Taeste Buddies: Kristen Naiman
The Real Real's Chief Creative Officer on the Joan Didion auction, gardening, and styling Hanson.
Welcome to another edition of Taeste Buddies. It’s a bi-weekly interview series that explores the idea of taste: How it’s shaped by our identities and spurred by our creativity. Each edition I chat with someone whose taste I admire, whether as a friend or from afar.
Kristen and I met up for our interview at Fort Greene’s trendiest coffee shop Thea. Come to find out, we live just a few blocks away from one another in Clinton Hill (clearly she has good taste in neighborhoods). I’ve been a
loyalist for well over a decade now, so I was curious to hear more from their CCO who joined last year, about her own thoughts on personal style, sustainability, and secondhand shopping.As someone who grapples a lot with the balance between making shopping recommendations and also not wanting to shill things to people, I appreciated Kristen’s thoughtful and grounded POV.
What does good taste mean to you?
Good taste is your taste. I think that people with really amazing style and really amazing taste have spent time honing their images. To me, that's the singular measure. They can appear in many, many different forms, as long as it's connected to what you're all about, how you see the world, and being a marker of good taste. Consistency and not a point of tyranny, but consistency in the form of something that's well developed and grows over time and doesn't jump around every time.
Where do you think your sense of taste comes from?
I grew up in Rye, in Westchester and out there were these two very glamorous Jewish women who were my sister's friend's moms. They wore wide-leg slouchy pants, Joan and David loafers, and tousled shaggy haircuts. I thought they were so insanely chic.
It's also all of the things I read, the movies I watch, the way I orient myself in culture. It was always films over fashion. I love beautiful clothes, but I come at it through that lens of how they communicate something about you.
When I was in my early 20s, I remember thinking about the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock because I’ve never met a white shirt or a white dress I didn’t like. There's a part of me that always goes back to Woody Allen heroines and the way that there's a masculine/feminine play, and also a way that style communicates intelligence. I was always a sucker for women who dressed in such a way that there was a sexiness that underpinned everything, but that sexiness came from their clarity of who they were and how they were moving through the world.
What was your last great purchase?
I bought a really beautiful silk old Hermes button-down shirt. It couldn’t be from much past the ‘80s, and the quality of the silk is bonkers. It's a little bit shiny with a dolman sleeve, slouchy, and a bit of a big collar.
I'm in a funny bridge age right now. When I was in my 20s and 30s and even into my early 40s, I dressed like an old lady. But now I'm getting to this murky middle age, where dressing like an old lady could make you just look more frumpy. This is the trickiest age to dress. I’m about to turn 50, and I'm trying to figure out what this age looks like.
When I bought this shirt, I thought '“is it going to age me up or age me down?” I decided in the end that I didn't really care, because it was so beautiful, such a perfect thing. I found this way to wear it buttoned up to my neck with this very fitted skirt. I wore it to an event a couple weeks ago, and I felt amazing in it.
What do you wear the most?
This is an Hermes scarf. Besides that blouse I bought, it’s the only Hermes I own. I'm not such an Hermes gal, but that scarf belonged to Joan Didion.
I bought it from a vintage dealer that I know who got a bunch of the stuff that they deemed not “whatever” enough to be in the auction [after her passing]. I was doing all this writing, and I was about to pitch it to a bunch of people, and I was really nervous. I walked into the Manhattan Vintage Fair and I ran into a dealer that I've known literally forever, she had a store on Court Street. I went straight for this funny caftan and she was like, “you know, that caftan was Joan Didion’s.” I had this lightning feeling of, “oh my God, I need Joan’s clothes to channel her powers.”
I ended up buying a few items, and one of them was the scarf. Weirdly, of all the things I bought, I wear that scarf to death. And I wear it all screwed up, wrapped up in my wet hair after I go swimming every Friday morning. I don't treat it like it's precious or Hermes at all. It’s in constant rotation. Sometimes around my neck, sometimes I have it stuffed in my bag, a lot of times it's on my head. It's a little piece of Joan.
What are you known for?
My oldest, dearest friend’s birthday is in August, and every year she comes to Long Island, and we throw a birthday party for her. We always make these messy cakes. This one is a pavlova, and I decorated it. I always try to put edible flowers on them, so I grow tons of nasturtium.
I'm also known for my salads. That's my thing, I make some million different salads. I believe arranging and chopping. The shape of the vegetables is actually everything in a salad. This is one random one I made for dinner one night this past summer, beautiful, a work of art.
I relate a lot, as I’ve gotten older I want to look effortless, but now feel like it takes a little bit more effort to do so.
I lean dressy. There's something old world in both my instincts, but also maybe the way I look. I always joke I love polka dots, but I cannot wear polka dots, because you may as well put me in Brighton Beach Memoirs and stick me in a cottage out there, because I immediately go period.
