Reviewed by Megan Evershed

In one of the pieces in Natasha Stagg's new book, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, she examines the thong. "It is strangely at once conservative and reactionary," Stagg writes. "Consider the conundrum of hiding panty lines by creating the illusion of underwearlessness."

Stagg's multi-dimensional reading of the thong as one thing and its opposite is fittingly emblematic of Sleeveless. The book itself is simultaneously one thing and its opposite—in the introduction, Stagg notes that some of the pieces are nonfiction, others fiction. While reading, it's not always immediately obvious which genre each text belongs to, but all are reliably composed in Stagg's characteristic, flat style.

Throughout the book, she explores power, influencing, consulting, gender relations, and the politics of fashion. Reading this book is almost like switching between tabs on an internet browser; each paragraph broaches a new idea, or nuances the paragraph that came before it. Crucially, this emphasis on nuance means that the book doesn't allow for clear-cut conclusions, especially when Stagg writes about the two places that dominate the book: New York and the internet.

The opening piece of the collection, "Cafeteria," invokes both of these places. The narrator is eavesdropping on a group having cocktails at Cafeteria, somewhere they go "because the characters in Sex and the City did that." While listening to them talk, the narrator is able to grasp identifying information about the group and locates them on the internet. "I understand that the best thing to be in New York is watched and heard," Stagg writes. In this story, New York is a venue of surveillance, which means you constantly have to be performing the best, most marketable version of yourself. 

This idea pervades the book. New York is frequently and intimately associated with performance: the city is "an actor playing itself," Stagg observes. As well as performing itself, the city also makes its own reality stars, such as President Donald Trump of The Apprentice fame. "New York felt very anti-Trump and yet it was Trump," Stagg writes in an essay on consulting. "This city made Trump and friends of his were all around us." Like the thong, Stagg shows New York to simultaneously be one thing and its opposite.

The book is peppered with references to other reality stars, including the Real Housewives of the Upper East Side and Kim Kardashian. Is there any greater venue for the blurred lines between authenticity and performance than reality TV? It's one thing and its opposite: real and fake, performed and unscripted. On its consumption, Stagg writes: "We're tricked and tricked again."

However, New York doesn't just 'make' famous reality stars, it also makes performers out of anyone working in media and its adjacent industries. According to Stagg, a fashion writer at Vogue won't be able to buy the "products she's pushing," but "has to pretend that she can afford them on her tiny little salary." Similarly, she recounts that, in the New York publishing world, "Everyone is reading some latest book, either because they have to or because they want to impress someone that has to. So everyone is reading something they don't really want to read." We're tricking and tricking again.

If the New York media and publishing industries encourage performance, so does another key venue: social media. Stagg comments that, online, "we dress in drag. . . . We wear representation of our real selves, perhaps especially in internet-only communication." Essentially, on the internet, we perform ourselves.

This social media performance, which is, ostensibly, optional, doesn't always feel that way. It can often seem that if you're not on social media, you're irrelevant. In Stagg's piece, "The Seven Year Itch," a character named Giovanni unplugs the power strip belonging to his roommate, Holly. The strip was powering the filter pump of Holly's fish tank, and so its unplugging causes her fish to suffocate and die. In this story, connectivity and power are conceptualized as literal life-givers. If you take them away, the fish will die.

This story masterfully speaks to how porous the boundaries are between our lives and the internet, how deleting a social media account can feel like a small death. Where there were once all of your thoughts and accomplishments collected on a scrollable Twitter profile, there's now a 404 error. Where there was once a long collection of photographs documenting your life on Instagram, there's now a void. "I want to keep life going and refreshing and updating," Stagg writes, using the language of the internet. The internet has changed how we think about our lives—right down to the terminology.

"The Seven Year Itch" is also about mites spreading from one person to another, similarly to viral content. The story, therefore, seems to be in communication with the idea of trending, something Stagg touches on in other pieces as well. There's a moment, for instance, in which she lists all of the fashion houses that included red boots in their Fall/Winter 2017 season. Like mites or a viral video, the red boots spread everywhere. It was a huge trend that season. 

Trends have the potential to direct and dominate online content, as well as what's coming out of fashion houses. It's a fascinating phenomenon, so fascinating that trend-forecasting was, at one point, trending itself. "Trends are trending," Stagg writes. "Isn't it boring?"

It is, but it doesn't seem boring when Stagg is writing about it. She is compulsively quotable. Her observations are incisive, and Sleeveless shimmers with insight. As we approach the next decade, it's exciting and reassuring to know that Stagg will be watching, listening, and interpreting culture as it unfolds in front of our eyes.