Rachel Seville Tashjian is a true flâneuse — every day, she takes at least one walk through Central Park with her dachshund, Ritz. And, as a fashion reporter, she’s often heading out to an interview, so she’ll build in time before or after to wander whichever neighborhood she’s meeting her subjects in. We met up with Rachel in her Midtown apartment to talk about hosting parties, dressing for the symphony, watching three movies back-to-back, and more.
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on her morning routine
I wake up pretty early, usually around six or seven. My husband Lloyd brings me coffee, and then I usually write in bed. Sometimes it's work, sometimes it's just journaling or my own writing projects. I have a bed tray, which is very transformative. If you're on your laptop in bed, it can feel very slug-like — but if you have a tray, you're sitting up a little bit. I’ll do that until around 10, then I take a shower and get dressed. I'll take the dog for a walk if Lloyd hasn't already done that. By that point, it's noon.
on growing up in a family that loved clothes
I grew up in Delaware. My father worked in communications for big engineering companies and my mom was a career coach. My grandmother never worked. She trained as an opera singer, but she had a very religious family, and they wouldn’t let her pursue that professionally. Her husband, my grandfather, was a lawyer for a small bank. No one in my family worked in fashion and they weren’t into designers or anything, but they were always really into clothes and shopping. My mom wore a lot of things from upscale clothing lines that don't exist anymore. And my dad can go into any store and find the most interesting thing. He has a lot of unusual sweaters that he's bought while traveling. He loves Ralph Lauren, but he's not like I want the Ralph Lauren look. He gets his sense of style from my grandmother. She would take me shopping a lot, and she would come up with these amazing outfits for me. I was like my dad; I would wear Abercrombie, but I would also wear vintage poodle skirts. Sometimes I would come home and just go through my parents’ closets and try on different things, and I’d borrow their clothes for school. My brother and I would trade clothes a lot. So, I grew up loving clothes, but I didn’t really know anything about fashion.
on becoming a writer
As a child, I was writing stories all the time. When I was in first grade, I remember going to a bookstore with my mom, and I got these journals with beautiful covers. I was like, I'm gonna write a novel in this journal. That’s an early writing memory. So, I was always really interested in writing. I loved magazine and newspaper journalism. And I found that the writers I was excited about were writing about fashion. When I was in high school, I loved Judith Thurman at The New Yorker, Cathy Horyn at New York Magazine, and Robin Givhan at The Washington Post. I was interested in the way these women wrote with style, authority, and a sense of humor. For college, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and I studied English and Art History. When I graduated, I wanted to be a writer, working at a magazine or a newspaper, but I applied for so many jobs and I didn't get any. This was in 2011, and at that time, people had fashion blogs, so I started a fashion blog on Tumblr. I would write lots of different things. Some of it was a satire of fashion blogging. Some of it was essays about brands that I liked. It was a place to try different sorts of writing. Very few people read it, but three editors read it, and they offered me freelance writing jobs.
Eventually, I got a job in the PR department of Vanity Fair. That was about ten years ago now. And then while I was there, they were like, We don't have anyone writing about fashion for our website. So, if you want, you can write for our site. That's how I really got my start. My first full-time writing job was at Garage magazine. When I was there, I knew I wanted to cover Fashion Week in a diaristic style, but one that felt grounded in observation and reporting. It felt very much of a piece with the kind of online writing that was happening at that time on Gawker or The Hairpin or The Awl, but about a scene that was very separate from the universes that those websites were talking about.
on learning about fashion and fashion writing
When I had my fashion blog, I would go to the websites of Parsons, FIT, and Central St. Martins to find syllabi for courses. Then I would buy the books or check them out of the library and read all of these fashion books. I would ask myself, how would Robin Givhan write about this, or how would Cathy Horyn write about this? I had my own interests, which I knew were different from other fashion writers, but I learned how to write by applying the approach of these well-established women to my new thing.
