rachel syme wants you to have a slow burn friendship
an interview with the new yorker staff writer on vintage fashion, the best jobs in media, and how writing letters can change your life.
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Happy Sunday!
We have a very special guest today: Rachel Syme. You may know her as the New Yorker staff writer who has profiled everyone who’s anyone in Hollywood—from Sofia Coppola (patron saint of coquettes in cinema) to Adam Scott (patron saint of office workers on TV).
I first came across Rachel’s work in my mid 20s, when I hungrily sought out interesting articles about fashion and clothes to read on my commute to work. Her Allbirds article gave me the language to explain why I was so perturbed by the epidemic of felt-footed tech bros in my home city. Her high-waisted pants article emboldened me to drop my first promotion paycheck on a pair of Piscine Blue Jesse Kamm Sailor Pants from Frances May boutique (that sweet Oregon sales tax exemption comes in clutch). She has shaped the way I think and write about clothes—that is, with a sociological lens.
So you can imagine how much it meant when I learned that Rachel was a Molehill reader. We have since connected over the bygone glory days of TheRealReal and our shared magpie predilection towards pretty objects.
Over a video call interview in January, we talked about:
the end of gourmands/the return of Old Lady Perfume
being a lifelong thrifter
lessons from her decade-long freelance hustle
the intimacy of a having a pen pal
Also, Rachel’s new book about the art of correspondence—Syme’s Letter Writer—is out now. I received my copy in the mail yesterday and let me tell you, it’s an absolute treat. It is written for the whimsical girls who dream of clacking away at a vintage typewriter wearing 1960s Pucci and furry pink slippers.
You can order one here, it would make a delightful Valentine’s Day gift AND inspire you to write a love letter for the ages.
Enjoy the interview! You can also listen to this in audio format through the Substack App.
"It’s one of the more significant friendships in my life, and it's all epistolary."
—Rachel Syme on how a pen pal changed her life
Viv: Hi Rachel! I’m thrilled to chat with you today, I’m such a fan of your writing.
Rachel: Thank you. I'm so honored, I love your newsletter. You have a wonderful sense of style.
Viv: I’ve been following your work for years, mostly your pieces for The New Yorker’s “On and Off the Avenue” column. What I love about them is that you pluck out these zeitgeisty garments, dissect their appeal and what it says about our culture.
You’ve covered the Nap Dress, Allbirds, and Juicy Couture tracksuits, to name a few. How do you decide what clothes to write about?
Rachel: Well, “On and Off the Avenue”, as a rubric, has existed in The New Yorker for a very long time. We've always had fashion coverage since the very beginning, stretching all the way back to the 1920s. This is our 100-year anniversary, and the magazine's take on fashion has always been about the cultural zeitgeist as it is about the clothes themselves. Sometimes, when I have a spare afternoon, I like to go back through the archives and read pieces by Lois Long, who wrote under the name “Lipstick,” and who wrote the first “On and Off the Avenue” columns.
To me, fashion is the most interesting where it intersects with consumer behavior—what's going on in the undercurrents of desire of the populace.
I think that fashion can be an amazing sociological mirror for what's going on at the time, and also a bellwether for what's to come. So when I’m looking for things to write about, I'm always trying to see what the currents are of the time, and how that might speak to some larger subconscious desire or cultural seachange.
Viv: I still think about your Allbirds article from 2018 all the time, where you deemed them “algorithmically empty” shoes. Where did the idea for that story stem from?
Rachel: At the time, it was this incredibly popular brand that had come out of Silicon Valley, by way of New Zealand, and seemed to be everywhere overnight. I visited the newly opened store in New York, and when I went in I felt this very…uncanny feeling. Like, these shoes are for everyone, but they’re also sort of not for anyone.
At the time, the Soho flagship was right across the street from the Amazon Four Star store. Do you remember that? It was a store that sold only items that had gotten four-star and above reviews. Those two stores across the street from each other had me thinking about this age of optimization—ideas of what is the best thing and the most streamlined thing.
And for me, that's not always the most beautiful thing. That's where I started to think about the shoes and what they meant, and at the same time, catalog their appeal because so many people loved them and were wearing them for every occasion. I mean, my dad is a diehard Allbirds fan. He gets a new pair every year.
