Rachel Tashjian Wise on How To Get Your Greedy Little Hands on Her Invite-Only Newsletter
"There's no special secret, it's not like going to the Beatrice Inn"
Three years ago, I had a friend who had a friend who started working at Telfar. “She doesn’t even know anything about fashion,” my friend told me about her friend, outside of a bar. She’d recently tried to dye her hair red, but something had gone awry during the bleaching or foilyage-ing or ecaille-ing, and it was really more orange. Like the color of a Reese’s wrapper. When I asked how she had learned about fashion, she said, “I get the Opulent Tips newsletter.” I think she rolled her eyes when she said this, but maybe that didn’t happen. “Rachel Tashjian writes it, you have to ask her to be added to the list.” She stomped on her cigarette. That night I DMed TheProphetPizza asking to be added to her mystical, friendship-ending, capital-F-Fashion list.
A few days later I received an email entitled: OT #53: YOU ARE INTENSE AND LOVE THE AVANT GARDE.
“The reality is that most people don't know very much about fashion,” Rachel tells me a couple of weeks ago. “It's part of the intellectual challenge of writing about fashion.” Her hair is perfectly bleached. She’s on a couch in a soft-looking, white, maybe a little thick-for-august, sweater. The DNC is underway and she’s been up since 6am, chatting about Tim Walz’s Carhartts on NPR’s Morning Edition.
So, who exactly is Rachel Tashjian Wise? Good question. She’s a fashion writer for The Washington Post’s Style section, and madame of downtown’s best-kept secret, the invite-only newsletter, Opulent Tips. It’s a newsletter about shopping, yes, but one that piques your curiosity (what’s Zoran? Who is Loulou de La Falaise? What exactly is an “Edith Head Hitchockian skirt suit"? How does one “wear it with this enormous bird”????). Formerly, she was Harper’s Bazaar’s Fashion News Director and before that, GQ’s first fashion critic. And prior to that, she was a UPenn grad working a marketing job at a finance company.
Below, she tells me how her tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn profile landed her her first gig at Vanity Fair and how she’d dress Tim Walz.
I love an origin story. What was your first moment with fashion?
I was not knowledgeable about capital F Fashion for most of my life. I was really, really interested in vintage clothes and putting together weird outfits, but I did not know anything about designers. What got me more interested in it was reading great writers, particularly Robin Givhan, who is still at The Washington Post, and Cathy Horyn, who was at The Times for a long time, now is at The Cut, and, Judith Thurman, who was writing at The New Yorker. It was through reading them obsessively that I was learning about fashion.
When I was in college there was a store, which still exists in Philadelphia, called Joan Shepp, and that store has like Rick Owens and Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, and all these great designers. That was the first time I saw some of those things close up. It was really through reading and touching that I really learned about fashion.
At one point in my mid-20s, I realized I really wanted to pivot to be a fashion journalist, so I went to the websites for Parsons and FIT and I found course catalogs and I would check those books out of the library.
What was your first job out of college?
My first job was working for a financial consulting company. I could not even get an interview at Condé Nast or New York Magazine, or anything like that, but I could get a job as a marketing person at this consulting company. It was the only time in my life I've ever had an office. My hours were literally nine to five. I was, like, well respected. I got a bonus. It was such an unbelievably funny thing because I have no head for numbers.
There must've been a sharp pivot at some point. What was that like?
Yeah, so I also had this fashion blog I was doing on the side. It was not very popular, like, four people read it, but four really important people to me. Through this fashion blog, I connected with a guy named John Jannuzzi who worked at Lucky Magazine, which was this incredible, way ahead-of-its-time magazine about shopping. They were really interested in working with fashion bloggers, so I did this workshop at Condé Nast for the fashion bloggers and LinkedIn had a specialist there, so I had this very creative, frankly, humorously written LinkedIn, which caught the attention of a human resources person at Condé Nast, who was looking to hire a publicist at Vanity Fair. He messaged me and I couldn't believe it, because Vanity Fair was the magazine that I grew up reading.
Oh my God. What did your LinkedIn say?
It was something like, I'm as witty as Tom Wolfe, I'm as frigid as Joan Didion, I think in headlines blah, blah, kind of like that. It was very literary, and, very, very Graydon’s Vanity Fair.
Let's get into Opulent Tips. Tell me about starting it.
I had a really small version of it in 2015 where I recommend vintage and antique things. In late 2020, everyone was starting Substacks and wanted to do a Substack about fashion, which didn't really exist at that point. There was Blackbird Spy Plane, but that was much more musings on menswear. I thought, people are always asking me for advice like, where should I get nice pants tailored, and this can be a repository where people can ask me questions and I can send out my recommendations.
But I didn't want to do it on Substack because people would say, “Oh, I'm starting a Substack!” and then the next day they would say, “I'm quitting my job!” and I really loved my job. I also felt a little bit iffy about the sort of political nature of it. At the time, they were giving these huge advances to people and other people would object to that person's politics so they would give an advance to someone else. I thought that seems silly, to be philosophical about it. And to be purely cynical and capitalistic about it, I thought, I'm not joining that unless they give me $150,000 or whatever they're giving these people, so I decided it would be more punk, and also just feel more intimate, to send it out through Gmail.
