I remember my dad wearing this badass jacket all the time when I was a kid. I love the classic look of the leather sleeves and wool body. It’s quite unique too—New York City Lites is a lighting company that one of my dad’s best friends, Deke, founded in the ’80s. Back then, Deke had a few of them made on 10th Avenue and gave one to my dad. Many years later, my dad gave his to me, and now it’s not only my favorite jacket but one of the coolest things I own. —Keir Novesky, global design director
Life-Affirming Ties
My dad started wearing ties in the ’80s, as a young, preternaturally exhausted psychiatry resident. By the time I came along, in the summer of ’96, he’d already amassed a small haberdashery’s worth of them. Wearing them today reminds me of his laughably elite taste—and the soft, reflexive empathy that masks it, a tacit rejection of the blowhards comparing lapel stitching on Styleforum.
Once, when I was in high school, my dad mentioned an especially telling interaction with a patient. One of his regulars, an older gentleman with a (relatively) sunny disposition, had ambled into his office unusually downtrodden. “Doc, what’s the meaning of all this?” he eventually sighed, gesturing wearily around him.
Earlier in their conversation, my dad encouraged the guy to share more about his day, trying to suss out what precipitated the fatalist turn. “I suppose it wasn’t all bad,” the patient said. On the way to the hospital, he had stopped to buy a coffee, cracking a joke that made the harried-looking barista laugh. “That’s the meaning of all this,” my dad recounted to me, using slightly flowerier language for emphasis. (Cue my mother’s eye-roll.) “If all you did today was make a stranger laugh, isn’t that worth it?”