Viv: Did you see the recent article in Line Sheet by
about the Hill House Nap Dress? You covered it a few years ago so when I saw that last week, I was like…the Nap Dress strikes yet again!Rachel: Yes. I wrote that piece during the early pandemic –about that dress being the look of “Gussied-Up Oblivion.” I mean, it felt to me like so many women, myself included, bought that nap dress during the early days of Covid. I was taken in by the idea of wandering my apartment alone in eyelet lace. I had a long white nap dress, and I still have it. And then that company just took off. So yes, I read that Line Sheet article with great interest because I wanted to know where they're going to go from here, and how they are going to push beyond their hero product, which can sometimes be a daunting task.
Viv: I still re-read your old articles, sometimes for my own writing research, because it’s interesting to gauge the cultural shift between then and now. Do you revisit old fashion stories?
Rachel: When you write about consumer culture, it's really about marking a moment and knowing that may not be the way people feel forever. I love reading old fashion coverage, even if it doesn’t totally hold up today. One of my favorite things to do is look in archives of the New York Times Style section or The New Yorker’s fashion columns, particularly Kennedy Fraser’s work from the 1970s. It keeps you sharp, to see the cycles repeating and evolving over time.
Viv: So I'm curious—since you’ve written about fragrance for a long time and it’s become such a buzzy topic in recent years—what’s on your mind in terms of fragrance trends?
Rachel: Fragrance trends…I pay attention to them because I write about fragrance from time to time, though not as much as I once did. But fragrance is so personal that I often think that trends are more marketing than a reflection of reality. People should be smelling constantly and finding out what they really like.
I mean, I can tell you I haven't loved this trend of gourmands, just because I feel like we're reaching the logical end point of that. I think we're going to start to see funkier smells coming back. We had a very pleasing cozy period where everything was kind of vanilla and rose and lychee. And with the gourmand thing, there's perfumes that smell like chocolate and croissants and cookies. I'm hoping for a return to more sophisticated florals. I love a really big, beautiful tuberose.
Viv: What’s your favorite tuberose scent? One of my first full bottle fragrance purchases ever was a tuberose—Hysteria by Mondo Mondo.
Rachel: I've been wearing Fleur Burlesque by Vilhelm Parfumerie and I love it. I think that there is a real need to have grown-up perfumes again. Though of course many of the people that are obsessed with perfume now are young people. I mean, obviously there's that New York Times story about teenage boys who are the biggest buyers of fragrance at this point. There’s “PerfumeTok.” Perfume is very much young and geared towards first-time consumers, and I love that—I myself fell hard for fragrance by spritzing on my mother’s perfumes when I was in middle school—but I also think Old Lady Perfume is going to have a comeback. I hope that happens.
Viv: Yeah, that would be interesting especially with the Gothic revival stuff happening in film and culture.
Viv: You’ve mentioned being a secondhand shopper, like buying baseball caps off eBay and Poshmark. Tell us about your relationship with thrifting.
Rachel: So I'm a lifelong thrifter. I'm from Albuquerque, New Mexico, which actually is an amazing place for thrifting. It's one of these places where a lot of glamorous older people move to during the end of their lives, because they want the desert sun and dry clean air.
And then when they are no longer with us, their estates don't really know what they have. So a lot of the thrift stores in New Mexico are filled with incredible gems. Much like in Florida, Arizona—these places that people go to retire, and then leave all of their vintage Donna Karan gowns to the local thrift store in a strip mall.
It's definitely changed a lot since I was young, as online shoppers have become savvier and the secret has gotten out. When I was a teenager, you could literally go to the Goodwill in Albuquerque and find a pair of YSL slingback pumps in perfect condition for like $40. Sadly, those days will never return. I was lucky, because I had a very cool local law school student that used to pick me up from school and drive me home when my parents couldn't. And she was an amazing thrifter, just had the nose for it. She took me thrift shopping for the first time—to the Buffalo Exchange on Central Avenue, next to the art house movie theater—and that's when I caught the bug.
And then when I moved to New York—I’m an elder millennial, so…I had that tragic period that we all had in the mid 2000s where we thought we should be wearing vintage secretarial clothes. I had at least four or five vintage wiggle dresses that I tried to make work when I was a twenty-two year old assistant. I regret to say I probably paired at least one with colored tights. It's a regrettable time in history, but we were all finding ourselves.
Viv: Does your southwestern background still show up in your style? I.e. you can take the girl out of ABQ but you can’t take the ABQ out of the girl?
Rachel: I never really got into Western wear, if that’s what you mean. I had a pair of cowboy boots growing up, but they’ve been lost to the sands of time. I do love turquoise, as a stone though I don't wear a lot of it. I have a couple rings and earrings, and many of them are sentimental gifts from my family that I love very much. I love to go to the Santa Fe flea market when I am visiting home and support all of the amazing local artisans that sell jewelry and pottery and textiles there.
