For over a solid decade, we collectively watched Stacy London strategically dismantle women’s wardrobes as co-host of TLC’s long-running reality TV behemoth What Not to Wear. The beloved makeover show centered itself around a handful of style rules, but beneath its snappy and sparkly facade, it exposed the vulnerable and transformative power of change while opening the door to a more evolved sense of self through a closet revamp. 

When you first meet Sunny Ruffalo, what strikes you is the unmistakable suspicion that she is a “somebody.” With her tousled blonde mane, her slim gray wool blazer, her pristine Adidas Stan Smiths, and a level, assured voice, she exudes a stealthy glamour that makes her stand out, even in a stylish town crawling with stylish city weekenders like Narrowsburg, NY.

Melissa Auf Der Maur speaks from a lifetime lived at the intersections of music, visual art, and performance, yet never entirely within any one of them. Auf Der Maur is a traveler between worlds — Montreal, New York, Cape Cod, Hudson Valley — and between selves: artist, musician, curator, and activist. What threads through the story is an insistence on vision, on integrity, and on the small revolutions that shape a life. Even now, decades into her career, she moves with purpose, carrying the weight and freedom of having always followed her own beat.

“We like to text message more than to hear the voice of somebody talking. So you isolate yourself and technology becomes your friend, which never can replace the human touch.”

Marcia Gay Harden’s 2018 memoir opens with a passage from that quintessential figurehead of upstate folklore, Washington Irving, about Rip Van Winkle’s decades-long nap in the Catskill Mountains. The anecdote is a metaphor for Harden’s relationship with her mother, of time passing and memories lost, but also reminds us that the Oscar-winning actress is intimately familiar with the territory. Her own Catskills home is a supremely private property on Gossamer Lake in the Catskills, where Harden and her family had congregated and escaped to, canoed, gardened, and cooked together since 1997 when she and her former husband acquired the initial 150 acres and continued to snap up surrounding chunks of land to accrue the current 300-plus. 

The supermodel, actor, film producer and native New Yorker has been a fashion industry darling virtually since birth. Leaving Greenwich Village behind for a full time life in Woodstock, NY, she tells us about challenging mainstream ideas and her Pursuit of Consciousness. 

Let’s start with the basics: Helena Christensen is a globally famous photographer and model, one of the “magnificent seven”—along with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and Claudia Schiffer—who inspired the term “supermodel” in the 1990s.

No one captures authentic New York grunge quite like Downtown designer Daryl K. For 30 years, she's been dressing rock stars and making regular women feel like one. On a historic day in November 2020, we meet in Hudson, NY to talk about America, women's bodies, and how punk is Upstate NY.