Styling SLOWING (Part III)

Notes on endings, familiarity, and the color blue

I’ve come to think of blue as the color of nuance. It soothes but also sharpens.

I have distinct memories of blue growing up: smudged ink on birthday cards, limbs or textures in my grandmother’s paintings, an emblem of the first subway line I rode when I moved to New York, and most notably, teasing my father for wearing the color almost exclusively. But I understand now how much of an armor blue became for him over the years—uniform in practice when everything was thrown into chaos beneath the surface. In this way, we are cut from the same cloth. As an adult, blue has also become my go-to color. It doesn’t ask me to button up. It’s shapeless, timeless. I can show up as myself in its presence.

Oh, how it’s present—in views outside of frosted window panes, in the threads of sweaters with product names like “Winter Skies,” which are crafted in show-stopping shades of cobalt, navy, and steel. Then there is the less visible but equally powerful blueness that emerges in early winter—an apt im…