I found it so essential to my writing to be working in the shadow of other people early in my career. I was at Vanity Fair when Ingrid Sischy was there. She was writing most of the fashion stories and I just inhaled everything she wrote and figured out how she did what she did. I was going into the office every day at Vanity Fair, and Fran Lebowitz would come in and smoke and complain. And I was like, this is how you speak, this is how you hold the attention of the room. I had a great editor there too, Matt Lynch. That was a big help to me. He would go through my drafts with me and say, “this part really needs to go up here,”and he’d explain why. And I had the same kind of support when I was at Harper's Bazaar, and when I was at GQ. It's so invaluable to have those kinds of experiences. I worry for younger people or even people my age. It's hard to find that kind of support and training and those opportunities to sit at the feet of someone great.
“I reread things all the time. As a writer, when I reread something, I’m always like, why didn’t I reread this sooner? It would be nice if I could wake up every day and reread things. I guess you can understand why monks read the Bible every day, right? It gets you into the right mindset.”
on writing to serve the reader
I've had jobs where you have to think about the person you're profiling through an advertising lens, and there are potential conflicts of interest. And I remember in other jobs I've had I’d feel like I wanted the person I was profiling to like the piece. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. But in my current job at The Washington Post, I’m only thinking about the reader. How do I serve the person who's reading this? How do I open this world up to this audience?
So, for example, runway fashion has gotten really expensive — more expensive than it’s ever been before. And at the same time, I think the quality of most of it has declined, both intellectually and materially. So, when I was covering runway fashion in September and October, my approach was like, if you're gonna ask us to pay all this money, it better be good, which is not an attitude I had before. I cover runway fashion a lot, but it’s not the only thing I cover. At other times, I try to open up fashion to a wider audience because I think it’s a very alienating subject and world. It’s not that I necessarily want people to come away from my writing thinking, oh yes, I'm so glad fashion exists, it’s important and it's art, but I want them to come away thinking, this is more complicated than I thought, or now I understand why this strange thing looks the way it does.
on getting dressed
On an average day, when I'm working, I get dressed very, very quickly. I have go-to pieces. I have an obscene collection of Lauren Manoogian sweaters. I usually put on one of those with a pair of trousers. My go-to trousers are mostly by The Row. And Sofie d’Hoore — her clothes are so good. They’re simple, but they're cut in interesting ways.
If we're going out somewhere, like to a dinner party or the symphony, then I'll take longer. But I think about what I'm going to wear a lot during the day, so it actually doesn't take me that long to get dressed. I’ll know I want to wear this particular hat, or If we're going to a cocktail party and I'm standing the whole time, I’ll plan to wear a piece I would never wear to dinner because I don’t want to spill something on it, like this pale pink Simone Rocha dress. Earlier this week, Lloyd and I went to the symphony, and I was thinking about what I was going to wear beforehand, and that made the whole thing even more fun and memorable. It expands the evening into a multi-hour, perhaps even multi-day thing. It's almost like going on vacation. When you plan to go on vacation, the planning is just as fun, or sometimes even more fun, than going on the vacation.
on how she finds fashion inspiration
I look at old photographs all the time. I like to look through museum collections. This morning, I was looking at The Met's site. They have about a dozen beautiful gloves by Hermès. I'm not really shopping for gloves, but next time I am, maybe that’ll inform what I look for. I also look at a lot of costumes in films. I don’t go out that much, and if we stay in, Lloyd and I will often watch movies. That’s probably what we’ll do tonight. If I have a day off, one of my favorite things to do is go for a long walk and then just sit at home and watch two or three movies in a row. I think it’s so fun; it’s the best feeling in the world to be like, all right, let’s do another one.
“I don’t think most people have personal style. Instead of talking about finding your personal style, maybe the better conversation to have would be how to shop better — how to think about what you’re looking at or what you’re seeing in a store in a more critical way.”
on fashion’s sustainability problem
It is frustrating that over the past 20 or 30 years we've stopped manufacturing clothing and textiles in the United States. Until very recently, that was done here all of the time. And that change has been really damaging because we have to import more things, so things are being flown in from all over the world. And it creates a much bigger opportunity for exploited labor. I think the only way to fix a lot of what we talk about in the United States when we talk about shopping, consumerism, sustainability, and fast fashion is through more regulation, especially of clothing production and manufacturing.