I've been known to wear a Teva. I've been known to wear hiking pants. I do still love a trip to REI when I need new hiking boots, trying the little fake climbing rock wall. I love a Nalgene bottle. There's still some crunchy desert tendencies that will never leave me. But my maternal grandmother was a New Yorker, through and through, even though she found herself living in the desert. She still had all of her good furs hanging in the closet, and she liked big baubles and costume jewelry. That probably had more of an effect on me than anything.
Viv: How do you thrift and secondhand shop now? What’s the best thing you’ve found recently?
Rachel: Now, my thrifting is really, really targeted. I want to be somebody who waits for the miracle.
For example, I wanted a sturdy winter coat this year that was from Anne Klein in the 70s/80s, when Donna Karan worked there. I just put an alert on all these different sites. Several pinged me. And they weren't right. They weren't the right size, they were a little bulky, whatever. Finally after several months, one popped up that was miraculously already a petite size. I’m 5’1” so I like to buy vintage because petite sizing in the 80s and 90s was incredible.
Viv: Oooo. I’m 5’2” so this is a good tip…
Rachel: Same here. There was this golden era of time, mostly in the 90s, where a lot of great brands were making petites. So I will often collect those brands because they literally fit me off the rack, though of course as a shortie I am no stranger to the tailor. I still get most of my pants hemmed. I am evangelist for buying something you really desire and then having it tailored to fit you perfectly; you’ll return to that piece again and again, rather than trying to make something work that isn’t quite calling to you.
Viv: Let’s chat about your career journey. When did you start writing for The New Yorker?
Rachel: I started writing for The New Yorker as a freelance columnist 2012, and then I became a staff writer full-time in 2020.
Viv: Can you walk me through the major points and decisions in your career that got you here?
Rachel: I moved to New York to attend a program called the Columbia Publishing Course. It was a summer program that you do the year after graduating college, it was supposed to help you get familiar with the publishing business. What I really wanted to do was work at magazines. At the time, the program had two tracks: the book track and the magazine track, so I picked the magazine track and had to spend the summer putting together a fake magazine.
Viv: Haha, that was probably what the YETI (Young Editors in Training) program in Ugly Betty was modeled after.
Rachel: It was all very silly. I think our fake magazine was called “Pur$e,” and it was supposed to be a financial lifestyle publication for women. Horrible name! But from that course, I got the bug and realized that's what I really wanted to do.
So I canvassed around town, just cold dropped my resume at various offices, and I ended up getting an internship at New York Magazine.
At the time, though, I was also starting grad school at NYU—in a journalism program called “Cultural Reporting and Criticism.” After one semester of that program, I realized that I really just wanted to start working rather than splitting my time between work and school. So that was a big decision I made.
From there, I got my first job as an editorial assistant, and worked my way up. At first, I was on a track to be an editor. For many years, I was editing and working on culture sections. I was an early employee at The Daily Beast when it was run by Tina Brown. My plan was always to be a culture editor, and I loved it for the time I did it. There is no greater thrill than pairing a writer to the right assignment.
But then I decided to pivot to writing, because I was doing a lot of that on my own, and realized it was where my real interests lay. It was a very scary transition to leap to the other side and I had no idea if it was going to work out. For many years there, it was touch and go. I was doing a lot of other things to cobble together a living in New York while I was freelancing. I was a freelance writer for basically a decade before I took up my full-time job. I had a lot of time hustling, and it was just a slow process of building up little by little, clip by clip.
Viv: What was the hardest thing about that period of freelance hustling for you?
Rachel: There's no safety net to it, because you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from a lot of the time. Every article you do is a victory, but then you have to get the next one—and you're only as good as the last one. And editors leave publications all the time, so you'll have a rapport with someone, and then they'll just suddenly leave one day, and that whole history built with them is gone. So you have to start over from scratch, and maybe that new editor doesn't need anything from you.
You're just constantly hawking your wares, and that can be a grind. But it was also a really formative time for me where I had to learn what my style was and how to stand behind it. How to develop, how to get better, how to get stronger. So I'm grateful for that time because it informs the kind of writer I am now.
Viv: Gotcha. I'm always fascinated by hearing about people’s experiences in media. I’m on the younger end of millennial, so hearing about older millennials who worked in media makes me realize that it's always been a really tough industry.
Rachel: Always. I mean, we always think that the best era of the industry was the one before we got there.
