that direct control could never have manufactured. The setup was the fovea. The perfection was peripheral.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the work I am proudest of - the photographs that still hold up, the writing that surprises me when I return to it - is almost never the work I felt best about in the immediate aftermath. The things I loved right away tend to be the obvious ones, the bright stars, the images that matched what I had pictured in my head. They are fine. They are competent. But the ones that linger, the ones I look back on and wonder how I made, those are always the faint stars. The ones I could not see at the time because I was staring directly at them, flooded with anxiety and the certainty that something had gone wrong.

Something had gone right. I just needed to look away long enough to see it.

So if you have recently made something - written something, built something, photographed something, begun something - and your immediate assessment is that it is not good enough, consider the possibility that you are not wrong about the work. You are wrong about the looking. Consider that the part of you doing the evaluating right now is your fovea, the detail-obsessed center that is magnificent at spotting flaws and blind to faint, extraordinary things. Consider that the truest version of what you have made will not reveal itself under direct examination, but will appear, months from now, in your periphery, on a night when you were not looking for it at all.

The star is already there. You just have to stop staring at it.

And let the edges of your vision do what they were built to do.

The Grey Area is where Gen Z talks about the stuff that doesn't have clean answers — business, culture, identity, and everything in between. New episodes every Monday. Part of the Almost Reckless universe from CP Media.

The Definitive Color Guide to Packing by City (the article came out last December) breaks down the math for over 50 cities that I’ve personally visited and have assigned a color equations to based on the city’s tone, temperature, and terrain. The purpose of the math is to give you guidance for what to pack when visiting a new city. Nothing sucks more than showing up like a bubblegum machine in a [1] +2 -4 city like Berlin; or feeling the weight of a [1+3] -4 wardrobe in Palm Beach, Florida. This isn’t about avoiding sideglances from locals, there’s a reason why people in certain areas dress a certain way. Because it works fluidly with the environment. People aren’t strolling the streets of Capri in a range of Black [1] and Navy [2] not because they’re provincial are not inclined to like those colors. It simply just doesn’t fit with the environment. Chameleons are a thing. Right? Maybe it’s the same idea, of sorts. Nailing the colormath of a city assures that you show up feeling like yourself and fitting in for the right reasons - I’ll say it again, this is not about dressing for the right lunch table in MeanGirls. Ok, let’s go.

I’m going to show you some key items I’ve packed for L.A. and I also want to show you how that very item transforms for other areas with other equations. This helps you avoid the trap of buying specific items for specific travel destinations.

Remember, anything in brackets represents the primary color of the destination. A regular size number outside of the brackets means it’s a solid color choice. A small number means to use it as an accent (pack sparingly); and an F means when you pack it make it fashion (a red rubber belt or strong shouldered dress in Paris for instance vs. a red pair of shorts in Nantucket).

The ring 3 dress here. I’ve got the perfect fit here for Bali, Florence, Dubai, and Antwerp.

A chocolate brown leather short can show up anywhere (personally I’ll bring the longer length, I’m not a shorts shorts person).

Melbourne, Palm Beach, Fl, Aspen, Colorado and Cabo, Mexico. Set. I promise, these may look like slight distinctions. But Melbourne doesn’t feel right in Palm Beach, and the Cabo vibe is out of place in the mountains of Aspen.

A trouser can move from city to city - you may have bought it as part of a suit, but broken up it goes even further.

Austin, Texas, Atlanta, Ga, San Francisco and Charleston, SC are all good here.

Dark indigo denim. It’s the jean that dresses everything up, or takes down something more serious. An ultimate valve for dialing up or down.

Stockholm, Washington, DC , Los Angeles, and Nantucket are all covered here.

And a chocolate brown skirt. One I live in for work in Manhattan can go with me around the world.

Jackson Hole, WY, Paris, France, Chicago, IL or Zurich. Set.

I’m not turning packing in to a math quiz. But I am sharing information that I’d wish I’d known. Because it’s one thing to pack a wrong outfit, or two. But when you pack the totally wrong person, especially if you’ve invested in travel items, that blows the hardest.

Style class last week is particularly good - it’s all explained further there. Feel free to comment any questions you may have or call out any cities that you’d love to see profiled.

The year was 2009. The time frame for me is important, because it was BCP (Before Creative Pragmatist). Meaning, before I’d figured it out. I was taking my son to some thing or other and he said: “can you just please dress like a “fun mom” today?

I’m going to show you here, in this series, how to do that. Not how to dress like a fun mom, not outfits for the playground, the birthday party or the school function. But how to compile the right ingredients to buildout your style, the style that keeps you moving through life feeling like yourself. Once you become a mom, you tend to either or hold on so dearly to the “former you” that you forgo pragmatism in the times when you really need it the most or bifurcate your style,Time with kids, doing the things you do, often in a style that is alien to you. Mostly because you’ve simply never been this person before. There are the times where you are “you” - at work, at parties, and in my case in sometimes carefully posed fashion photos that could imply that my only reality is backstage at a runway show, at a Polo event, or a magazine spread of “just a day in my life at home with my boys”.

