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.