wanderslut

IPAs between the coasts.

The Northeast and California may both have their signature styles, but they don’t have a monopoly on craft beer. The midwest may be the home of PBR and Miller, but it’s a nest for indie brewers as well.

A free afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, let me sample just two of the midwestern city’s breweries (leaving several out, sadly). The first was North High Brewing, which is located in a beautifully renovated early 20th century Ford dealership building. It’s a lovely place to sit, with all sorts of local antiques and memorabilia decorating the walls. 

The tap list is surprisingly wide, covering hop lovers with lots of IPAs and pale ales, a generous handful of malty amber and wheat beers, and even a couple of shandies thrown in for good measure (this is a college town, after all). Fly, a hazy pale ale, stands out as a winner, and adventurous palates might enjoy sampling the sweet Tree Tapper, made with Ohio maple syrup, and the Wayne Grodzkiskie, a smoked wheat ale with a distinctive flavor. 

The next destination was Seventh Son Brewing, which has ample space for entertaining both inside and out. The spacious and sunlit taproom serves up a roster of beers that are also primarily hoppy styles at the core, rounded out with a few others like the Blue Jay Way porter and Kitty Paw, their very own hard seltzer. I had the pleasure of trying their Capra Nova, a fresh-hopped IPA that’s memorably delicious and makes you sort of feel like you’re drinking pure nature. The Rime Winter IPA is also a tasty and rich choice that’s seasonal without bashing you over the head with it. 

San Francisco born and brewed.

If anyone can tell you about the interconnectedness of the environment and culture, it might just be brewers. Beer is made from water, hops, grain, and sometimes fruits or herbs. And as craft beer continues to explode throughout the U.S., with brewers looking for ways to work with and build mutual relationships with their local communities, those ingredients are often being sourced close to home. And sometimes the end product gives back to its birthplace, as well.

Anchor Brewing, which claims to be the oldest craft brewery in the country, dating back to 1896, is in and of San Francisco. Its name comes from the importance of maritime activity in the Bay, which shaped the city and surrounding region. Today, the Bay remains significant both culturally and ecologically, which is why the nonprofit organization San Francisco Baykeeper exists. The organization, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year, patrols the Bay, seeking out major polluters and holding them accountable to clean water laws. And as the Trump administration continuously throws out environment regulations and ignores scientific data, Baykeeper’s work remains, unfortunately, more relevant than ever.

And fittingly, Anchor Brewing does its part to look out for the organization looking out for its home. Anchor’s Baykeeper IPA is a golden-colored, clear and delicately flavored fruity and hoppy brew with a slight tang; it’s described as a “San Francisco-style IPA.” The unique moniker might be appropriate, too, considering just how local the beer is – one of the major malt components is family farm-grown barley from across the Bay. And as the name would suggest, a portion of proceeds from the IPA – which is newly available in cans – will be donated to support Baykeeper’s work.  

Beer and accountability, both for local communities and the environment, make a strong pairing – and in fact, it’s what we craft beer fans are coming to expect from our favorite breweries. “Drinking responsibly” is coming into a whole new meaning.

IPAs between the coasts.

The Northeast and California may both have their signature styles, but they don’t have a monopoly on craft beer. The midwest may be the home of PBR and Miller, but it’s a nest for indie brewers as well.

A free afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, let me sample just two of the midwestern city’s breweries (leaving several out, sadly). The first was North High Brewing, which is located in a beautifully renovated early 20th century Ford dealership building. It’s a lovely place to sit, with all sorts of local antiques and memorabilia decorating the walls. 

The tap list is surprisingly wide, covering hop lovers with lots of IPAs and pale ales, a generous handful of malty amber and wheat beers, and even a couple of shandies thrown in for good measure (this is a college town, after all). Fly, a hazy pale ale, stands out as a winner, and adventurous palates might enjoy sampling the sweet Tree Tapper, made with Ohio maple syrup, and the Wayne Grodzkiskie, a smoked wheat ale with a distinctive flavor. 

