Fashion

9 Months Into the Pandemic, My Bedroom Has Become My Everything

My bedroom is the only place in the world that really belongs to me. If I can make it reminiscent of my favorite dive bar, or a pine-scented forest, or the miniatures exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, maybe I…

When I look around my bedroom, I’m overwhelmed by the amount of…well, things I’ve accumulated over the past few months. The shiny white hook from which I hang my colorful new assortment of masks; the altar-adjacent amount of scented candles on my windowsill; the neon-pink “Girls, Girls, Girls” sign I bought to recreate the aesthetic of my favorite, recently closed lesbian bar; the shelf where I proudly display the dollhouse-sized food miniatures I’ve begun trawling eBay for nightly.

All of this might sound like run-of-the-mill consumerism, but I can promise you: I wasn’t like this before. Prior to March, when COVID-19 first arrived in the U.S. and confined many of us to our homes, I spent most of my time at work or at bars or friends’ houses, returning to the fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn that I share with three roommates mostly to sleep, binge-watch TV, or heat up frozen ravioli from the haphazardly stocked grocery downstairs. I didn’t lavish attention on my bedroom decor, because what was the point? I wasn’t there much anyway.

Now we’re nine months into the pandemic, with cases rising in New York and around the country, and I’m relating to my bedroom—a 12-square-foot, white-walled cube with okay-ish light and a less-than-ideal amount of closet space—in an entirely new way. I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home, which means I now write stories and conduct interviews almost entirely from bed (or, on extremely productive days, from the tiny desk bolted to one wall).

Leisure-wise, I’m socializing in the outside world a bit more than I was this spring—for now, anyway—but I still spend an inordinate amount of my time in my chambre, watching trite romantic comedies on Netflix, rereading novels I’d skimmed the first time around, and making occasional, fleeting attempts to organize the stacks of unopened New Yorker magazines that have been making me feel insufficiently literary since I moved in three years ago.

If you’d told me in 2019 that my response to a global pandemic would primarily be “buying things,” I would have laughed you off. There’s something that feels decidedly un-revolutionary about the anxiety-induced nesting I’m doing. How embarrassing, how capitalist and distinctly female, to line the walls of your own little hidey-hole as the world literally burns, my brain whispers as I try to fall asleep at night.

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Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

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Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

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