SKIMS Digest

Domesticity is sticky, especially during a year we didn’t choose to spend inside. Imagine approaching a big blow-out car accident on the freeway, driving towards it and sprinting out your door to make conversation about how charming the weather is today. Isn't it just the perfect little breeze to do a few rounds of CPR in the good ol' outdoors? My favorite season!

Make no mistake, I love domesticity. I love the concept and feel, the aspiration and adoration. The personalization. I love everything, absolutely everything, about home. (Taurus sun.)

The old cliche "you can't go home again" was paraphrased by The Moody Blues with "You Can Never Go Home," a song that sounds the same whether you have heard it thousands of times or zero. It's so familiar that it should work either way.

My favorite thing Kim Kardashian West has ever done—and there are a lot—was recreating the house she grew up in from top to bottom for her mother's birthday. Detail-oriented, she rented her childhood home, including each of their cars, and decorated it by redecorating the decorations of the past. It is, quite simply, the only thing I have ever been jealous of. Her latest SKIMS line, the Velour collection, Kim says, "is a nod to the early 2000s, and it was so fun to go through all the memories and have such an important time in my life inspire both the collection and the campaign."

I know I'm obsessed with the past. (Cancer rising.) I used to save everything, from receipts to ticket stubs, jotting down every memory as it happened. My diary entries stopped when surveillance social media picked up, trading in my thoughts and feelings for timestamps and location tags.

I was having trouble sleeping this year. Someone said: maybe your days don't end because you don't feel like you've done anything worth being a day.

Trend pieces publish the hottest new scrolling habit: real estate listings.

I have always wanted to know what your home looks like. Everyone's home. One of the most frustrating aspects of apartment building living is close proximity to seeing handfuls of interiors, but being too shy to get inside. Also, pandemic.

Bedrooms have become video chat backgrounds, and we’ve slowly put together the layout of each others' most intimate spaces. Now it's dressing up to sit around—no longer does something comfortable imply laziness or shame. The intimacy of seeing each other in repose. If lingerie is a sexy secret implying planning and thoughtful care, SKIMS is intentional loungewear: an invitation to share the most raw, honest portrait of our everyday life. “I want to help give other people confidence and to feel good about themselves,” says Kim. “I want to continue to share my world.”

Years ago, everything felt aspirational. Flash photography of salads and make-up drawers, cabinets of knick-knacks, detailed explanations of what-cream-does-what, where I got this bookmark, did you ever notice the antique shop on Houston? Meet the down-to-earth starlet who's everything you wish you could be, or maybe you still could be? Smear blush using your fingers. What you own is what you could be. I wore the same outfit every day, tight black dress and tights, slid into un-tied Doc Martens. I had long brown hair and winged eyeliner.

Now, I aspire to abolish all my aspirations. It's the same movement as before—forward—but the goalpost is now a vanishing point. To keep turning, over and over, not knowing when I've reached the end, because it is only about getting more perfect.

It was easy to bleach and cut off all my hair—I had volunteered to be a subject for whatever the stylist wanted. Venus was in retrograde, I was warned. But then I just kept doing it, over and over. Booking sessions for roots with a stylist, and following her to another salon. Roots and tones and roots and tones. Waiting until the last possible moment, overgrown, to stretch out time between sessions. In lockdown, I began to learn again. Flashbacks to high school haircuts: standing in front of the bathroom mirror, sink full of hair. Brushing bleach, sloppy droplets dripping down, wiping away before they get close to the eye. Pink dye smeared, washed, replaced. Blue. Blonde. Orange. Color remover.

Not just me—my groupchats are full of the same. My friends are tracking down resurfaced clothes of who they wanted to be. Sixth grade, ninth grade, twelfth grade, whatever. The age of sweatpants is only for those who have already reached what they aspired to be. I used to think of outfits and comfort as mutually exclusive, never seen without concealed under-eyes. I didn't own sweatpants. But the more time I spend alone, or in moments of shared-household intimacy, it's integral to find those house clothes that do the job of domestic life—living for living's sake—finding a sensual, physical comfort while appeasing the emotional, spiritual style.

When I think about childhood memories, it's always crystal-clear images, flashes of fog of hazy peripheral vision. Being six, running through the house moments before needing stitches. Going back home and not knowing whether the sink is too small, or I'm too big. Calling my brother over: look how small this room is. That doorknob gave me a black eye in the 90s.

There are, I suppose, people who have moved around a lot. I'm not one of them.

I redecorated an apartment from my childhood, not owned but that native New York legacy of leases. Security deposit: $75. Day after day, I forget the space as I originally knew it. In moments of reflection, I'll make a concentrated effort to place what used to be. But the moments I'm most grateful for are after that click-turn of the lock, walking into the dog claws tip-tapping towards me, and inhaling the ambiguous defining scent of trips to Grandma's.

Weep no more for treasures you've been searching for in vain
Cause the truth is gently falling with the rain
High above the forest lie the pastures of the sun
Where the two that learned the secret are now one
I don't know what I'm searching for
I never have opened the door
— The Moody Blues, "You Can Never Go Home"

Darcie Wilder is a writer living in New York.