Cool people like cool things, which is why we asked cool person Naomi Fry to come on Perfectly Imperfect & spread the hot rec wealth.

Brooklyn’s Naomi Fry has been a Staff Writer at The New Yorker since 2018 and is widely known for her razor-sharp cultural commentary & prolific social media presence. Fry has a real knack for finding the humor in pop culture but also diving deep on subjects like Ben Affleck’s back tattoo or more recently, The Grubby Glamour of Juergen Teller’s Photography. On her Twitter and Instagram you can expect to find her iconic wit, great fits, tasteful shitposting, and even photos with John Mayer. Naomi has great taste and lucky for us, she’s here to talk about what she’s been into.

Without further ado

Naomi Fry (twitter, instagram)

👜 Prada Tessuto nylon chain-link crossbody bag

About a month ago I was at a drugstore not far from my house when something chic happened. This was surprising because the circumstances (refilling a prescription for a pill to treat a fungus on my toe) and the location (a Walgreens in Bushwick), really weren’t chic at all. Nevertheless! There I was browsing the shelves when I saw this young cool woman carrying an amazing bag. It was a crossbody nylon Prada purse—I don’t know if it was actually from the ‘90s or if it just looked like it was—and crucially the strap was chain link, making it seem like a Chanel knockoff. I followed the woman around stealthily trying to catch as many glimpses of the purse as I could, and when I got home I started googling the resale sites and found something similar! Thank you anonymous Walgreens inspiration! (The link I put in is for a sold-out bag but you can probably find something similar if you search eBay etc.)

📖 Jean Rhys novels

I’d read “Wide Sargasso Sea” many years ago but I wasn’t familiar with Jean Rhys’s other novels until my friend Emily Gould urged me to read them, so I’m passing on this rec to you. “Good Morning, Midnight,” “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie,” “Quartet,” and “Voyage in the Dark” were all written between the two world wars, and are all slim books about a Rhys-like protagonist: a woman alone who drinks too much and is always in verging-on-desperate straits, between Paris and London. Really amazing if depressing. 

🍍 Pineapple snack 

This is a very basic but very powerful idea that I stole from my husband’s brain. If you get a pineapple at the store and cut it into not-very-big chunks, and then you put them in a bowl covered in saran wrap in the fridge, every time you open the fridge to get something you can stick your fingers in there and grab a perfectly cold, delicious, and sweet chunk of pineapple to shove in your mouth. It’s very refreshing! And I imagine will seem even more so as spring ends and the heat of summer begins! 

🍔🍕🍣 Hannah Goldfield’s New Yorker restaurant reviews

Hannah is a good friend of mine and also my colleague at the New Yorker: she writes the Tables for Two column in the magazine every week. She has such a knack for describing food that everything of hers that I read, I immediately want to start eating!!! Highly recommended. 

🎶 Britney Spears, “Blackout” (2007) 

Somehow still the best writing music when I’m on a deadline (which is almost constantly).

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