Cool people like cool things, which is why we asked Laura Reilly to share a taste of her taste on Perfectly Imperfect.

Laura Reilly is the New York City-based writer behind the Magasin Newsletter. If you enjoy Perfectly Imperfect but wish more of the recommendations were “shop-able”, you should check out Magasin. Sometimes Laura chats with fellow shoppers, and other times she talks about what sales are going on and everything “new” going on in the fashion world. It tends to skew towards women’s clothing, but I still open every email and find a bunch of new stuff I’m into. Laura has incredible taste and lucky for us, she’s here to share a taste of her taste.

Without further ado

Laura Reilly (instagram, twitter, substack)

👾 Clemence Poles' Passerby Discord

Imagine if all of Craigslist was made up of your cool and stylish Instagram mutuals, and you'd have the Passerby discord. This recommendation is basically a conduit to another recommendation vehicle. You can find New York and Paris (and elsewhere) sublets in the best neighborhoods that are furnished by people who get paid well for their good taste, and which aren't found on, say, Facebook marketplace, because the generally tight-knit nature of the group means a trusted renter base. The #fashion channel errs towards suggestions equally weighted by relevance and timelessness, in that particular narrowly coded style that some dressers dress for—can you tell I'm doing everything in my power not to say the girls that get it get it? My only gripe is the conversion is slow sometimes because the group is still young. So come on over if this ^ is you.

💎 The Gem app

Most of my shopping recommendations end up in my newsletter, but I feel like it'd be cheap of me not to share at least one thing here. This is actually a biggie, at least for my own online transactional practices, and I haven't written about it anywhere yet. Basically, this app funnels the results from all the resale sites (eBay, Etsy, Vestiaire, Grailed, The RealReal, etc.) onto one platform, so you don't need to comb them individually for your saved searches/designers. I just bought a barely worn Dilara corset for $300, and I've previously found Pleats Please pants for $100 and an '00s Chanel suede halter for $700. The interface is so straightforward and un-noisy, just an ad-free infinite scroll of results that actually match the query.

🏋 My lovely Chatty Serbian Trainer

My appointments with Alex are a thing I genuinely look forward to Thursday mornings. It's not just because he's quantifiably shifting my body composition, but because he's a total gossip, and the gym we meet at feels like a setting in a modern day Edith Wharton novel. Lots of C list celebs and the rich people you kind of know. Alex trains vaguely everyone, so we end up swapping (harmless! And good natured!) stories while I'm doing weighted step-ups and the hour goes by so so fast.

🥗 Vitamix Foodcycler

My partner is a chef (important sub-recommendation: he runs the dining and catering business @Eti.nyc), so there's a lot of food nonsense happening in our kitchen at all times. A couple birthdays ago I bought him this composting device that we set up under the sink and feed all of our food scraps. With the heat and limited trash pickups in Clinton Hill, our garbage would really smell sometimes, but now since we put all our organics in the machine, our place feels monumentally cleaner. In fact, the dehydrated, ground up bits that come out of the composter smell like expensive, conceptual loose leaf tea that I haven't actually tried drinking yet but might be talking myself into doing right now.

☕️ Cardamom in Coffee

I can't imagine how many coffee reccs you must have received here, but I'm going to add mine anyway. I first heard of cardamom in coffee as an Arabic thing that I got into because it's delicious. Later, I learned ayurveda also recommends it as a way to "cool" coffee's hot pitta qualities. This plays out for me when I feel my anxiety is up (and coffee can exacerbate that); adding ground cardamom pods completely balances out any sense of jitteriness or high strung-ness. I use Burlap and Barrel's. The way I think about it is like how green tea has l-theanine to balance out the caffeine content. This is effectively the human intervention equivalent for finding coffee stasis. I also recently heard cumin can basically do the same thing for foods that cause gas, which is VERY INTERESTING to me as someone who would one day like to eat a sunchoke again. 

👡 MNZ Olympia Wedges

I would never in a million years use the word "viral" to describe the phenomenon of the Maryam Olympia heels, but still, somehow every single girl in the LES or Fort Greene/Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy with a (real) job in fashion seems to have a pair or multiple. Everyone in the Passerby Discord for sure does lol. Their stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold energy is so funny and cute and serious and deep all at once and it's exactly what keeps the MNZ girls so loyal to the brand. They have this quality about them that you could be wearing the most dogshit outfit and put on the Olympias and suddenly the look is a total provocation and you're the smartest person in the room.

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