On Flânerie - Feeling Seen

I recently rediscovered the word flâneuse — the feminine form of flâneur, that 19th century French concept of the urban wanderer, the person who moves through a city with no fixed destination and total openness to whatever the streets decide to put in front of them — and the moment I read it, I had one of those small but satisfying experiences of recognition where you realize there has always been a word for something you thought was just a personal quirk. I’m more interested in the women who did it despite the social constraints of the era — George Sand dressing in men's clothes just to walk freely through Paris, Virginia Woolf making the streets of London a kind of interior monologue. Although I am not bound by those constraints in these modern times, I still find the act of flânerie something that resonates deeply within me.

When I moved to San Francisco a few years ago, I spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to figure out why something felt missing… I kept coming back to New York in my mind, and to Mexico City, and to Paris, and eventually I started to wonder if what I was missing wasn't a specific city so much as a specific relationship to being in a city — that particular quality of density and layeredness that makes wandering feel generative rather than just aimless. What I was mourning, I now understand, was the loss of a place that supported my flâneuse nature. I just didn't have the word for it yet.

All of which brings me to two weeks ago and a client who came to me because he was tired of not looking the way he felt on the inside, which is one of my favorite kinds of problem to work on because it's not really a style problem at all, it's a translation problem — the feeling exists, the vision exists somewhere, and what's needed is someone to help find the language for it. He didn't know where to start, which is completely understandable because when your wardrobe is stuck in high school or college, the gap between where you are and where you want to be can feel so wide that it's hard to know which step to even take first.

So we took the smallest possible step. We went to a menswear shop in the West Village, and I put him in a wider-leg navy chino to replace a pair of skinny jeans that had been through the wash so many times they were practically a different fabric than they started as. A bridge pant, as I’m calling it, something close enough to what he already knew to feel wearable on a Monday morning, but with enough of a shift in silhouette that it would start to recalibrate how he saw himself. We talked more over drinks at Katana Kitten about how he wants to feel and how he wants to be perceived, and I asked a lot of questions and listened to all the in-between parts of his answers, the parts where people reveal more than they mean to, and I started building a picture even if I didn't have the full image yet. That part of the process is always a little bit like developing film — the shapes emerge slowly, and you have to resist the urge to force them into clarity before they're ready.

Then this past weekend, I had a massage booked near Two Bridges at a place that had gone viral on TikTok, but the cigarette smell the moment I walked in was so overwhelming that I made my apologies and left, and suddenly I had a free afternoon with no plan whatsoever. Which is, I have come to understand, exactly the kind of condition that produces the best finds.

I remembered I had bookmarked a tofu dessert spot nearby — Fong On on Division, a place I'd been meaning to get to for ages — so I followed my appetite there first, and then after, with no destination in mind, I just walked. I turned onto Orchard Street and it opened up in front of me like a different city: blocks of vintage shops and small independent designers, the kind of street where you can spend two hours and feel like you've barely scratched it, and where the stuff hanging in the windows has actual personality rather than the feeling of having been selected by an algorithm. There were pieces I immediately recognized as right for my client — the textures, the proportions, the particular kind of character that reads as intentional — and I photographed storefronts and took notes and walked around with this lovely feeling of having been sent somewhere by the city rather than having chosen it myself.

I texted him, he agreed it was exactly the direction, he gave me a formal budget and a list of what he wanted to build toward, and we decided together to start with a foundation of basics and a few statement pieces and see where the budget breathes from there.

What I want to say with all of this is that I don't think my job is to go looking for perfection, because perfection as an organizing principle is actually kind of deadening — it closes things down instead of opening them up, and it tends to produce results that feel curated in the bad sense of the word, like a hotel lobby that's beautiful but gives you nothing to hold onto. What I do instead is get to know a person genuinely and then move through the world with them somewhere in the back of my mind, not hunting, not forcing, not limiting myself to a pre-approved list of shops and sources, but staying open to the possibility that the right thing might be on a street I turned onto for no particular reason on an afternoon when my massage fell through.

That is flânerie as a working method. It looks like wandering. It is actually a form of sustained attention — to people, to places, to the small unexpected thing that turns out to be exactly what you didn't know you were looking for.

On the Search for Human Individuality

I have spent a lot of my life collecting experiences that did not obviously belong together.

Retail merchandising. Nursing. A master's in public health at Columbia University. Management consulting. And now this. If you are trying to find the thread, I understand.

Here’s what I think was happening in my head when making these pivots: I did not feel like I knew enough yet. Not enough about people, not enough about the world, basically not enough about what actually makes a life feel like my own. So I kept going. I wouldn’t say I was lost, because there was always something else worth understanding. Another corner of the world I had not seen yet. I needed to collect enough of it to feel like I had a real picture.

Growing up “shy” (aka observant) and pushing myself to become this person who is client/patient facing a vast majority of the time, gave me the ability to pay attention to people and situations in a specific way.

I realized that when I walk into someone's home I am not really looking at the furniture. I am looking for the thing that tells me who they actually are. And it is almost never the most expensive piece in the room. It is the one with a story behind it. The bowl that came back from a trip somewhere. The object that stops a conversation because someone across the room needs to know where it came from or who made it. It’s the same with how someone chooses their outfit.

What I am noticing more of though is how there are the same things in the same way everywhere. Fast fashion and manufacturing and supply chain logistics have increased production of the same thing. AI can generate a fully styled room in seconds. “Google it”, “buy it from Amazon”. Everything is available and somehow it has never been harder to find something that actually feels like you.

People are buying more and more and still walking around with this quiet sense that something is missing. Not because they have bad taste. But because they have not had the space or the support to figure out what their taste actually is.

I started Alight because I think that matters. Not in a precious way. In a very practical, this is your one life kind of way.

This is for the person who is ready to stop decorating their home the way a catalog told them to. Who has been quietly buying things trying to find the right feeling and has not found it yet in the usual places. Who knows there is a version of their life that feels more like them and just needs someone patient enough to help draw it out.

With that to say, the thread that has been stringing my assortment of careers together is a desire to help people - physically, creatively, analytically. So my latest venture is to help people find that “thing” that makes them feel unique and distinctly human.

— C

March 2026