The carefully styled photos of a typical day with my sons:

But here’s the reality of the fashion challenges I faced. What exactly does the person above wear, when these moments are blips, far and few between? When the true picture looks more like the ones below:

So the key word here is “fashion.” Because it’s not discovering what “outfits” work best at hockey practice, the school play, taming the cousins, biking, tennis tournaments, fishing, golfing, camping, boating, hosting the birthday party….It’s about knowing what elements you need to have in your closet that will conspire to uphold or form your personal style thru-line. Not in an attempt to “look good” - though who doesn’t want that? Rather, it’s the pursuit of feeling like yourself - no matter where you are. And since the person now standing on a wet field wiping tears off the son’s face who has just lost his soccer match is the same one who maybe has just had a great intimate night out with her partner, or figured out something really smart and difficult at work, you can see the conflict.

It’s something I address in my book The Creative Pragmatist. When you say someone has “great personal style” you are referring to someone who, every time you run in to them - the grocery store, an event, etc. - they just look like themselves. It’s not a label bestowed to someone whose outfit you admire at an event. Because you can’t give them this label until you know how they show up in different moments of their life. If Audrey Hepburn had been just that one dress from Sabrina, the conversation would have only been about the perfect “fit” and Givenchy. But Audrey’s throughline of personal style confirmed that was no one hit wonder. She knew who she was and how to convey it visually.

The Creative Pragmatist is a thinking book because Personal Style can be learned, but learning requires thinking. See how that works? There’s no such thing as 7-minute-abs and there’s not a phrase or 3 steps that will create your style or change your relationship with clothing. At the same time, it’s not Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In the book, I outline the steps clearly, and I know that’s changed lives. Because thousands have told me so. And that statement isn’t a stretch - because while dressing well is nice, knowing who you are and how to visually convey it, feel it, and live it every day is life altering.

So here, specifically, I will talk to the moms. I know what you’re going through and I can help.

First, I’m going to layout the Mom tropes. And here’s the thing, while it is funny to laugh at the tropes, reality is that in some way we all want to be a little bit of each of them. Just not to the point that it’s so easily encapsulated here.

BUT FIRST, I NEED TO SAY THIS - for this article, I tried to find images of these “tropes”. And I did, but I didn’t feel good choosing any of them. Because I know people who are these “tropes”, and they’re all phenomenal people. And some aren’t. And if they aren’t it’s not because of their style. So don’t let the bigger point get lost here - this isn’t about how we think about people because of their style, it’s about how we think of ourselves when our style doesn’t reflect the scope of who we are.

There’s a reason why we don’t want to be described in such easy simplistic (and funny) terms. Because it’s a bit one dimensional. It reduces you to well…..a trope. And that’s not how we want to be. “Creative Pragmatist” was formed on the bedrock of knowledge that we are many things at once, that we have depth as individuals, and that a thruline of our style dna, our 3 adjectives, keeps us grounds us but never sinks us.

Ok, on to some highly practical advice. I’ll show you a key investment piece and why it makes so much sense. Note that the WINSLOW PANT is rooted in the Creative and the Pragmatic and it manages to be chill, modern and classic - all at once. When you become a mom, the creative side doesn’t change, but the pragmatic considerations do. With the right core elements, this simply becomes a puzzle of styling rather than a full out overhaul of a closet.

What to look for in the perfect Mom pant:

1. Can options happen when it’s hacked? This can be shortened, ballooned or left long. All quick styling hacks that give major range of vibes.

2. Elastic waist but not heavily gathered- no junk in the front of your trunk moments. Stretch, ease but still clean - almost tailored like.

3. Modernity - it’s a classic and chill in that it’s a sweatpant, but the sculpting makes it modern, but the pliability of the material keeps it from being ridiculous.

4. Clean seaming- if you buy a sweatshirting pant that is overly washed or with raw seams or heavily topstitched , then it is heavily emphasizing the CHILL aspect - but bcs this is already elastic waisted, in sport material the chill is there - all those other details make it too onesided. Clean seams give a tailored vibe, polished - this gives you options and why it looks great with a blazer or a sneaker.

5. Drawstrings that are on the INSIDE - if they are exposed on the outside only then it will definitively always read more casual. Limited options.

So you see below, the range. For a photo shoot we put extra C to the Creative Pragmatic. But whether you are at playground, tennis tournament, golf tournament there’s no sacrifice when you need to lean harder on the P. The olive color here and the red one Here are perfect.

Ok, more to come. This is a lot to absorb, and already from what you’ve read I’m sure you can apply the bigger concepts across a wide swath of what you already own.

