Spelade
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From being a fashion director for W Magazine to studying yoga and opening her own studio, to growing pot in Northern California, to making a spontaneous move to the magical, middle of nowhere in Uruguay, Heidi Lender has lived many lives. After years of following the dreams and wishes of the men in her life, in the last seven years, Heidi has had a slow and uncomfortable awakening to the fact that over time she had developed a pattern of dimming her own light in exchange for pleasing her partners. Now, at 50, she is, at last, giving birth to her calling and coming to terms with the fact that she isn’t going to fulfill her princess motherhood fantasy. Happier than ever, Heidi is single and breaking her fear of success by creating Campo, a new, global creative hub in South America. “I really fell hard and quietly and I never do things quietly but I really kept it to myself. I didn't necessarily want to be a mother but...there was a moment when I thought, ‘Oh my God. Well, then, what am I, as a woman? Who am I? What am I going to be? If I'm not going to be a mom?’ And I really just fell hard and sad and I had no idea. It was so traumatic because I didn't know that I had this princess mother thing inside of me...The Universe was like, ‘Here Heidi, you better just take a deep look at who you are because you've got however many years left and you can't go on like this, being asleep.’ I was asleep. Ironically, I actually thought I was awake. I was studying yoga and I was super self-aware and I really thought, ‘Wow, I’m such a smarty-pants,’ but I really was asleep.”
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Curandera (Mexican Healer), Chloe Garcia Ponce, was introduced to darkness at 8 years old when her father passed away. “In order to understand or to speak about light you have to experience darkness. The amount of light that I'm capable of working with is also because I have witnessed a lot of darkness and sadness and grief and pain, and all that is part of this beautiful wheel of life. We cannot have one without the other.” In a way, the passing of her father was her first teacher on her spiritual path because she realized that he was not gone from her. “I could hear things when I was younger and I was very much connected to wanting to give people the proper way of dying. When I was a kid I would find animals, dead birds, cats, that were run over, and I I felt innately my duty that I needed to give them a proper burial.” But It wasn’t until her Saturn Return that Chloe went back to her childhood roots of honoring the spiritual realm as a healer, and turned her back on what felt like the empty life she had been leading in her 20’s in New York’s art business. “I was unhappy, I was very unhappy because nothing felt sacred. In my childhood everything was sacred.” Since, Chloe has listened to heart, defying societal pressures, including that of being a mother, and instead has devoted her energy towards mothering everyone and everything around her. “You have to want to break down all of those boundaries that were imposed socially, from family, from any type of environment, if you really want to find your voice...when you are a Curandera, when you are a healer, it's one of the choices you have to make because whatever I pick up energetically could be passed on to anyone that lives with me. And so most medicine women or men that live in tribal communities don't have children because their children are the people that are in the tribe.”
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We sit down this week with the incredibly multi-talented artist, director, and musician, Terence Nance, to get inside his head about things like his HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness, that airs out, in almost a stream-of-consciousness, many of today’s most salient issues like systemic racism, white privilege, gender, and masculinity. Not knowing it all is especially important to Terence’s work, “I think of making stuff as conversation; why would you get into a conversation if you knew where it was going to go? Why would it be interesting to talk to somebody if you knew exactly what they were going to say back to you?”. He also explains why honesty within his family and close relationships is what makes him feel the most vulnerable, but he goes there anyway so as to set an example to his nieces and nephews, and why he sees beauty as a scale of disarming people and emitting ease, rather than as an aesthetic quality. But most fascinating to us is how Terence unpacks attributes that we give to words such as unapologetic. “People have been using the word unapologetic a lot and I don't know that I have a relationship to that word because that means that I would have had some sort of expectation that I am to apologize for something...I've never felt any kind of dialogue with an audience or anybody making the show that made me feel like there was anything that would offend or necessitate an apology or a caveat of any kind.”
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DJ Louie XIV, who has spent years mixing music for a hyper-masculine crowd, talks about struggling with the shame and hiding that followed him out of the closet and how that has shaped everything in his life, from intimate relationships with other men to owning his path as an artist, as well as imagining his life was a TV show to writing and producing his own.