The young people are like, oh, your generation has the last jobs in media. But everybody from my little micro-generation, thinks, well, the generation before us had the last great jobs in media. Like magazine publishing in the 90s, where there were unlimited expense accounts. But then, in the 90s, people were complaining that they weren't there in the high time of the 60s, when the Paris Review was getting started.
Everybody thinks that the best time is always the time that came before, but it's just because their path is yet uncharted.
So when you're always looking for examples from the past and knowing that you can't replicate that, it feels like there's something you've lost—but really you're just starting something new.
Viv: There’s a lot of pessimism and doom about the outlook of media, so that’s a very refreshing way to frame it.
Rachel: Yeah. And I'm so excited to see what young people are doing. Like on Substack, for example, you all are building your own little media empire. You have a lot of dedicated readers who are choosing you, and you know it every day.
I jump into the Molehill chat every now and then, and it's so lovely to see people asking each other for where they can find XYZ and everybody has a response. Seeing that is very heartening to me, because when I was young and loved magazines so much, I felt like I was in communion with the editorial staff, even though I couldn't communicate with them directly. Like Sassy, where the editors and writers were all characters, and you kind of felt like they were your friends, and they were all talking about each other in their articles. In the end, you’re building community with your readers and I think that’s really wonderful and encouraging to see.
Viv: Your new book, Syme’s Letter Writer, feels like a good place to end things. What got you hooked onto the “art of written correspondence”?
Rachel: So this book grew out of a random impulse during the early days of the pandemic, when I was locked down in my one bedroom apartment in Greenpoint. I was feeling like reaching out to people, because obviously you couldn't see many people in person. I thought about returning to letter writing at that time, because I had always loved it. I’d had pen pals when I was younger , I just always loved the act of getting and sending mail. It was one of my favorite things. I was the kind of child who liked Anne of Green Gables and Little Women and Jane Austen and always wanted to have a fancy tea party for my birthday. I kind of was like a 85-year-old British woman stuck in a 10-year old's body.
So in the early days of the pandemic, I said, okay, I want to start writing letters again. I have all this unused stationery. I have a couple of fountain pens that are just sitting there, uninked and unloved. I have a vintage typewriter. Let me try this.
I went on social media, and put a post up asking if anybody wanted to exchange letters with me. Because at that point, I had already asked everybody that I knew, and that was going fine, and I was writing a few letters back and forth with friends and family. But a lot of people were kind of like, I talk to you every day on text. Why would I want to write a letter with you? So those attempts fizzled pretty quickly.
I was like, strangers! I must find strangers who want to write. Strangers are the way to go. And I got an overwhelming response at first—hundreds and hundreds of people DM’d me and wanted to write to me. I quickly realized there was absolutely no way I could write to hundreds of people and have it be something sustainable.
So then I thought, these people should be writing to each other. But how do I do this? So I ended up starting a rudimentary pen pal matching system, which I did using a software called Elfster that's technically made for Secret Santa exchanges. It ended up having 15,000 participants, and was covered in NPR and CNN. The project at large ended up being called called Penpalooza, which is a very silly pun that has seemed to stick around.
Once they started writing to each other, the project exploded from there. It's still going. You can always look on Instagram and look under #penpalooza. People send pictures of their mail and their mail art. It has taken on a little life of its own.
Throughout that time, I was talking to an editor at Clarkson Potter, which is an amazing art book publisher that's a wing of Penguin Random House, who thought there might be a book in making a guide to modern correspondence. We came up with this idea for a book about letter writing that was very visual, and kind of like a grown up Klutz book, which was such a fun project to work on. I mean, I think of it as a very lighthearted project. It's not highly serious writing, but correspondence, and all its attendant rules and supplies, is something that I think is seriously delightful to think about.
[Rachel takes out a copy of the book and flips through it to show me pages]
It's just supposed to be a bauble—, a beautiful object that you have on your coffee table. The whole thing is supposed to be fun and fanciful. It's the kind of book I would've wanted when I was thirteen. Maybe it would be a good first gift to a person who wants to write letters and is starting out their journey of being a writer.
Because, in terms of what is on the page, a lot of it is about being a writer as well. I mean, it's a book about writing letters, as a medium and a practice—but inside that, there are little essays about how to develop a consistent writing practice and how to find new ideas for what to write about and how to push your writing style forward. There's a chapter called “How to Maintain a Mysterious Mystique in Your Correspondence.”
Viv: Do you think letter writing is/will continue to have a resurgence? Like, the whole “print is back” sentiment in our digital age?
Rachel: Letter writing is a very interesting thing, because I think it's something that should have died out.