In the meantime, PSA for some of our stylists that are moms and incredibly helpful on their insta: darianne.tibi; keturah.tibi; acacia.tibi; lees.tibi.

More to come. Please comment on what else you may be looking for, I’ll try and help. Ok?

But, but, but…when people share your mindset, how they think about things rather than what they think about things, that’s where good discourse comes - the kind that inspires you, helps you problem solve, move forward. This is my definition of feeling settled.

I’m framing this to make my point. Stay with me here.

Recently I posted a video and a woman wrote in: “bad outfit. Just being honest”. We are in a time in the world where we can receive hundreds, thousands of opinions at warp speed. If you are an entrepreneur, running or working in a company, or just finding your way as to what is next for you, it’s impossible to separate the bad noise. We’ve let these people in to our lives. One individual, one who may not look anything like a friend you’d want, or a potential customer or client, has the ability to send a message that gives them equal status with all others.

You think.

But the reality of the algorithm is, these individuals have outsized status. It’s simply gamed that way. Good for the Metas of the world, bad for humans. Unless you break away from the algorithm and understand who is in your community of customers – who are your potential customers, you’ll continue to experience mental whiplash. That whiplash is destabilizing because it dulls our gut and you lose your instinct for what is good or bad, right or wrong. What product will sell, won’t wont. What path makes sense, what path doesn’t. It’s why we have a flood of mediocrity out there – from the movies we watch to the clothes we wear.

Knowing who your customer is can’t come until you know who you are, what it is you’re creating and why. Once you know, you hardmark this information. And then, most importantly, you tune out the algorithm and tune in to people who share your same mindset. It’s a smaller target group than everyone. And that may seem bad, until you realize everyone was never a target group to begin with. Reading this, it all seems logical, maybe even a solid reminder of what you know. But in actuality, enacting it, and following through is not obvious or even simple, but I have created a process for doing it and I share it with you in my book. Almost Reckless isn’t a biography or a story of how I built Tibi. It’s a book gives you the framework of how to break out of the algorithm and move on to your own path to success. Whatever that means to you. And I can tell you from personal experience, once you get there it is incredibly stabilizing.

In the U.S., you can order the book or the audible here: ALMOST RECKLESS

Outside the U.S. order HERE

KNOW THIS: If you LOVE supporting small businesses - which we do - If you go here: Almost Reckless at your neighborhood bookstore then you will feel extra good. I’m shouting out a few of my very favorites here: Athena Books in Old Greenwich, Ct; Bird Bookstore in Dallas, E. Shaver Bookseller in Savannah, Ga and GJ Ford Bookshop on St. Simons Island, Ga. PLEASE IN COMMENTS LET ME NOW YOUR FAVORITE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES!!!!

Six cobblestone blocks of Greek Revival row-houses sit tucked between DUMBO and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, hemmed in by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on one side and the East River on the other. This is Vinegar Hill. And it looks, in the most generous and accurate sense of the phrase, like a piece of old New York that was set down gently and simply never moved. The Belgian block streets have been here longer than the houses. In the mid-19th century, the neighborhood was a tight, working-class enclave characterized by the existence of various labor intensive jobs tied to the Navy Yard - a community that bore its name as an act of commemoration: a neighborhood named for a defeat that people refused to forget.

When the Navy Yard closed in 1966, Vinegar Hill went quiet. Artists and preservationists filtered in over the following decades, enough to earn it landmark designation in 1997, but not enough to change its essential character. DUMBO, just blocks away, was transformed almost entirely. Vinegar Hill was not. And so when Sam Buffa and Jean Adamson, who had met working together at Freeman’s on the Lower East Side and had since moved into a carriage house in the neighborhood, opened Vinegar Hill House at 72 Hudson Avenue in November 2008, they were doing something that had not been done on that block since a diner closed in the 1970s: feeding people.

This is not a preamble. It is, as it always is in this written section, the story. A restaurant is never only a restaurant, and the most interesting question you can ask about any place is not what is on the menu, but why it exists where it does, and what is to be understood about its surroundings that made it possible.

We went on a Saturday morning in early March. A time when the city outside feels like it is still deciding whether winter is finished or if there is still some room to spare. Inside, Vinegar Hill House splits between two rooms with almost nothing in common except the food. Upstairs is large and open - a bright dining room with a visible kitchen and seats along the bar, considerably more light, the kind of space that hums pleasantly at a Saturday pace. We were downstairs, by the fireplace - small, low-lit, unhurried - the kind of room that asks you to take your coat off slowly and stay awhile. On a cold morning in March, it is, without question, the correct room.

The menu is short in the way that menus are so when the kitchen is confident enough not to overextend. Our picks included some orange juice, cold and clean - uncomplicated in the way that only fresh-squeezed juice can be, which is to say completely. Then a mint tea that carried the particular quiet authority of something that does not need to announce itself: a small ceramic cup, steam rising slowly into the dim warmth of the downstairs room, each sip less like refreshment than permission - to stop moving, to settle in, to be somewhere on purpose on a cold weekend morning.