But I also think that we have a broken relationship with our belongings and with desire. I think we feel that it’s not okay to want things, but it actually is. Desire and longing are important feelings and emotions because they're gateways to fantasy. And I think fantasy is so important. We’re constantly feeling guilty about shopping, and so we’re constantly trying to figure out how to buy less or buy better. I’m not saying that’s invalid, but I think that guilt would be lessened if we could think a little differently about why we want what we want and why we shop and what we're trying to get out of buying something.
on starting her natural-style newsletter
I came up with the idea for it in 2015 or 2016. I thought it would be cool to do a newsletter with little essays and interesting things I found. That's how it started — I had a TinyLetter. But I only did it for a year. And then in late 2020, I wanted to do a newsletter again. I like to shop and look at clothes even when I’m not planning to buy anything, and I felt like I’d get really interested in something, like beaded cardigans, and I’d just have a bunch of things saved on Etsy and that didn’t go anywhere. So, I thought, what if I could release these into the world? I felt like I knew a lot about fashion and brands and shopping, and it can be hard to find that information, so I wanted to frame it in a way that would allow people to ask questions. I sent it out from my Gmail account. At the time, everyone was like, I've launched a Substack! And I thought it was funny to be like, I'm sending an email in Times New Roman from my Gmail account and bcc’ing everyone. I thought that was kind of charming and punk. Now I've had to start three new email addresses in order to send it out to the full list. It's a real pain to send it out because you can only bcc so many people.
on following your own curiosity
I wish that conversations about fashion weren't so tightly tied to the functionality of social media. It feels like we're all talking about trends, and then we're all talking about how there are too many trends, and then we're all talking about how personal style is better than trends. It just feels like everything is reacting to the last conversation. The problem with fashion is that if someone is doing something and it’s working for them, the response — from designers, writers, everyone — is not, oh, I would also like to do something like that, but how can I put my unique, individual imprint on it? Instead, it’s just like, I will also do that exact thing. And then eventually whatever that thing is burns out and everyone moves on to something else. The number of Substack essays I've seen arguing that the algorithm makes it so that you can't have any taste — it's like, okay, then get off the algorithm. I don't think it's that complicated to discover things for yourself. It’s just curiosity. Once you find, for example, one interesting film, then you look up other things with the same director or the same actor. And then all of a sudden, you're following your own path of interest.
“When I talk to my mom about something, she’ll say, ‘Do you want to vent or do you want me to give you advice?’ That’s a skill that very few people have. I need to learn to do that — I give way too much advice to people who don’t want it. But I do ask her for advice. Lloyd and I want to have children, and I was talking to her about that yesterday and she said, ‘People always told me that after I had children, I wouldn’t care about my work, and I just didn’t find that to be true at all,’ which was helpful for me to hear from her.”
on how she shops
There are different reasons I want different things. Sometimes it's to solve a problem. I get up every day and I wear trousers, so I want them to be soft or I want them to fit in this fluid way. And sometimes I see something, like my Bode candy wrapper dress, that I think should be in a museum and it's cool to have something like that and get to wear it and be in the world in an outfit like that. I have this ALAÏA coat — I wanted it for two years, and I finally found it on Yoox during some ridiculous sale, so I got it for a quarter of the price. The whole two years that I was thinking about this coat, I thought that my life would change if I had it. And I do feel that my life changed.
I’m always looking at clothes, but I don’t actually buy very much. I like small boutiques like Maimoun, Oroboro, Stand Up Comedy, and La Garçonne. I look at those sites all the time. They have beautiful photography. And a lot of my clothes are vintage. Earlier in March I thought, I want some of those beaded shrunken cashmere cardigans from the ‘50s. So, I spent a weekend looking through those on Etsy. I have no idea where that idea came from, but now it's something I have, and I wear it all the time. I also wanted a very large, pleated silk skirt, so that’s something else I got recently. I'm very inspired by my friends’ shopping as well. My friend Lynette is the greatest shopper in the world. She'll say, “Oh, I just got a Prada coat.” And then I'm like, maybe I should have a Prada coat. So, I'll go on The RealReal and look for something that might work. I look at The RealReal a lot.
on her relationship with her husband
We met at a party in 2016. When we were introduced, I was really interested in him, and I felt like he was testing me a little bit. He wasn't — he told me later he was just terrified. You know when you're nervous and it comes off as being aloof by accident? It was that sort of situation. But he was dating someone at the time. After that, we would run into each other all the time but one of us was always dating someone else. Until we ran into each other on the subway in 2018. We started dating right after that.