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Artist Sylvia Maier gifts us with an intimate portrait of her soul as she takes us on a journey from her childhood, growing up in 70s New York as the only daughter of biracial musician parents, through healing the pain of an abusive father by seeking out and painting beauty. She tells us why, having cared for her dying mother, she is no longer afraid of dying herself, why trust was the biggest risk she has ever taken, and she gets real about her identity as mother, artist, and person of color, all while navigating ideals around personal value in an all too material world. “I try to bridge my own contradictions, my own struggles with the world and my inner life. And for me, currency has always been about achieving your ultimate potential. That is your highest level of currency. It’s that you come to this planet and then you fulfill your potential.”
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In the run-up to Mother’s Day Weekend, the irrepressibly unapologetic Elisa Goodkind switches things up by placing the emphasis on celebrating children and acknowledging her self-perceived failures. She shows us that by embracing our failures, be it in parenting, career, love, or life in general, we also embrace our reinvention. Refusing to be invisible at any age, Elisa’s tales take us from her time as a stylist in wild 80s New York, to a yoga teaching mother, to risking it all at 50 and going into business with her daughter.
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We greatly admire New York-based fashion designer, Mara Hoffman. Her designs and principles stand out in a sea of homogeneity and “buy more” culture. The former dancer studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and London’s Central Saint Martins College. She was “discovered” by Sex and the City stylist, Patricia Field, who sold Mara’s samples in her shop. We sat down with Mara in her 6th Avenue studio to talk getting comfortable with change by facing our mortality, not being too attached to the identities we create for ourselves, and how we have to work for our happiness. We discovered why she’s not actually that passionate about the fashion industry because “it can make people feel kind of lousy...it's completely warped our sense of consuming, in that we ‘need’ all this stuff that we don't need.” Ultimately, Mara’s message is to “let it go to let it grow...Imagine holding a seed in a clenched fist...It's really hard to let things go but that's where the growth is; it's on that other side.”
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Welcome to episode 1 of What’s Underneath. Each week Elisa Goodkind & Lily Mandelbaum will be facilitating facade-free interviews with diverse non-conformists about their relationship to style, self-image, and identity, expanding the kinds of unfiltered dialogue they’ve been having in their viral YouTube video series, The What’s Underneath Project. Before they begin interviewing others and asking them to be vulnerable, Elisa & Lily have decided to start by walking the walk and interviewing one another. In this week's episode, Lily gets real about control, the business side of StyleLikeU, her borderline nervous breakdown earlier this year, the challenges of developing an authentic voice on social media, and healing her relationship with her body over the last decade.
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In this episode, we are joined by a gigantic hero of ours, Damien Echols, who was incarcerated on death row for 18 years and 76 days for murders that he did not commit. We became aware of his story with the first of a series of three documentaries called Paradise Lost and have since been forever strengthened by his two books (we can’t wait for the next one soon to be released). Damien’s story is one of almost superhuman inspiration in terms of what the human spirit is capable of enduring and overcoming. Having grown up in the bible belt of West Memphis, Damien was an automatic misfit with his interest in mystical, spiritual teachings and because of his style. Most poignant was his being wrongfully accused, partly because of the books he read and a black trenchcoat that he had found in an abandoned house and that he wore often. Damien’s story is so quintessential for StyleLikeU because it shows how we can be so quick to condemn based on a person’s individuality. Despite Damien’s unimaginable fate, including nearly 10 years in solitary confinement, he says he is actually grateful for what happened to him, because through extreme difficulty, he was able to find his authentic path and purpose. “A lot of what living is is figuring out what your real authentic self is in every single situation and circumstance because we've been programmed in ways we don't understand we've been programmed. We've been taught to have 2.5 kids, get married, get a station wagon and a minivan. Make sure your TV is one inch bigger than the neighbors’. People have fallen for that until they've almost become like rats on a treadmill. Falling deeper and deeper into debt, deeper and deeper into despair, deeper and deeper into hell.”