The food itself unfolded less like a sequence of dishes and more like a single, sustained argument for staying longer than you planned. The Apple Sourdough Pancake led - one round, cast-iron-caramelized disc, its exterior somewhere between amber and lacquer, giving way inside to the softness of a sourdough crumb that has been offered time, heat, and ingenuity behind its creation. Upon reaching the table, pat of butter was already melting into its center as maple syrup pooled around the base - a picturesque invitation to taste the faint tang of fermentation the pulls quietly beneath the sweetness. These were not opposing forces, the tang and sweet, but a foundation. It is the kind of thing that makes you understand, viscerally, what a wood-fired oven is actually for, and why no other method of cooking would produce the same result. If you go and order nothing else, order this.

The Tuna Salad Sando came next - toasted pullman bread, properly thick and browned, cradling tuna that has been mixed with enough attentiveness to make you reconsider, briefly, everything you assumed about the category. The pickles and potato chips folded inside are not garnishes; they are load-bearing - a sharp vinegar note and a texture that keeps the whole thing honest, converting what might have been a polite lunch into something you finish with the kind of quiet, uncomplicated satisfaction that doesn’t require much further commentary.

The Scrambled Eggs - seven dollars, listed as a side, approached as such, and then immediately to be re-evaluated as anything but. Ribboned and slow, pulled from the heat before they quite finished deciding what they were, embodying a patient softness that requires both time and the discipline not to intervene. Lastly, and not to be forgotten, was the Breakfast Sausage. Deeply browned, snapping at the skin, with an interior that had clearly been thought about - seasoned with intention, not habit. The kind of sausage that makes you wonder, is it a side, or rather, should we actually build the meal around it?

What Vinegar Hill House understood, and what it has been proving for nearly two decades on a block that asked nothing of it but honesty and care, is that a place does not need to perform its context in order to belong to it. The peeling white paint on the exterior, the old fireplace, the mismatched chairs - none of it felt curated. It felt inherited, just there, as though the restaurant took it as it came. To eat there on a cold Saturday morning, downstairs by the fire, is not to solely experience the character of Vinegar Hill. It is to participate in it.

Brunch Saturday and Sunday, 11:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Dinner nightly. The garden opens when the weather allows. Take the F to York Street.

I have been thinking about why that is. And the closest I have come to an explanation is the ocean.

Somewhere far offshore, sometimes hundreds of miles away, sometimes in a part of the ocean you will never see or think about, a storm is generating energy. Wind presses against the surface, and that friction creates movement. No, not waves, not yet at least. It’s energy. A disturbance that enters the water and begins to travel, silently, beneath everything, at speeds and over distances that would seem improbable if you could witness them. But you cannot witness them, because from where you are standing, nothing has changed. The ocean looks the same as it did an hour ago, a week ago, a year ago. You could be forgiven for thinking that it always will.

This, I think, is how the most important movements in our lives tend to begin. Not with a visible event, but with an invisible transfer of energy that we are not yet equipped to perceive.

What is remarkable about the physics of ocean waves is that the energy, once created, does not stop. It does not lose interest. It does not reconsider. It moves through the deep water in what oceanographers call a swell, and a swell is a patient, almost impossibly consistent thing. It is energy that has committed to a direction. The surface above it may appear calm, may give no indication that anything is in transit, but the movement below is constant and purposeful. It has somewhere to be, and it is getting there, whether or not the shore knows it is coming.

I think most of us have experienced the deep-water phase of something important without knowing we were in it. This is, perhaps, its most defining characteristic - you do not get to know. The frustration that accumulates so gradually it feels less like a catalyst and more like a personality trait. The skill quietly sharpening itself through repetition you barely notice. The conversation that plants something in you that will not germinate for months. The storm is already happening. You are simply too far from it to hear the thunder.

And often, more often than we would like to admit, the deep-water phase does not even feel like waiting. It feels like living. You are doing work you love. You are in an environment that challenges you and gives you room to create. The conditions, on paper, are good, maybe even great, and so when something beneath the surface begins to shift - a recognition that the compensation does not match the contribution, a slow disillusionment with someone you once respected, a creeping awareness that the ceiling above you is lower than you had been told - you absorb it. You justify. You tell yourself that the good outweighs the difficult, and for a while, genuinely, it does. Justification, when it is working, looks so remarkably like contentment that even you cannot tell the difference. You are not unhappy. You are in deep water, and the surface is calm, and the energy is moving, and you have no idea.

Then, the shallow water.

A wave does not build gradually, the way we might expect. For the vast majority of its life, it is invisible - a pulse of energy gliding through the deep. But when it reaches the continental shelf, when the water beneath it becomes shallow enough to interfere with its movement, the wave is forced to rise. All of that energy, accumulated across hundreds of miles of open ocean, is suddenly compressed into something visible. The wave grows. It steepens. And then, in a matter of seconds, it breaks.

