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It’s not an overreach to say that the writer, artist, and creative director Emily Segal is one of the internet’s foremost arbiters of taste. In the early 2010s, she was a founding member of the legendary New York City art collective K-HOLE, which popularized the idea of “normcore.” Roughly ten million trend cycles later, Segal has since relocated to Los Angeles where she runs her strategy consulting agency, Nemesis, and serves as Head of Brand at Costar, which recently launched the dating app Readme (where people get matched based on their reading, well, taste).
In her spare time, Segal weighs in regularly on the ongoing discourse around “tasteslop” — a concept so diametrically opposed to normcore that Segal is quite possibly the expert on the subject: “I’ve always been waiting for another moment when something might present itself as similarly oxymoronic,” as she explains one morning over Zoom.
For our latest edition of “Model’s Own,” Segal un-gatekept her favorite NYC ballet flat spot, confessed her desired return to the acrylic manicure lifestyle, and made us all seriously envious of her childhood growing up under the influence of so many fabulous Upper East Side women.
What item or garment have you owned the longest?
I am very sentimental, and I have a lot of really old things archived. Probably the oldest garments in my family history that I have are my great-grandmother's petticoats, which I wore as my prom dress. Unsurprisingly, I was named “Most Pretentious” in my high school yearbook.
I also have this blue cardigan that I got at the Manhattan Vintage Show in New York when I was in high school. It was from this company called Ohio Knitting Mills that basically bought 10,000 pieces of deadstock knits from this Cleveland factory. It was a very early 2000s kind of proto- menswear American fetishistic thing.
What item do you own multiples of?
Black jackets! You can see evidence of this from the inside of my closet.
What item or garment do you regret getting rid of?
I almost always regret selling things. I rarely regret giving things away, but I always feel like it's stupid when I sell it and get some fraction of the cost, and it feels so meaningless.
I recently sold this Dries shirt that looked awful on me and reminded me of a really horrible time in my life. I felt like, oh, if I sell it, it’ll transmute the energy. But then I felt weirdly sentimental about it once it was gone. I should have kept it as a sort of trophy. It was this men’s Dries sheer black bowling shirt that was striped with a leopard panel on it; I got it when I was finally old enough and stupid enough to experiment with such things like buying the $500 Dries bowling shirt only to learn that it’s sort of completely not worth it, even though Dries is obviously a great designer. It just reminds me of those times where you’re trying so hard to look a certain way and it completely backfires.
Who’s the most stylish person you grew up around?
Two women come to mind who were the mothers of my classmates growing up. One was my friend’s mom, Betsy Rathe; she used to take us to Patricia Field after school and have the drag queens do my makeup. This was when I was seven or nine. I remember going to Moschino with her after school and watching them dress her. She also had this amazing apartment on Madison Avenue that had crushed red velvet wallpaper and hundreds of silver framed photographs. And it was just really iconic and very textural and beautiful.
Another classmate’s mother, Ranjana Khan, is the partner of Naeem Khan, the fashion designer. Ranjana was on Real Housewives of New York. She’s just the most beautiful, glamorous woman. And she dressed me up in a sari when I was in first grade, which was an indelible experience of glamour. I grew up around some pretty glamorous women. My mom has fabulous style and was also super influential; she took me to the Costume Institute at the Met almost every week and to lots of antique and vintage stores.
What’s your favorite T-shirt?
So there’s this company called Bronson MFG, which is basically a Chinese version of Japanese Americana replica companies like Buzz Rickson’s or The Real McCoy’s, which would make these hyper-faithful reproductions of American military spec wear. They’re always really expensive, and now there are all of these Chinese versions of these companies that do the same thing for a fraction of the price.
Bronson MFG is one of them. They make these tubular T-shirts — really heavyweight T-shirts that don’t have a seam down the side. My brother was wearing them and gatekeeping them from my dad, and then my dad was wearing them and gatekeeping them from my brother, and now everyone’s in on it.
Tell us about your everyday bag.
The medium nylon reversible tote from my dear friends and clients at Baggu. It’s gingham on the inside, but I’ve been wearing it with the black outside. It’s very rugged. It has this skinny strap and this really nice oblong proportion that I think has a sort of vintage Prada shape to it. And it holds a lot. It’s a really nice, ambiguous everyday bag.
What’s the last thing you bought in person?
I bought three pairs of ballet flats at the French Sole outlet on the Upper East Side, which I probably should gatekeep. But basically there’s the original French Sole on one side of Lexington, and then across the street there’s the outlet. I don’t know if it's called the outlet, but it has the overstock. I got three pairs of ballet flats for $120. They’re the Classic French sole, beautifully made, comfy, made in France.
