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.”

Our childhoods inimitably define us. And it is only when we are adults that we glean just how much. It came as little surprise, therefore, to hear that Anie Stanley grew up in the Catskills with romantic aspirations of a beautiful homestead. I stayed in her house a couple of seasons back with a girlfriend in the fabled Smokey Belles, named after the many women who have visited (Southern Belles) and the property’s 7 campfires. 

When throwing a small dinner party this winter, the best advice Goshen Green Farms founder Ana Hito could give is to leverage whatever the season offers—from the tablescape to the menu. The balaboosta herself abides by the same rule of thumb when preparing for her monthly farm-to-table dinners—the last of which happens to be tonight.

Arriving at Marine Penvern’s “humble little abode,” her eponymous clothing atelier on Hudson’s Warren Street, is like being welcomed into a jewel box. Handmade garments beckon: boiled wool jackets with red zippers running down one side, her signature; playful capes and silk chiffon skirts in shiny metallic; “protective gear” made of aluminum-coated wool sheathed in polyurethane, a sardonic take on 5G conspiracy theories; and a striking floral house dress in soft, fine wool, her version of pandemic loungewear.

I am sitting at a table inside the private quarters of bed and breakfast, The Milliner, located in Hudson, NY, owned by artist Charlotta Janssen and her partner, photographer Shannon Greer. Their carefully crafted space is a world populated by artists, activists, visiting neighbors, old paint trays, and good food. The late morning light is coming through the guest room window, which catches Janssen’s crisp blue eyes as she sits on a stool. The fine lines around her face tell a story of a life well-lived. 

Alexandra Climent’s story has many layers, much like the extraordinary material she uses to make her art. As the self taught woodworker walks me through it from the sun-soaked living room of the new home she shares with her partner and pup in Narrowsburg, I catch myself interrupting to gasp out awestruck questions like, “how did you not give up?” which I asked not once but twice during our conversation. Her answer is accompanied by a hearty laugh and an easygoing humility that comes naturally: “I still ask myself that! I asked myself that yesterday.” 

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. 

Jodie Patterson is proof of how full a life can be. In her fifty-three expansive years, she’s mothered five children, been an acrobat in the Big Apple Circus, directed public relations for a major fashion brand, got married twice, owned a beauty business, wrote a memoir, and the list can quite literally go on and on. She’s always creating and forever ideating, but when we finally connect, she’s in both a mellow zone because of the incessant rain New York City is getting and concerned about the state of the world in this current moment.

They say you can’t go home again, but there are some places you outgrow and some places that grow with you, claiming a corner of your internal landscape and imprinting on who you are by reminding you of who you were. For Rendón, a seasoned and successful actor who splits her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, this place is Tivoli. 

Christi Johnson exemplifies the coexistence of creativity and sustainability. From repurposing discarded treasures to nurturing a lush garden, the designer’s life upstate is a masterclass in the art of unhurried living, where each decision is sewn with intention and purpose. 

Life moves in seasons, and that measure shifts our sense of cause and consequence. Emily Johnston works within is long view. She lifts pigment from stone born eons ago and grinds it with river water. She calls the practice integrity of intuition; through it, art binds to land and to time. Color on the canvas becomes a record of fossil and tide, joining medium with maker, place with era.

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. 

An ideal day upstate for Francesca DiMattio includes the following: working on the land, sculpting in the studio, and going to Salvation Army. For the 36-year-old artist, whose large-scale paintings and ceramic sculptures conjure up a jumbled universe of patched shapes and textures, thrift stores and their potpourri of knickknacks, oddities, and secret histories have long influenced how she thinks about her own work.

Imagine your dream weekend in the Catskills. Then think what it would look like if you took that weekend and transformed it into a covetable lifestyle brand. This is the foundation of the Livingston Manor Fly Fishing Club, a membership-based community of like-minded souls dedicated to getting out in nature and enjoying it to the core.

The sun was at its peak when I pulled in to the eerily quiet town of Bovina and drove up the gravel driveway to Brushland Eating House on Main Street. The town itself, which boasts a mere population of 600, felt like an empty movie set patterned with antiquated charms.