From the shore, this looks sudden. It looks like the wave came from nowhere - one moment the water was calm and the next it was not. But the wave did not come from nowhere. It came from a storm you never saw, across an ocean you were not watching, carrying energy that was always, at every moment, in motion. The only thing that changed is that it finally arrived where you could see it.

The best things in life, I have come to believe, follow this pattern with an almost unsettling consistency. The opportunity that appears the same week you realize you have outgrown where you are. The door that opens so quickly after the previous one closes that it feels almost implausible, like the universe is being heavy-handed with its metaphors. From the outside, and sometimes from the inside, the speed is disorienting. It can feel reckless, impulsive, too fast to be trustworthy. We are conditioned to be suspicious of things that move quickly, as though deliberation is the only legitimate precursor to a good decision. As though the wave owes us a slower arrival just because we were not watching while it crossed the ocean.

But the speed is not the thing to question. The speed is the answer. When something is right - genuinely, structurally, in-your-bones right - it does not need a long introduction. The preparation has already happened. The storm, the swell, the thousands of miles of silent travel. That was the deliberation. That was the slow, invisible work of becoming ready for something you did not yet know was coming. The wave breaks fast not because it is reckless, but because it is finished waiting.

And here is the part that I find most beautiful, and most difficult to accept in the moment: sometimes the very thing that forces the wave to rise - the shallow water, the disruption, the event that compresses years of invisible energy into a single, clarifying moment - does not feel like a gift. It feels like a slight. An insult, even. But it is the shelf that makes the wave possible. Without it, the energy just keeps traveling, indefinitely, beneath a surface that never breaks. The disruption is not the problem. The disruption is what makes the wave, your wave. Finally, unmistakably, visible.

So if something in your life is moving fast right now, faster than you expected, faster than feels comfortable, consider the possibility that it is not moving too fast. Consider that it has been moving for a very long time, patiently, beneath everything, waiting for the water to get shallow enough to show itself. Consider that the speed is not a warning. It is the wave, telling you it has arrived.

And that all you have to do, now, is let it break.

It’s Easter morning, and my “remember” pic that popped up is this. Let me tell you about “this.” Every spring, my parents would come in town for a couple of weeks. They would tell my boys “we can do anything you want.”

There was a local outdoor furniture store in town, on a busy street, called “Patios.com”

And all my kids wanted to do with my parents was visit the store, and try out the lounges. This, this was life. The good life. And my parents obliged. No cost, minimal travel. And a willingness to maybe endure some strange glances and a confused store manager.

Fully content, my dad chilling with the boys on the side of a busy street in a lot filled with patio chairs for sale. This wasn’t something that occurred because they were shopping for chairs, this was the intent of the visit. Charlie looks annoyed here, but only because his grandmother is asking him to smile.

This is what happiness looks like. To me.

Q: “Honest question—how do your feet not slip around in the Ulrich slingbacks when you wear them with socks?”

A: Here are a few things we do. Ok, for a runway show we’ll put double-stick tape on the actual foot bed. The problem is that gums up the shoe—and ruins it for wearing with a bare foot, so not the best option for long term. My favorite is putting down the Dr. Scholl’s silicone pad right under the front ball of the foot—that works great, and is comfy, too. - Amy

Q: “Is the brown Leather Zip Up Hoodie Jacket the same weight as the pebbled black leather jacket from last Fall?”

A: Same shape, definitely lighter. Think outerwear bomber vs medium-weight spring anorak vibes. It feels more “supple” - a word that makes me cringe but it seems right. - Amy

Q: “Can a curvy person REALLY wear that hoop pencil skirt? Or is this style just not for me?”

A: Yes! Have you seen Darianne @darianne.tibi or Stella on Style Class (Season 7, Episodes 10 & 13)? It fits higher on the waist closer to the belly button. Check the size chart against your own high waist specs. - Keturah

Q: “What’s so luxe about the fabrics from Spring versus any other collection?”

A: Hmm, I don’t think it’s extra luxe vis-à-vis any other Tibi collection. So, let me just explain what luxe means. We use the best mills in Europe—Sordevolo, Tessibilia, Dinamo—these mills produce for Hermes, Gucci, Balenciaga. We love beautiful fabrics and because we’re independent, because I report to myself, we’re able to make this possible. We don’t do massive ad campaigns or insane runway shows, we also don’t work with big department stores that have drained many companies - what that means is, we can put our funds in the right place - the materials and the make. Traci and I spend a lot of time thinking about how we want to feel in our clothes—the fabrics are super important. Always have been. - Amy

Q: “I can’t figure out my sizing, I feel like the clothing doesn’t sit right on me. I’ve been sizing down because I don’t want my clothes to feel TOO big. And when I purchase fitted items, I tend to size up. Am I choosing the wrong size?”