In 2004, when I was a sophomore in high school, I was wearing a lot of ballet flats, and I was wearing disgusting, beaten to hell, whatever cheapest ballet flats I could find. I was also wearing real ballet flats because it was a different consumer landscape. So I was wearing Bloch ballet slippers. And my dad at the time was briefly dating this very fancy Upper East Side lady, and she was horrified at how disgusting and stinky my ballet flats were. So she took me to French Soul and she bought me these light green suede ballet flats, which I was so obsessed with.
She also gave me her mother’s vintage Pucci and her mother’s vintage Neiman Marcus cashmere coat, which I still wear. That’s another old thing that I have. And I was like, “I still hate you” — so evil. You cannot win over an evil teenage girl so easily. And then my brother spilled pizza grease on her $10,000 rug, and it was over.
Are you an impulse shopper or a deep researcher?
I feel like being a deep researcher fatigues me and makes me into an impulse shopper. I had this experience just now with sneakers — I think it is a golden age of lifestyle shoes and expressive sneakers, and I challenged myself to try and figure out what sneakers I actually liked or actually wanted and found the whole experience so fatiguing that then I just randomly end up buying a pair one day. There’s this dynamic at play with the overload of options at the moment that makes research less and less satisfying because there’s no end to it
I tend to also get perverse and really like things that are the opposite of archival and are sort of trashy and garbagey or spam. The fastest and cheapest thing also tends to fascinate me. I remember Zoe Latta once said that fast fashion was part of my practice.
What’s your approach to dressing as a wedding guest?
My best friend got married this summer, and so I did so much research about what to wear to this wedding that I felt like it was having a negative effect on my mental health. I was like, “This is really not a good way for me to spend my time.”
My approach to dressing as a wedding guest is that I really try to avoid wearing black, even though I love wearing black, because I think it’s spiritually correct to try and be festive. I was definitely caught in a bind at this wedding because it was in Sicily, it was 100 degrees, and it was an extremely fancy and beautiful wedding, and I optimized for that. And then there were a lot of art girls there in their really cool exoskeleton dresses, and I had an identity crisis.
Given your commitment to vintage, are there any ultra-specific ways you care for or store these pieces?
I do have a storage unit in LA, and then I have a couple of boxes in my dad’s storage unit on the East Coast that contain really old things. I have no idea how well that’s stored because I think I shoved things in those boxes when I was still in my very messy early 20s. Now that I’m getting older and moved into a new house recently, I’ve gotten more thoughtful about how to make sure that things are kept properly.
I was never interested in being particularly organized until I got pregnant, and then I got obsessed with it, which was maybe spiritual, hormonal, whatever. But I also started to understand some of the wisdom of so many traditions around having things be very pared-down and intentional. A few years ago, my aunt moved out of her house, and she sent me a huge box that just showed up on my doorstep one day of all these old “working woman in New York” type of clothes, which was pretty cool to have — Henri Bendel Black Label knit dresses that she wore to work at Citibank in the early ’90s. So I have a big box of those. And then I have a lot of T-shirts or sweatshirts from friends’ projects. And then I have coats and dresses that I probably won’t wear but don’t want to get rid of; those are hanging in plastic. Clothes are a really important way for me to remember things. I’m always trying to balance that with not being overloaded and cluttered.
Are you particular about what goes on your face in the mornings and before bed?
I have gotten very obsessive about using European sunscreen that has all the filters in it that are not FDA-approved — specifically La Roche Posay Anthelios UVMune400, which is extremely annoying to order from overseas. I didn’t really realize how important sunscreen was until I moved to such a sunny place.
At night I’ve been using this Celimax Pore + Dark Spot Brightening Cream, which is niacinamide and tranexamic acid, and then my favorite Bee Magic all-in-one skin balm. Otherwise, I sort of skipped that generational experience of the secular prayer of the 20-step skincare routine. I’d rather just get Botox or a facelift.
Any other non-negotiable grooming or beauty rituals?
I had acrylic nails for almost a decade. And as a writer, I was always at war with the keyboard. [The nails] were off for a period during COVID. Then, when I got pregnant, I felt like I shouldn't be cooking toxic materials onto my skin. So I started wearing press-ons — currently I have KISS imPRESS Premiums. Press-ons have gotten really advanced in the past five years in particular. But I think I am ready to reenter the world of having proper nails. The sound of a really hard nail on your phone screen — I’m craving that sound and feeling again.