We talked about moving in together within months after we started dating, but Lloyd told me that he felt like for the time being, he wanted to keep his apartment and continue to live separately. I thought that it was really cool that he said that because in a relationship, I think it's important that if you disagree, you feel comfortable enough to say that. I thought it was great that he didn’t feel like he couldn’t tell me what he wanted. I think a lot of relationships end because one person did or didn’t want to do something, but they didn’t feel like they could say it. Then when we’d been dating for a year and a half, his lease was up, and we decided to move in together. That was right before COVID. In the summer during the pandemic, my parents were in Cape Cod, and we decided to go there for Memorial Day. We rented a car to drive up there, but we hadn’t rented a car to go back. We thought we'd come back in a week or two, but we ended up spending almost the entire summer there. I guess that's probably when we figured out that we could really be together long-term.
We spent all that time with my parents over the summer and then we spent most of that December and January with his parents. I think we learned a lot about how we wanted our relationship to be from looking at our parents’ relationships and thinking about the things we do and don’t admire about their relationships and their habits and the way they relate to each other. We got married in the church that I grew up going to and we did very standard premarital counseling with the priest, and we talked a lot about what our parents' relationships were like during that process.
“It’s weird. I was in this minimal phase — I’m not minimalist, but I was really paring back. And then I was like, why am I doing this? I own all this amazing, colorful clothing. So, I’ve been trying to mix them together.”
on beauty
My mother has always been amazing at making sure I don’t feel insecure. She would say things like, “You are so smart! I wish I were as smart as you!” She would tell me things like, “You have a kind of Grace Kelly look.” I remember once when I was in eighth grade, she was like, “You look like Gwyneth Paltrow!” I had braces and absolutely did not look like Gwyneth Paltrow, but I was like, great! She still says things like that to me now. I'm not arrogant or anything, but, for instance, I’ve gained 10 or 15 pounds since I got married and I'm not like, oh no, I gained this weight and I need to lose it. I'm just like, okay, whatever, that's fine.
My mother is extremely beautiful, but she's also very minimal in her approach. She moisturizes and wears sunscreen, and I obsessively moisturize and use sunscreen. I use Tatcha Water Cream and Supergoop sunscreen, the clear stuff, which is really nice. I also use The Ordinary's cleanser, which I like because it's inexpensive. I don't really use any anti-aging creams or anything like that. I get Botox once in a while, but I like to have some wrinkles and movement. I assume I'll get a facelift when I'm 60 or somewhere around that age.
on what she’s reading
Fashion is Spinach by Elizabeth Hawes is so good. She's a really funny writer. I’m rereading it right now. She was a labor activist and socialist and a fashion designer. She spent a long time working in various design houses and couture houses in Paris. Then she made ready-to-wear clothing when ready-to-wear was first emerging in the United States in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. In the book, she dismantles the idea of fashion as this thing that should be mass-produced and available to everyone. Her primary argument is that there's fashion and there’s style, and fashion exists to steal from style and give it to people who don't have it.
I’m also reading Rosemary’s Baby, Hardly Strangers, Sally Hemmings, and New York: Trends and Traditions.
rachel’s favorite spots in new york city
I like the Bridle Path in Central Park. It's from when you could ride a horse around Central Park — you could do that until quite recently. It's a sandy path that goes up the west side of the park. It’s quiet and there are lots of plants and some really beautiful bridges pass over it. And the southern part of Central Park is very underrated because it’s the most cartoonish part of Central Park.
Carnegie Hall is an epic place to hear music. It's so different from seeing something at Lincoln Center.
We go to P.J. Carney's, the sports bar and pub across the street from us, at least once a week. It's a great place to get a beer or an enormous glass of wine and a bowl of chili. It could be the Fanelli’s of Midtown. Loi, the Greek restaurant down the street from us, is amazing.
Going to Bergdorf Goodman is amazing. They have a great section of antique home goods on the top floor; I don’t think many people know about that. Outline is really good, and so is Oroboro. I go to the BODE store a lot. In front of Nordstrom, there's a woman who wears a sequin beret and sings Billy Joel covers. She has a full setup — a karaoke screen with lyrics, and a little stereo that plays tracks. She’s there every weekend.