A: Ahh, I know that can be frustrating. Here’s a helpful thing to know—if an item looks loose on one model (let’s say the oversized Liam Blazer) and other items look more fitted (the Compact Stretch Knit Pencil Skirt for example) it’s because we don’t offer all things oversized, or all things slim. We create designs that we want to wear the way we want to wear them. We’re not locked in to presenting only one type of fit. So, if it’s oversized on a model, it will be oversized on you if you order your size—we don’t put larger pieces on a model to effect ease. The relaxed vibe is meticulously built into our style. If we show an item that’s fitted on the model, it will be fitted on you. If we show an item that’s fitted on a model, it will be fitted on you. Look at the Tibi size chart—see where your sizing matches up. For example, I’m just 5’5”, 120 lbs, I have 38” hips, 34” bust, and 27” waist—I wear a 4, a Small, or a 27 in Tibi across the board. Now, it’s a free country—if you don’t want something oversized, you can always try sizing down. Conversely, if you want something looser, size up. We’re all good here. - Amy

If you have any questions that weren’t covered above, ask them in the comments section, and we’ll get to answering.

Back in 2018, when we had created a job description for head of marketing, a key “soft skill” I needed was someone who fit the bill of a “typical marketing guy.” The one who helps me formulate ideas, then enthusiastically embraces them, then operates in and outside the company networking, greasing palms, you know the type. But shortly after hiring Emeka as our head of marketing, I recognized right away a fellow introvert. In our interviews, I’d misread him as an extrovert; thinking he would complete my puzzle, be the one to do the social side I had found so painful. Instead, I found someone in a constant search for the why. Someone I could have meaningful back and forth conversations, not someone there simply as a backboard for me to hit ideas against. Or worse, simply a sponge to absorb what I say and then go implement. Emeka has a great bullshit sensor, the conversations forced me - admittedly sometimes uncomfortably, to be very honest with situations we were in so we could come up with ideas on how to find our way out.

I’m going to share an excerpt from Almost Reckless, where I talk about a singular moment that really helped shape Tibi’s course forward. And since I am Tibi, this is deeply personal. It was my own path I was building at the same time.

For any entrepreneurs out there, people building teams, the people you surround yourself come together often to form a whole.

Nothing in AI, no LinkedIn profiles can help you articulate how important it is that, in my case, the person you’re hiring has a deep sense of humor.

Or that, when you have an idea to create movie posters around your runway show, and you hire incredible models who JUST AREN’T WORKING because there is no synergy around them, that they’re willing to grab other team members and do it themselves. I remember this day, we’d paid a fortune for two models, only to put them off to the side and have Emeka and a few other team members become the campaign.

I’m sharing this with you all to say, whether it’s in our jobs, our personal lives - if we hold so tightly to the job description (and by now I use this as metaphor) we can often lose the bigger picture of what’s been put in front of us. I’m sure you’ve all been in situations where you’re focusing so hard on what isn’t that you simply don’t see what is. This is what I appreciate so much about being human. We’re all a work in progress. I could never have written the right job description for what I got from Emeka at the time. Sometimes you just don’t know what you need until it appears. It’s why I love things IRL, it’s why I don’t embrace WFH as the norm rather than the exception. It’s why I have faith that AI will play a role but not become the main character.

I also think it’s great when you have these nice surprises in life, that you can say them out loud. So I am.

Café Sabarsky sits on the ground floor of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, a museum of early 20th-century German and Austrian art and design, housed in a 1914 Beaux-Arts mansion at 1048 Fifth Avenue - designed by Carrère & Hastings, the same firm responsible for the New York Public Library. The building was originally commissioned by industrialist William Starr Miller, later occupied by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and then, after a long stretch as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, purchased in 1994 by two friends who shared a vision: art dealer Serge Sabarsky and businessman Ronald S. Lauder. Their friendship spanned nearly thirty years. It began in 1967, in Sabarsky’s gallery on Madison Avenue, where Lauder was a frequent visitor and, eventually, a close confidant. The two shared an almost devotional commitment to the art and design of Vienna circa ~1900, and talked endlessly of opening a museum to bring it all together in one place. Sabarsky died in 1996, five years before the museum opened, but Lauder saw it through in his honor, and named the café after his friend.

This is not a preamble. It is the story. Because if Tibi Eats is about more than the food - which it always has been - then understanding what and why a place exists is the very foundation upon which everything else is built. The Neue Galerie, and by extension Café Sabarsky, exists as an act of friendship, of conviction, and of a long, patient belief that certain things are worth doing even when the timeline is uncertain.