The next destination was Seventh Son Brewing, which has ample space for entertaining both inside and out. The spacious and sunlit taproom serves up a roster of beers that are also primarily hoppy styles at the core, rounded out with a few others like the Blue Jay Way porter and Kitty Paw, their very own hard seltzer. I had the pleasure of trying their Capra Nova, a fresh-hopped IPA that’s memorably delicious and makes you sort of feel like you’re drinking pure nature. The Rime Winter IPA is also a tasty and rich choice that’s seasonal without bashing you over the head with it. 

Rays of hope at Oxford Fashion Studio group shows.

From NYFW, we have unfortunately come to expect little more than watching desperate bloggers in head-to-toe Fashion Nova going battle royale for the perfect runway shot while the rest of us wait to be disappointed by another variety show brought to you by overly confident trust fund kids with sewing machines and good PR.

However, the definitive airy opulence of Haan Haan gives us brightly edgy Newport Beach vibes and a little bit of hope. With a somehow elegantly bold construction, the young Sydney designer has achieved the look of “Versace for the wife.” In 2019, it’s nearly impossible to create a collection that isn’t referential – and there’s nothing wrong with that. When we talked to her backstage, we were pleasantly surprised to find that she takes the concept of sustainable fashion to a new level. The young designer is not only using original “silk” prints on recycled poly fabrics, but taking lace deadstock to the next level with her optimistic reconstruction. She calls her most notable piece, a flowing, high slit maxi dress with beautifully constructed cutout shorts a “power dress,” which we agree gives off mad powerhouse vibes without sacrificing the flowing femininity that comes with a cinched waist and puffy sleeve. We’re excited to see what comes next for this junior designer.

While it’s difficult to keep attention through multiple designer showings, in the third Oxford Studio show group we were woken up by the styling of the budding South African designer Arti Juglao, who caught our attention by styling her ethereal dresses with flip flops and slip on tennis shoes. We thought we were over “deconstructed,” with exposed zippers and seams, but with the way Juglao brings together the air of femininity and the hard construction of her pieces, these details present a point of view that we didn’t realize we were missing.

Overall we still saw details typical of rookie designers within the 13 collections we viewed, like popped seams and poor fabric choice, but these two standouts gave us hope for the next generation of designers.

Camp, but make it high fashion.

Whenever some prized trait of a subculture hits the mainstream, something is always going to be lost in translation. When it was announced that this year’s exhibition at the Met Costume Institute was going to be “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” queers everywhere held their breath. Two of the biggest cultural institutions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vogue Magazine, were going to be devoting several months to appreciating the style we hold so dear. Were they going to fuck it up?

Walking through the exhibit as a queer person deeply immersed in the art and disaster of camp, I quickly realized something: the exhibition wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for me. Instead of Liza Minelli and Dolly Parton, Leigh Bowery and Lady Bunny, club kids, street queens, and starving artists, there was….a lot of Moschino. The tongue-in-cheek, Jeremy Scott types of contemporary fashion are fun, for sure, but they’re the end of a filtered version of camp. Something made serious, then funny, then serious, then funny again. The exhibition refers to Sontag’s and Isherwood’s distinctions between “low” and “high” camp, one of which is supposedly accidental and a bit embarrassing, the other is pure opulence. What they’re missing here is – well, everything.

Take Dolly Parton, for instance. She’s said that her look is styled after the town tramp she used to see growing up. She knows that her look is a tacky kind of glamorous, and it’s not embarrassing in the least. It works: you can’t look away. There’s mockery in camp, but it’s not directed toward the wearer of “low” camp. Camp performance and style are a way of seizing what’s always been limited to people other than you: straight, rich, white, et cetera. It’s a way of saying, “being you isn’t so hard. I can do it better.” It’s loving your idols but not taking them too seriously. 

So when the “Camp” exhibit enters through Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp” and depicts almost exclusively designer pieces, they’re skipping to the end. They’re looking at camp through an outside perspective. 

Lady Gaga, one of the chairs of the exhibition, may be the lynchpin connecting the Met’s camp to the queer world of camp. She’s a queer woman who always knows what she’s referencing, and it’s not the runways themselves. Her performance on the pink carpet at this year’s Met Gala was one of few who really got it. Camp is performance, it’s intentional artifice, it’s funny, but it’s also genuine. Camp doesn’t care if you laugh at it. It’s already laughing at you.