Even though it's more vulnerable, there's something younger in spirit about just being fresh faced, especially right now, because of all the attempts to look younger.
But when I was younger, if I could have done anything, I might have been a French spy in World War Two or something. I love glamor that's not necessarily dressy, but it’s put together. As I've gotten older, I've had to actually learn to make it undone, because to be put together now really can look very doyenne which is not my vibe in my heart. So I've been leaning towards this super scrubbed face. I've always worn lipstick, another old school, old world vibe of mine. But besides that, I often don't even wear mascara anymore. Even though it's more vulnerable, there's something younger in spirit about just being fresh faced, especially right now, because of all the attempts to look younger.
What’s an outfit that represents your personal style?
I had to go to a wedding with my now ex-husband when we were in our late 20s. It seemed very glamorous, and I didn't have any money. We lived over in Cobble Hill at the time, and I was walking to and from the subway every day past this vintage clothing store [the same on on Court Street] that I really liked, and this dress was in the window.
I kept thinking about it, and finally it was a week or two before the wedding, and I decided I was just going to walk in there and try that dress on. It fit me perfectly. It was 200 bucks, which at the time seemed like a lot of money. I bought that dress and I've worn that dress at these very pivotal moments. I wore the dress to that wedding, and it was one of those nights where you just felt so right. And then I wore it to the CFDA awards in 2018. At Kate Spade it was a time of transition and we all decided to wear vintage. Then I just wore it to a party three months ago.
There's something very consistent about my style, but I think the best pieces are the ones you hold on to. When you find pieces that are really true to you, they evolve with you over time.
How does your sense of taste come into play outside of fashion?
I love to cook, I love to have dinner parties, and I love to eat. My daughter had her bat mitzvah in the fall, and I was not raised practicing Judaism, but part of my experience of becoming a mom was realizing that I don't want her to feel disconnected from it like I did. I wanted to know what it is culturally and she can do with it what she wants.
We had her bat mitzvah, so we've been thinking about ways to keep that up in our lives. So for the month of March, I did shabbat every Friday night, inviting all the different people in my life. I'll just throw it out to a bunch of people, it's not necessarily people that know each other, they’re from all pockets of my life. Last week I made a huge thing of curry, and my daughter and I came up with one question during the night. Last week's was: Now that it’s spring, what is making you feel optimistic?
How did you get to where you are career-wise?
I think of myself as a late bloomer. I had these real opportunities very young, but I also spent a lot of years under the radar doing jobs that allowed me to know who I was as a professional person before having to interface with the world.
I was in college, and I was studying writing and I was bartending and waitressing as you do in college. My best friend from my writing program had graduated the year before. He got a job at Paper, doing a lot of music coverage, so I met all these people who became the roots of my tree of life in New York. One of them was leaving Paper to go to this short-lived magazine called Condé Nast Sports for Women, so I started there.
It was ahead of its time. The first shoot I ever did for them was Richard Burbridge shooting this woman who was an alligator wrangler in a white Eres bikini with her head in the mouth of an alligator. That was sport! I ended up staying there and not going back to school, because it was so fun and glamorous. It was a startup, and so very quickly I went from working in the fashion closet to being thrown on shoots.
I worked there for a year and a half, and then I left and I started styling musicians. That really lit up my brain, because I'd have to meet someone and understand very quickly who they were. I got a job styling Hanson. I was 23 and they were 19, 17, and 14, and I spent a year traveling around the world with them. They were three men on the precipice of becoming adults, and I spent a year helping them articulate who each of them were individually, and then what they were collectively.
During that year, I found this vintage jean jacket for Taylor, and it was from The Gap and I hand embroidered flowers all over it. The Gap called me, and they were like, “Where did you get that jacket?” When I said I made it, the concept team invited me in to come work with them. They had a team of people that traveled all over the world, three, four times a year, Paris, London, Tokyo… and they shopped. Then they would come back and put these concepts together that were meant to inspire the design. At the time, they were taking the cultural temperature, understanding how people wanted to feel, and as a result, how they wanted to look. I still think that that's my truth. Fashion is a cultural bellwether.
Then I worked for 10 years for Isaac Mizrahi, which was an incredible education about how beautiful clothes look, feel, and get made. And then from there, I got a job at Kate Spade. I was there 10 years, and the last two years I had a concept studio that was living at the center of the brand. We were coming up with the story concepts for marketing and design. But I got to this place in that job where I didn't want to be telling people that they needed stuff at a cadence that was untenable for anyone to be responsible.
I spent a year going freelance, wanting to work on a writing project on all the things we acquire in our lives and how they intersect with our experience. Then The Real Real called.
Working at The Real Real, how has it shaped your thoughts around shopping?
There was always this distinction between people that were into high fashion and people that were not. I always thought that was very faulty. As soon as I was working in fashion, I knew I wanted the absolute most gorgeous things that last the longest.
