"WHERE ARE MY KEYS"

Three years ago, I wrote a Hung Up post that was one of my first ideas for this newsletter. Like any coastal woman with boobs to accentuate, three-dollar-sign cocktails to sip, weddings to attend, and a mother to say something was too short, I eagerly opened up every email from the clothing brand Reformation. I rounded up a few of Ref’s more-untethered from reality email subject lines: “YOUR BOSS IS AT THE CLUB.” The newsletter’s audience was a quarter of what it is now; I wanted to bump this for people who missed it. 

“YOUR BOSS IS AT THE CLUB”

Hunter Harris · February 24, 2021

As a rule, I hate brand emails, mostly because I hate emails. Every day I do my silly little skincare regimen and do my silly little tasks: check my email, check Twitter, open a Google doc to write three complete sentences, check my email again, respond to someone too quickly and respond to someone else two days late, and then open up a Google doc again, only to hate the three sentences I just wrote.

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All of those email subject lines felt like random texts from someone I almost became friends with once. “I have so many ideas about this character, who appears in my inbox every so often. I imagine that she really is someone I met once, but the details are foggy,” I wrote at the time. “We had one conversation, and the same day I get a push alert from Clubhouse¹ asking me to “welcome her,” she’s sending me an invitation to her wedding with the gloriously clear subject line: “SECOND MARRIAGE.” She’s like your good friend’s other friend, the one you see once a year at a birthday dinner and have no plans to build a friendship with because why would you?”

This week, the brand launched a shoot with Monica Lewinsky and Vote.org that felt plainly idiotic.² The empty cliched “Vote!!!!” language is depressingly 2016, a fashion fascicle of “Pokémon Go to the polls.” I run cold and am weak-willed, unfortunately, so I don’t think this will stop me from checking to see if one cardigan I like is ever back in stock. The brand’s emails have become marginally more normal, which is a shame. I had to scroll very far back in my inbox to find some of that original Ref magic, subject lines that were dizzying but awe-inspiring. More brand emails should feel like they are written by a person who didn’t get to work at OG Jezebel, someone putting a sticker on their phone’s camera for a truly horrific meal at Frog Club, or from a voice who is a pick-me of female friendship. 

But there is still some of that old magic, like you’re catching a very disorganized but glamorous person with one earbud in, on her way to a restaurant you haven’t yet heard about, with a name you will certainly mispronounce.