I’m curled up in a ball, being attentive to The Cure’s Disintegration in a room full of giant striking flora and goths wearing black Buffalo Londons. It’s a profoundly wet March afternoon in Ridgewood, Queens, but the manner the mild pours in through the large industrial home windows, it may perhaps be early summer. I’m at Nowadays, a nightclub that, once a month, comes alive for the duration of the day for Classic Album Sundays, which is precisely what it seems like: fans sit in a room and pay attention to a lovely album on some relatively precise hello-fi device. This Sunday, the audio system blare Robert Smith’s iconically macabre 1989 document. In the front of the room after the turntable stands a female sporting an all-black outfit that maximum considerably includes a really perfect pair of black Acne jeans.
Her call is Barbie Bertisch, and in addition to strolling this event, she works in style as a task supervisor on the branding studio High Tide and plays in a band. She also co-curates the zine Love Injection, which celebrates New York and its history, with her associate, Paul Raffaele. Found at document shops across the united states, the zine is incredibly freeform. It consists of testimonies ranging from interviews with New York dance-tune icons to club chart listings to essays on repealing the town’s Cabaret Law and greater. The result is an honestly special print artifact that captures what its miles want to live and dance in New York City.
Bertisch is someone with a creative, imaginative, and prescient that spans the entirety of New York’s microcosm of the hi-fi scene, which is dedicated to finding and sharing audio formats of the very best fine. When I see her, she spends time telling the target audience about the physical weight of the vinyl pressing we are paying attention to. She goes into even more detail while explaining the gap’s acoustics and why she selected the turntable the file sits on. Bertisch explains all of this with diligence and doesn’t make assumptions about our prior information of hi-fi going into the afternoon, which turned into crucial.
Once the document begins playing, I consider all the exceptional factors of audio in a way I never have earlier. I love true sound like an awful lot as the next person, but after hearing Bertisch speak, it feels as though the walls are pulsating. I can experience the bass at my fingertips. When I lie down on the club’s bleachers, the synthesizer tones sound as if they’re gilded. Robert Smith’s voice takes on an entirely new stage of viscosity once I listen; it seeps thru the audio system that fills the room.
Bertisch ought to very well be the spokesperson for this manner of publicly experiencing song at the highest caliber. She, without problems, convinces listeners that superb audio is an underappreciated art shape worth showing its greatness via each feasible medium. I first got here into touch with Bertisch thru a pal who works at The Lot Radio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, wherein Bertisch and Raffaele additionally manifest to regularly playsets. As a pretty massive doofus in terms of right audio and weird sounds, I figured Bertisch might be a person I’d percentage a lot in not unusual with. When I observed out, she also came about to have a fashion heritage; the concept solidified in my mind that I had to find out extra approximately what she does and how all the elements of her life coalesce.
A few days later, Bertisch and I meet up on the Strand Book Store in Union Square and stroll through the stacks to chat. It’s pretty packed for a Wednesday night. Still, we manipulate to find a nook off to the facet and start to speak about music and its intersection with fashion, in addition to Bertisch’s personal relationship to New York as an Argentinian ex-pat and a reformed membership kid. Music and style enjoy a notoriously symbiotic relationship, and Bertisch’s lifestyles and paintings encapsulate that union. First exposed to the major fashion homes of the past due to the aughts on a journey to Europe, Bertisch quickly fell in love with Hussein Chalayan, Nicolas Ghesquière, and Raf Simons. Before she knew it, she was on her way to design college in Miami.
It became there, by the ocean, that she started partying and fast found the pleasure of the dance floor and its role in transferring private aesthetics. “Partying brought a layer of music meets fashion meets most of this kind of interdisciplinary matters,” she says. “I don’t know if I might’ve had that curiosity aspect explored otherwise.” Bertisch’s late formative years coincided with electroclash, a style that could be a combination of heavily percussive electronics and sing-spoken vocals. Her days inside the membership were molded using this boiling factor in independent tune’s then-zeitgeist.
Instead of the Fila shoes and tiny sun shades of these days’ membership kids, Bertisch found her dance ground fashion in the shape of “bangs, jet-black hair, split tank tops, and weird shades,” she shares. But that is all in the beyond; Bertisch’s choppy facet bangs are lengthy gone. She still goes out to parties in New York. However, her courting to membership existence has modified, and so has her style. In her past due formative years, the relationship between her non-public style and the tune she listened to become without delay linked to winning aesthetics of club tradition on time, her method to getting dressed nowadays is all about the uniform.
Right now, style is her quotidian armor. “I’m keen on structures and a uniform, and so that’s kind of like how I consider day-to-day style,” she says. When I ask her later what that uniform looks like, she explains with first-rate specificity: “There’s a black pair of flawlessly becoming skinny denim, and a white pair, and a blue pair—ideally, raw denim. Then there’s the precise white T-shirt, the best T-shirt in white and black, and some tan coloration there.
Then there’s [the] perfect leather jacket. Then there’s a really perfect bomber and the suitable shearling coat; then there’s the perfect peacoat and the ideal overcoat. Then there’s the suitable pair of white footwear, then the perfect pair of Chelsea boots, and maybe stilettos,” she explains to me with a chunk of fun. At the top of the day, even though her fashion comes all the way down to being authentic, wearing apparel that is in shape impeccably and drawing proposals from fashionable musicians like Patti Smith, Nico, and Cosey Fanni Tutti.
Music and style have lengthily coexisted with a splendid degree of Concord, and Bertisch’s existence is a high-quality example of this duality. A top-notch pair of denim fulfill a need that is not so special from having a physical response to tune in a membership. Bertisch’s relationship with each art paperwork comes down to what’s important and delightful. It all comes all the way down to visceral pleasure.
As we finish up, I explicitly ask Bertisch how she perspectives obsessing over style as something that waxes and wanes. She has the perfect reaction: “It’s a type of like ignoring part of you that usually becomes there, and also you’re just no longer talking to [it]. It’s kind of like waving at you from at the back of, like, ‘Hey! I want you to take note of me, and you shouldn’t forget about a part of yourself simply because you’re busy.’”