The postal service is impossible and preposterous. We have texting, we have DMs, we have every way to get in touch with people. People don't even like the phone anymore—except for me, I still love a long call—that's considered too outdated. People don't really send epic emails like they used to I mean, people barely blog. So many forms of communication rapidly feel anachronistic.
At the same time, I hope letter writing is having a bit of a resurgence in this period, where people are trying to get off the Internet and to find other ways to communicate with one another. They want to things that are tangible and actually will stand the test of time.
In terms of a form of communication, I find it to be the most mindful. Because you have time to write a letter. You have time, as much as you want to give yourself, to say what you want to say, to craft the words the way you want to craft them, and you know they’re going to one person. There’s no deadline, nobody even really waiting for the next letter to come, even if they hope they will receive one. You get to set the pace.
But also, it’s not a totally private act. It's not like journaling where you're writing only for yourself. It does have an audience.It is writing that will be read. If and when a letter arrives at its destination, it's probably one of the most closely read documents you'll ever compose in your lifetime. I read letters so carefully and delicately, like they're a little gift.
So you get a lot of time to compose it yourself. You get a lot of freedom in your choices because you're not being interrupted. You get to send something complete out, and then your reader gets equally ample time to absorb that and make something in response.
It is this very slow, very organic, very purposeful way of getting to know someone. During that early part of the pandemic, I did take a few of those people that had initially messaged me and became their pen pal. And I've stayed corresponding with quite a few of them. So we've been writing to one another for nearly five years now.
There's a woman named Rebecca who lives up in Boston, who's one of my most regular and longtime correspondents. She's become one of my best friends, but we've never met in person, and only really communicate through letters. And the letters are long and luxurious, and I read them in the bathtub and I love them. It’s one of the more significant friendships in my life, and it's all epistolary.
Having those relationships has changed my sense of time and my sense of connection. I think I was starting to feel really burnt out on connections. I know thousands of people, technically, at least on social media, but it is really hard to deeply know someone that way. And yet, I really know the people I'm writing letters to. They really know me. I tell them everything and they tell me everything. It's very intense and intimate like the friendships I always wanted to have growing up.
Viv: Do you want to meet Rebecca in-person one day?
Rachel: We totally want to. We try. Actually, we started talking on the phone maybe a couple years ago. We're now on an audio/voice memo level, but I think we will finally meet this year. We've decided that in 2025 this year, we'll finally meet. We did do a recorded interview with one another for the audiobook version of the book, where we discuss what it is like to be writing to each other for five years. That is by far my favorite part of the audiobook.
Viv: Would you characterize your relationship with Rebecca as a slow burn friendship?
Rachel: Yes, and very few people have that anymore! I mean, I think it's a slow burn, and I cherish that, but also I fell in love with her the minute I got her first letter.
Her letters are so beautiful. She's a lawyer, but with her writing, she could be a novelist. She's an amazing stylist, and her letters are very much about the natural world outside her house. She goes on walks and she'll draw me maps of her walks and collect leaves and flowers from her walks and mail them. She makes collages. She's just such a creative person.The first letter I think I got, had a map of her walk, had drawings she had done herself of her family and the flora outside her house. And then there was a bag of tea she had blended herself that was herbal. It was amazing. I was just like, who is this person? You know what I mean?
Viv: Yeah. It sounds like she really shared a slice of her world with you.
Rachel: But the slow burn thing you're talking about is totally true, because you reveal yourself in letters over time. It takes the time it takes. None of it is rushed, by the very limitations of the form.
Peoples’ lives are very busy too, and letters are a medium that shifts to accommodate that. I'm in the middle of writing somebody back right now, but it's a time consuming activity, so it's like I have to set aside time to do it. They have to set aside time to do it. Often the lag between letters will be months. And that’s fine! That’s what makes each one that arrives feel like such an event.
I'll hear from Rebecca and then we'll go months without a letter and then suddenly I'll get an eight page letter from her, and then it takes me a couple months to equally get up the energy to respond in kind.
But every single letter that arrives arrives exactly on time. To me, there's no such thing as a late letter.
Letters arrive exactly when they're supposed to.
Thank you Rachel, for chatting with me!
You can find her at IG @rachsyme order a copy of Syme’s Letter Writer here.
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loved reading this chat between the 2 coolest people on the internet!
I love handwriting letters to my friends. My bestie and I always send each other handwritten cards and letters for holidays/birthdays. We send each other presents as well but we always love the letters/cards the most. I’ll be ordering Rachel’s book 😍