By Jay Cheshes
Three new books spotlight the creative output of three extraordinary women across the fields of design, fashion, and entertaining. Here, we catch up with authors Jenny Walton, Mariana Velásquez, and Ariel Okin to get a deeper look at their individual practices and how these new titles came to be.
“Jenny Sais Quoi: Adventures in Vintage & Personal Style” (Monacelli Press) is available at Books & Books.
It’s often said that real style can’t be taught. Jenny Walton, whose elegant, artfully-off-kilter looks have helped her earn nearly 400,000 Instagram followers, and many thousands of Substack subscribers, has a different point of view. “Style is just like any skill,” she says. “It takes a lot of time, of looking at things, trying things on, seeing what works.”
With her debut book, “Jenny Sais Quoi: Adventures in Vintage & Personal Style,” out from Monacelli Press in April, she hopes to inspire readers to “get off of their phone,” she says, “and into stores, and start discovering themselves and what they really like.”
The author, photographed by Theresa Rudzki, for “Jenny Sais Quoi.”
Walton, a graduate of the Fashion Design program at Parsons, started her career at Calypso St. Barth as an assistant designer. On her commutes to work from her Brooklyn apartment, she’d hunch over a notebook, drawing the outfits in her head. “It was 2014, and Instagram was starting to take off,” she says. “I would spend the length of the G train sketching, and then post it when I got off. And it was amazing, because you could immediately get feedback.” The posts helped spur a career shift into fashion illustration, starting with a big spread for InStyle magazine. But it was her creative wardrobe, plucked from vintage shops in New York and posted online, that really propelled her into the spotlight. A few years ago, she began writing regularly for Vogue about vintage shopping.
Her lavishly illustrated book—part visual diary, part artist’s portfolio, part style coach manual—leads readers to find inspiration, as she does, in the world around them. “I think so much of what we see now is fed to us, but unique style or just a point of view can be found in random places,” she says. “It might be going to a record store, picking up an album and think, She looks cool, and just go down that rabbit hole.”
A spread from the book featuring Walton’s beloved Peggy the Pigeon. Photo by Youn Kim.
The book follows along as Walton, chasing romance, moves from New York to Milan. Her overseas love affair doesn’t last long, and soon she’s on her own, building a new life as an expat. There are treatises on “color paletting,” on getting “off the algorithm,” on the many ways “mistakes make style”; and digressions on her beloved dogs, Charlie, a beagle, and Aurora, a wire-haired dachshund, along with a whole section on “Peggy the Pigeon,” as she dubbed the JW Anderson designed pigeon purse she carried down the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival. “Everywhere I went with it, people were losing their minds,” she says. “It’s such a fun act to be at a security line and they ask for your ID and you open up the wing of a pigeon.”
As she was finishing up the book last year, Walton found love again, seated in the next seat on a flight. Now, newly engaged, she’s leaving Italy for southern California, embracing a new sun-drenched landscape for style inspiration.
“Revel: A Maximalist’s Guide to Having People Over” is available at Books & Books.
Food stylist Mariana Velásquez is a generous host, her gatherings verging on sensory overload. Her evocative new book, “Revel: A Maximalist’s Guide to Having People Over,” out now from Ten Speed Press, celebrates her exuberant approach to entertaining.
“I’m all about more is more, generosity, being ample,” she says. “I love layers, I love print, I love color. I love things that don’t feel too matchy. I want tables and spaces that tell stories—of travels, of family traditions.”
Velásquez grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, but has lived in Brooklyn for more than 20 years. “My grandmothers, my aunts, they’re incredible hosts,” she says. “But they don’t enjoy themselves when hosting—they’re so tense the whole time. I wanted to write a book that would help remove stress from the equation.”
Velásquez arranging flowers; photo by Gentl & Hyers.
The book offers roadmaps for removing the pain points from hosting, whether you’re coddling a partner with breakfast in bed or throwing a garden party for two dozen guests. Her checklists for avoiding day-of disasters have every angle covered, from how much ice to purchase (2.5 pounds per person) to how much meat and cheese to budget for perfectly portioned aperitivo boards.
Velásquez worked in restaurants and in food magazine test kitchens before finding her true calling of styling food—and food events—for editorial shoots. “I found that what fascinated me was the aesthetics of it all, making you salivate through amazing images,” she says.