We dined on a Thursday evening - the quieter mode of a place that is never truly quiet, but assumes a more intimate, considered register after dark. There is a small table lamp at each marble table, its pleated shade casting a warm amber glow against the dark wood paneling that lines the walls. The room is outfitted not as a themed approximation of a Viennese café, but as an actual one — furnished with period objects that are themselves museum-quality artifacts: lighting fixtures by Josef Hoffmann, furniture by Adolf Loos, banquettes upholstered in an Otto Wagner fabric from 1912. In one corner, a Bösendorfer grand piano waits for the evenings when cabaret and chamber performances bring the room to a different kind of life. At dinner, the room does not feel decorated. It feels inhabited.

We opened with two things best understood as acts of orientation. Firstly, a Spaten - the Munich lager, poured cold into a tall glass, in that exact state of refreshment that only a proper Central European lager can provide. Then, and more to the point of the meal itself - the Weisswurst mit Brezen & Händelmaier’s. Two pale Bavarian sausages - smooth, mild, delicately spiced with parsley and lemon - curled on either side of a warm, salt-flecked pretzel, with a generous pool of Händelmaier’s sweet mustard anchoring the plate. This is a dish that asks almost nothing of you, and gives quite a lot in return. It is simple in the way that things which have been done correctly for a very long time tend to be - not uncomplicated, but resolved.

The Geräucherte Forellen Crêpe followed - and here the kitchen pivots, quietly and with considerable confidence, from the rustic to the refined. A crêpe, tightly rolled around a filling of smoked trout and fresh herbs, topped with a generous crown of piped crème fraîche and a bouquet of dill and microgreens, surrounded at its base by thin cucumber ribbons, a radish slice, and a single heirloom tomato, the whole plate finished with a swirl of bright herb oil. A dish that is composed and elegantly precise in the way that good Viennese cooking tends to be, which is to say that nothing on the plate is accidental, and nothing is wasted.

In order of appearance: the Rote Rüben Salat - a beet salad that, despite being a salad, carries itself with the presence of something more significant. Deep crimson beets, thinly sliced and layered into something closer to architecture than a plate of greens, finished with a drizzle of cream and a crown of fresh herbs, joined by a single quenelle of goat cheese that functions as the counterargument to everything warm and earthy in the beets, as a sherry vinaigrette binds it all together with a quiet, and honest, acidity. And the Bratwurst mit Bratkartoffeln - two sausages, grill-marked, their skins pulled taut and darkened in just the right places, with a tumble of pan-fried potatoes, golden and crisped at the edges, scattered with herbs. The evening's special was a duck: fanned slices of rosy, just-cooked breast, its skin rendered and deeply colored. Beside them, a breaded herb dumpling - round, golden-crusted, giving way to something soft and aromatic within - and two quenelles of orange squash purée, smooth and vivid, resting against a bed of braised red cabbage having absorbed the color and patience of a long, slow cook.

Finally, the Wiener Schnitzel, mit Erdäpfel-Gurkensalat - the plate is placed and, with humility, proceeds to occupy the space that the entire food conversation had been leading toward. Veal, pounded thin, breaded, and fried to a color somewhere between pale gold and caramel, wearing a costume-like, blistered and airy crust that naturally and delicately maintains that deeply important, and ever-so slight separation from the meat. Two lemon wedges rest on top, a small heap of lingonberries sits in the upper corner - tart, jammy, the necessary interruption - and beside it, a clean mound of potato-cucumber salad, modestly dressed, cool.

The desserts, I will confess, arrived at a moment in the meal when resolve had already been substantially compromised - which is to say, we were not making decisions so much as capitulating to what the evening had already decided for us. The plates that were ultimately returned to the kitchen were not plates so much as evidence: the scattered, powdery wreckage of an Apfelstrudel, its pastry shattered into flakes, a last smear of cream on the rim; and a second plate showing the dark residue of something rich and chocolate-adjacent that had been dispatched entirely, without ceremony (my elaborate way of saying I can’t remember what this was). The desserts at Café Sabarsky are not the kind you deliberate over. They are the kind you finish before you’ve had a chance to think about whether you intended to.

There is a version of New York in which a restaurant inside a museum feels like a compromise - a convenience, or an afterthought perhaps. Café Sabarsky is the definitive argument against this logic. It is a case in which the institution around it has not diluted the dining experience, but instead imbued it with something that very few standalone restaurants can manufacture: genuine cultural weight. To sit in that room at night, beneath Hoffmann’s fixtures, against Wagner’s fabric, with a pretzel, a cold lager, and a schnitzel that earns its reputation, is to understand something about what it means to protect and transmit a culture - to say, with deliberate intention, this mattered then, and it still matters now.

Dinner reservations via Resy. Walk-ins welcome for dessert and drinks in the evening, based on availability. Closed Tuesdays. Note that Café Sabarsky closes for the summer beginning May 27, 2026, and reopens in the autumn — a detail worth being aware of, and a good reason not to wait.

