1 Photographs by: Camilla Meshiea and Kate Steciw
Style Idol
Issue #29
Emily Ryan
By Marisa Meltzer
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
“Nothing is worse than getting into a fight with your boyfriend on the street while wearing your California Raisins T-shirt,” says Emily Ryan, an artist and musician — not to mention native Californian — who recently moved to Brooklyn. She’s talking about her travails moving from Los Angeles, where she could stash extra clothes in a car versus a tote bag. As she sees it, it is one thing to wear something see-through when your method of transportation is your car. “In L.A., you can chance it and wear something ripped. But in New York, if the armpit in your shirt has a hole in it, you’re stuck with it all day and everyone can see.”
Not that she’s against holey tees by any means. She waxes nostalgic on the “awesome requisite faded black T-shirts with tears” she wore as a teenager. Ryan, who was in the band Emily’s Sassy Lime, playing with the likes of Bikini Kill while still in high school, talks about clothes in the mid-’90s with a certain amount of reverence. “We were so lucky because it was that era of white tights with dingy knees,” she says. She has a new band, Combovers and Coattails with Michi Turner, both of them playing keyboards facing each other. She’s also at work on a project drawing everyone she meets in Brooklyn: friends, pets, neighborhood figures, pervy guys on the B61 bus.
These days, when she gets dressed, she tends to gravitate toward the grandiose. “I always want to ere on the side of excess,” she laughs. Today she’s wearing a vintage white confection of a dress, which she describes as “very Gilles Dufour, pre–club kid France” that she bought at a garage sale in Los Angeles. “If you go to Barney’s right now, some 22-year-old designer is making the same dress,” she says, adding, that people always mistake her clothes for designer, but she’s much more into vintage and chain stores. “I’m big on Target, Loehman’s, Ross Dress for Less.”
What she’s really into is the fine line between frumpy and fashionable. For fall, she’s decided her whole style is going to be “Alice down the rabbit hole,” with bows in the hair or a satin sash. “Everything should have collars and cuffs,” she declares. “I like things closed up.”
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