And who were your first subscribers?
They were mostly my friends. I posted on an Instagram story and people just started DMing me, then other people began posting screenshots so that's how it still works. There's like no special secret, it's not like going to the Beatrice Inn or something. You can just DM me and I'll add you to it.
I have this theory for any dinner party, there’s always a secret guest of honor. The host knows deep down who they are throwing the party for. Do you ever have “guests of honor” when you write Opulent Tips?
I think about that all the time, with all of the writing that I do, actually. There are a lot of stories that I write, especially for the Washington Post, where the topic is very specific and niche and the challenge is to make that topic understandable to as broad an audience as possible. Even if there’s a designer who is a small, cult designer, there's some question that that person is asking within their work that’s much bigger than fashion. Usually, if I'm writing about someone, they're asking questions and I'm thinking a lot about how to make things accessible and invigorating and interesting to people.
But then there are some newsletters where I know so-and-so isn't going to care about this. This is for this specific person, or others where I'm responding to a specific conversation happening online.
There was one I did last summer that was about these Tiktoks I was being served about how to find your personal style. I had written this newsletter that was like, some people are just never going to have personal style. There were a lot of people who probably read that newsletter, hadn’t seen those videos, and had no idea what I was talking about, but then there were a bunch of people who had.
Do you ever get tired of explaining fashion to an audience?
It's funny to think about. The reality is that most people don't know very much about fashion. Even people who talk about it online obsessively, they’re openly like, “I'm learning about these things.” You know, it's not like we have Tim Blanks like, “Yeah, I remember when I was at this Galliano show, and here's what it's all about.” It's part of the intellectual challenge of writing about fashion is that it’s actually pretty misunderstood even among people who are really interested in it.
That's fascinating. Yes, it's just inherent to just writing about fashion. I wanted to talk about the DNC. Best dressed?
I think Michelle Obama. Who is your best dressed?
Probably Michelle, too. How would you dress Walz?
That's a great question. It's curious to me to think about whether progressive politicians who are very patriotic, are they wearing clothes by American designers? And are they wearing clothes by American designers that are made in the United States? Because that's a pretty hard thing to find. If I were dressing him, I’d try to find affordable made-in-America designs. Hertling makes really good pants and Bill's Khakis. Those would be my starting points.
And would you continue to dress Kamala in Chloé?
I actually like what she wears. What she's been wearing over the past year, especially the high-end European designers, it just seems that she likes what she's wearing and it's more important that she likes what she's wearing than we approve of what she's wearing.
This is a moment for us to shift that conversation away from, what should she be wearing? to, this is what she's chosen to wear and what is it telling us?
You’re a great stylist. I'm Gen Z, but I really want to know what high schoolers are wearing. What are they up to? I did this whole photography project with high schoolers trying to see what they’re like, but it’s hard to access them if you’re an adult.
You know who's really good on this is Casey Lewis and she just did a newsletter last week about what the back-to-school trends are and she said camo is a big back-to-school trend.
What are you reading right now?
I am reading a galley of my friend Sophia Kemp's first novel called Paradise Logic and it's very mind-bending about a young woman who lives in Brooklyn and is on the quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time. It's so good. I also just finished Sarah Hoover's, memoir, [The Motherload]. She is a former gallery director at Gagosian, who has insane style. She wears all this Chanel. She had terrible postpartum depression and she wrote an incredible memoir about it. I just finished that this weekend. Then I'm on this big kick of this writer and artist, Barbara Chase-Riboud. She wrote this book in the 1970s about Thomas Jefferson's love affair with Sally Hemings, way before historians were discussing this, and it was a bestseller, but it was dismissed by historians as a fantasy, and then, of course, decades later, it was proven that she knew exactly what she was talking about.
Favorite New York City spots?
The first one is Paley Park, which is this funny little park in Midtown. It has a waterfall and it’s where I go to leave my house if I'm not going to Central Park.
Drawing Center in Soho. I love an old Soho gallery space with those really creaky floors. It makes me feel like I'm in 9½ Weeks because it's just very like 80s Soho.
Then the Belgian slipper store, Belgian Shoes. They make these incredible loafers and they haven't changed the design of these loafers since the 60s. They're a shrunken little shoe with a tiny bow on them. Isaac Mizrahi is obsessed with them. The store is just incredibly old-fashioned. If you want to order a custom pair, you fill out a slip of paper and they mail it to Belgium and they might come or they might not.
Favorite dinner party question?
A big sweeping question, like, did you grow up going to church? Or, are you afraid of mortality? Who's the premier plastic surgeon in New York?
Rachel’s IG, Twitter, read her latest articles at the Post and browse her work for GQ or Harper’s Bazaar.
So good.
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