Last month, I closed CP Radio 018 with a hope - that by now I could be writing as I once did about the joyous inspiration brought about by a season of green growth. Walking through the city this past week, I noticed the trees along the sidewalks beginning to show the earliest signs of budding - thin, barely-there leaves reaching out from branches that, just weeks ago, were stripped bare and frozen under grey skies. The shift is quiet and unhurried, the way all meaningful transitions tend to be. It does not announce itself with fanfare, but rather with a slow exhale, as if the city has been holding its breath since November and is only now remembering how to release it.

There is a reciprocity between waiting and arriving that I think about often when building these monthly curations. To wait is to build anticipation, to sharpen one’s awareness of what is absent so that when it finally appears, the recognition is total - not just visual, but felt. We spent the winter months on CP Radio building sonic frames and exploring the textures of patience, of grounding, of finding warmth in the cold through the medium of music. 019 is the arrival. Not the explosion of summer, but the opening of a door - a playlist that moves with the energy of stepping outside and realizing, for the first time in months, that you don’t need to brace yourself against the air.

Can’t Beat the Heat, by Glyders, opens this month’s curation for a reason. Glyders are a duo out of Chicago - partners Joshua Condon and Eliza Weber - who have been making what they call maximal minimal rock and roll since 2014. There is something deeply honest about their approach to music, frugally inspired recordings on analogue equipment, building songs that are simple, hypnotic, and repetitive in the way that traversing through a familiar neighborhood is too - each pass revealing something you somehow hadn’t noticed before. Can’t Beat the Heat “radiates a sunburnt peace”, a phrase I borrow from a review of their album Maria’s Hunt that I found no reason to attempt to improve upon, reminiscent of that first warm day where you sit on a bench, close your eyes, and let the light do the work of reminding you that this, right here, is worth paying attention to. In 018, I wrote about Bobby Hebb’s Sunny transporting my mind to a brighter place while walking through snow. Can’t Beat the Heat doesn’t need to transport - it confirms. The warmth is no longer imagined. It is here.

If Glyders are the arrival of warmth, then Hako Is Alive and She Is 59, by MokuMoku, represents the beautiful stubbornness of what endures through time. MokuMoku is a project that lives at the intersection of jazz, fusion, rock, and soul, blending live instrumentation with sampling in a way that feels less like a collage and more like a conversation. The track samples Hako Yamasaki’s ヘルプミー (Help Me) from 1976 - which is important to note as the title is thus clearly not a metaphor, but a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that Hako Yamasaki is alive, that she was 59 years old when this track was created, and that her voice still carries weight across decades, languages, and oceans. There is something profoundly moving about an artist choosing to honor another artist not through imitation, but through presence - to say, in effect, you are still here, and because you are still here, so is the feeling you once gave us. In CP Radio 017, we explored Dylan’s (Bob) philosophy of perpetual becoming, the idea that one never truly arrives at a final version of oneself. MokuMoku extends this thought in a different direction - that the things we create do not stop becoming, that a song from 1976 can find new life in 2017, and again in 2026, when it lands on a playlist alongside Dire Straits, Kid Cudi, and James Blake. To be alive is to still be in conversation, even when the conversation spans half a century.

And finally, a song that holds a special place in this curation - Nothing New, by Evan Blix. Those who follow the Creative Pragmatist may recognize Evan’s name; he is a Tibi Close Friend, with a performance that reinforces, for us, the incredible depth of talent that exists just beneath the surface of what most people are paying attention to. Evan is a singer-songwriter from Santa Barbara, formerly the frontman of Glenn Annie, now forging his own path as a solo artist. His sound draws from the ‘70s piano-driven rock of Harry Nilsson and Paul McCartney, but filtered through something undeniably his own - a warmth and directness that makes each song feel like a letter written to someone specific, possibly you the listener. There is a rich tension in an artist who is reinventing himself, stepping out from the familiar structure of a band into the open air of solo work, releasing a song called Nothing New. It speaks to a truth that is easy to overlook - that sometimes the most profound newness is found not in novelty, but in the courage to see what has always been there with fresh eyes. Evan’s presence on 019 is a reminder that the CP ecosystem is not a broadcast, but a web - a living, growing network of people and sounds that continue to cross paths and feed one another in unexpected ways.

Alas April arrives, and with it, CP Radio 019 - thirty tracks that move between the meditative and the kinetic, the familiar and the uncharted, the warm and the bittersweet. From the lush funk of Cymande’s One More to the sprawling darkness of The Cure’s A Forest, from Charley Crockett’s outlaw chill to the electronic tenderness of James Blake, this month’s curation is built for the in-between - the weeks where winter’s grip has loosened but summer has not yet claimed us. It is in these transitional spaces, I’ve found, that we are most attuned to what music can do for us. Not to escape, and not merely to emphasize, but to accompany - to walk beside us as the world opens back up, one degree at a time.

A CP Media production, born from the world of Almost Reckless. New episodes every Monday.