A few years ago, she launched her own line of housewares—colorful aprons, dishes, and tabletop accessories—which led to a collaboration with Sur La Table. The retail giant will release her debut collection this spring.
A festive gathering from “Revel;” photo by Gentl & Hyers.
In 2021 Velásquez published her first book in English, “Colombiana,” written during the pandemic and dedicated to the foods she pined for from her youth in Bogotá. The book launched just as the world was coming back to life. “When ‘Colombiana’ came out, I started hosting more than ever,” she says. “Every week I was having gatherings—on rooftops, in parks, at other people’s houses. And I started gathering menus and writing down recipes.”
Now she’s collected those menus, and memories, in her new book, shot by husband-and-wife team Andrea Gentl and Martin Hyers, and featuring Velásquez and her friends feasting in locales in New York and Colombia.
An image from “Revel” by Gentl & Hyers.
Potent Tomatillo Mezcal Marys fuel a summer brunch in her leafy backyard featuring giant rolled omelets filled with sheep’s milk cheese and wilted greens. A “Manhattan Dance Party,” with rooftop views of the Chrysler Building, includes whole roasted arctic char with cucumber scales, and a Champagne Jello tower. A monochrome luncheon, a study in pink, featuring radicchio salad, salmon rice, and cassis sorbet, served in a super-saturated pink dining room in Cartagena, riffs on the eccentric habits of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, an inspiration who, in the 1970s, says Velásquez, “used to have entirely pink lunches prepared for him once a month.”
Her spreads, covering every occasion, big and small—from hangover breakfasts (ginger-spiked broth, spicy micheladas) to dockside picnics to candlelit roast chicken dinners at home—are all as enticing to look at as they must be to eat.
“The Happy Home: Layered Interiors for Joyful Living,” (Rizzoli) is available at Books & Books.
Ariel Okin calls herself an accidental designer. After getting her Master’s in Public Affairs from Columbia University, she landed a job in New York writing education grants. In her spare time, she helped friends with home décor projects.
“It was sort of like, Oh I love your apartment, can you help me with mine?” she says. “I was around 22; it was the era when my friends were moving in with their significant others or getting their own places to themselves. So, I started helping them and then I quickly realized that I was spending more time doing that than I was at my day job. And I was doing it for free.”
A portrait of the author by Donna Dotan; courtesy of Rizzoli.
Eventually she found clients who were willing to pay for her discerning eye. But the design work was a sideline, consuming her free time. After a luxury apartment she worked on was featured in Elle Decor, she finally had the confidence to switch to designing full-time.
“I really tried to be very careful about it,” she says of the professional leap. “I waited until I had enough work lined up for about six months.”
Courtesy of Rizzoli.
Now a decade into launching her eponymous firm, she’s amassed an impressive portfolio of residential projects. She’s selected 10 for her debut monograph, released by Rizzoli in February, showcasing her talent for channeling each client’s particular personality.
“Our three pillars are, Is it personal to the client, Is it functional and also, of course, Is it beautiful,” she says.
Courtesy of Rizzoli.
The book also highlights her versatility, moving from brownstone Brooklyn to New Jersey horse country, from beachfront luxury in the Hamptons to her own home in suburban Westchester.
“Ariel’s work is the opposite of everything we’ve come to expect from the interiors of the Internet,” writes her friend Lena Dunham in the introduction to the book. “She revels in softness, specificity, and livability, while consistently surprising with her choices.” Okin, who met the writer-actor-director through a mutual friend, has worked on two of Dunham’s New York homes, including a new place in Chelsea. Most other high-profile clients, valuing their privacy, have kept their names out of the book.
One prominent exception, Audrey Gelman, cofounder of the now-defunct private club The Wing and owner of the Six Bells Countryside Inn, in the Hudson Valley, showcases her antique-filled home upstate.
Photo by Read McKendree; courtesy of Rizzoli.
Along with lavish spreads of these and other completed projects, the book offers inspirational design tips: on creating the perfect mudroom, on adding a “quirky dash of whimsy,” on using “large-scale prints.” “I really wanted it to feel instructional and not just pretty photos,” Okin says of the book. “So, I tried to layer in the why and how behind what we did.”