You read somebody like Rachel Tashjian at the Washington Post, or Stella Bugbee and they'll walk into those collections and find the stuff that people that have really beautiful taste are going to pluck out and wear. You want creativity, you want new vision, you want people to make people think. But what if we make less, but the most beautiful, most well-made stuff? Then we keep things longer, and you have a really accessible, much more democratic way for people to buy into that. We'd all be in a lot better shape.
What does working look like to you?
So this is me at the end of my dining room table, which is actually where I work too. Part of me really loves working from home, because I’m a cozy person, and I am happy to be able to have that balance. But I also really love being out in the world, and I love to see people. The entire pandemic I got dressed to sit at the end of my dining room table because I need to maintain that level of separation between what is total leisure and what is work.
Do you have any shopping tips for navigating TRR?
I'm very consistent in terms of what I like, especially at this point in my life. Noticing that and being comfortable with that, and then setting up ways to look for that has made it so that I can find these inroads. On The Real Real there are ways to make these saved searches that people don't always use. I'm always looking for “flat shoes from The Row,” or “cream colored trench coats”.
This is very controversial, but I like a palette. All of my stuff works together. Build some structure for yourself and that actually allows you a lot of creativity inside of it. There's two roots to it. One is knowing who you are, noticing what engages you. And then the other part of it is that we now live in a world where we're just totally overwhelmed, and the only way to deal with that is to know what you're looking at and looking for.
What’s most precious to you?
Okay, so this is a little bit meta, because it's two things in one, and the two things are the sweater and this is a beautiful watercolor, if you can believe it, a painting that my friend Sarah Glick made for an essay that I wrote. It’s a Ralph Lauren sweater that my mom bought for me when I was in high school at Loehmann's. I had to beg her for that sweater. I still have that sweater, and it's my favorite sweater to garden in. It's literally disintegrating, but it's very dear to me.
What outside of fashion inspires you?
I love to garden. Gardening is an incredibly meditative thing. It's a project that unfolded for many years. When you learn to garden, you plant something that might not come to fruition for four or five years. There’s all this heartbreak. A gorgeous plant I bought is going to die a sad death in the wrong place, and something else is going to burst forth and be totally incredible. I have no idea what will take well. So that's really helped me with presence.
This past summer, I sold my house and bought this little cottage. The cottage has no garden of any kind, but there's this area in the back where I can make one. I've been looking at all these little pictures of my own garden to remember all the mistakes, the successes, the different things to think through.
To build a second garden in life is a really different experience. When I started gardening, I didn't know anything. Now I know some things, but my gardening style is very wild and unstructured. I'm not that scientific about it. I was looking at all these little pictures as inspiration for what I'm going to do.
What’s something you have unexpectedly great taste in?
People. I have a huge group of friends and friends from all different parts of my life. Friendship has this way of providing witness. I have a lot of friends that I've had for 30 years. We've moved through the world together, they know my story and I know theirs, and we’re evolving with each other. Our job isn't to change them, our job is to witness each other. I have found that to be an incredibly enriching part of my life, and something that I really find a lot of joy in.
What are you currently consuming?
This is a book that my friend Kim, the founder of Paper, gave me a couple months ago. It's by Maira Kalman, and it's called Women Holding Things. It's both metaphorically and literally about this idea of what women hold. I love gift giving, especially when people do it in a really insightful way that actually makes you feel seen.
This past year, I've had a really super crazy transformation. I'm about to turn 50. I got a new job. My daughter turned 13. We had a bat mitzvah for her. She applied to high school. I bought a house. You name it, it happened. Kim has this new book, and I spent the last year and a half editing that. The end of that editing process, because of all this new transition. And so she gave me this book. Maira is a good friend of hers. It made me feel inspired to do all the things I was doing, and not to feel like it's too much.
Tell me about this picture from a recent trip
This was in San Juan Puerto Rico with my daughter just a couple weeks ago. There's a really interesting food culture there, and a cool vintage clothing scene there.
We were walking and my daughter took it of me from behind. I'm walking into this new chapter of my life. Again, I’m in the head-to-toe cream. I've had this funny realization that the shoes and bags I once chose are not going to serve my well with age. I’m wearing a The Row backpack that I had just bought. It's this pretty silk twill, and it’s white with cream silk ribbons. I'm walking into my new era with this thing on my back. It feels really new, and also feels like me. I love that my daughter captured this moment.
Can you share a few recommendations?
We talked about style as you get older. These are my fave flat shoes: Sophique loafers
This shoe from The Row that I’m wearing instead
My favorite flower, the Japanese anemone from my favorite nursery
My current TRR obsession: Koos Van Den Akker
My next cookbook (I have too much ADD to follow them but I always have one I’m using to riff): Third Culture Cooking
Great read ⭐️
Loved this