This issue marks the third anniversay of this Karen’s Quirky Style column, which celebrates a love affair with playing dress-up in New York! This column would be nothing without you, dear readers, and I want to give you a big hug and kiss for reading and commenting and just generally adding to the fun and mayhem these past three years! Kiss kiss kiss!

And thanks to Lincoln Anderson at The Village Sun for bringing me to his wonderful online community of New Yorkers who care about what’s going on in our city. Thanks also to George and Dusty of WestView News, who launched me into the West Village. I have to tell you that story today.

Top mural by @CALL_HER_AL. I love this glamorous, thoughtful portayal of a woman with red feathers in her hair by artist Allison Ruiz (who drives a pink hearse, by the way. Now that’s traveling in style!).

In honor of this milestone, I’d like to reflect a bit on what it’s been like to do a photoshoot for this column every month for the past three years, why I like it, and the fun process I went through with my photographer, Phil, to put this celebration of New York street art together. Come along as I take you inside the making of a great shoot!

The Start of KQS

This column (KQS for short) started when I walked into George Capsis’s kitchen in early 2019, after I wrote an article he liked about the closing of the Cornelia Street Café. George loves to get to know new people. He can be a real charmer and his interested attention gets people to open up. After praising my writing, he asked me what I wanted to write about.

I was surpised by the word that came out of my mouth: fashion! Dusty was there, and we started brainstorming a whole fashion section for WestView News. That didn’t pan out quite as I envisaged, but for several years there was a double-page spread featuring my column and the Style on the Street column that I started and then turned over to Dusty in November 2019. Karilyn Prisco joined her to put that together a few months later. Last year, George asked me to write a column about my dating adventures, Catch and Release, which appeared below my KQS for eight episodes.

As I floated out of George and Dusty’s kitchen on that fateful Wednesday in 2019, one more wish bubbled up. I said, “I want to be a model.” Although I’m well past my twenties, I was super inspired by Nancy Ozelli, an elegant silver-haired model I’d met at the National Arts Club. It was one of those powerful moments that sends ripples out into the universe.

Modeling Moments

Since that moment, I’ve modeled for this column for three years, and I’ve also modeled for several West Village businesses. I always get a slightly embarrassed kick out of seeing my picture on the sandwich board outside of Juice & Joy on Sixth Avenue. I’ve done a few other shoots through Model Mayhem, including a hilarious shoot portraying Kim Jenner as the matriarch of look-alike Kardashians! The highlight of my modelling career to date was being a part of the Vogue Cover Shoot for the December 2019 issue, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the cover.

Crazy Genius Phil

Phil and I started working together in June 2020, and my column went to another order of magnitude with the Dominion Day shoot (featuring the amazing Engineered by Andrea T dress). When I’m preparing for a shoot with Phil, I spend a few hours getting into the character or persona I’m going to portray. I sometimes try to disguise myself so he doesn’t recognize me when we meet at the designated place and time. And I often succeed, even though he’s expecting me!

We have a creative flow that’s given me so much inspiration. Often Phil finds a location and then I put together an outfit to go with it. But other times it’s the reverse—I tell him what I’m planning to wear, and then we brainstorm ideas for locations. After I moved the column from WestView News to the Village Sun, our territory of possible locations expanded beyond the West Village to all of Lower Manhattan and Cheslea and Gramercy Park. And my column exploded with the fruits of our collaboration.

Entering the Mystery

For this third anniversary column, I felt quite reflective after the shoot. I spent some time thinking about why I keep doing this column month after month. I love the mystery of becoming someone new, unkown to myself. I look at myself looking out of a different face, and it seems there is a possibility to be someone else. Someone with no history. A new start every month. Sometimes I get closer to who I think the mystery of my core being is, and I am reluctant to deconstruct after the shoot, to return to the usual face in the mirror. (Believe me, my friends have put up with me coming to post-shoot events in all kinds of outlandish get-ups, but they’re all quirky too, so they don’t mind!)

The mysterious self imbues me, but I don’t know who she is, what she thinks. What she feels. I impute a strength of character and depth of feeling I don’t usually touch into. A depth of passion, intensity, desirability. And a fu*!ck you. A standing in herself no matter what. That mysterious alter-ego seems to vanish when I take off the makeup of the model and become ordinary Karen Rempel again.

Creating a Persona

I love playing around with makeup to enter into that persona of a stranger. I often browse online to get ideas, and then adapt it to my color scheme or facial features. According to the New York Times, art looks aren’t meant to be beautiful—and this makeup look wasn’t! Perhaps that’s one reason why quirky style is so freeing. It doesn’t have to meet any standards of beauty, no expectations of conformity. I’ve had a hard time wearing blue lipstick because it looks so wrong—and indeed, it freaked out my friend Sally when I saw her after the shoot—but for this look, I think it is perfect. I used a Sharpie for the beauty spots and the hearts I drew on different parts of my body. My body was literally the canvas for artistic expression.

Phil had suggested the location for this month’s shoot, at the First Street Green Art Park. He sent me a few photos of the murals a few weeks before the shoot. I took the F train to the location one day after work, as well, and checked out the artistic possibilities for three different dresses I had in mind. (I went through my closet to see what I haven’t worn for this column yet, and it was down to three dresses!)

After looking at all the murals, I chose this foxy blue dress by Chelle Friday. I met the designer, Michelle Runden, after she put a notice for models on the bulletin board at Joffrey Ballet School (a ballet institution in my neighborhood, which I’ve been lucky enough to attend for adult beginner classes). Michelle and I hit it off, and I did a fashion show with her in Washington Square Park, and another at the Sky Room on West 40th Street. She gave me this dress to thank me, and I absolutely love it—it’s so flattering with the ruching over the midriff.

After checking out the murals, I headed to Edith Machinist on Rivington, buoyed up by the great finds from last month’s shoot. I was looking for super-high silver platform sandals like Carrie wore in the Sex and the City reboot “And Just Like That.” Edie, the owner, said lots of people have been looking for those shoes! She couldn’t help me out, but sent me to a few wonderful stores on Broome Street, where I found these amazing “rocket bottle” stockings and the endearing owl necklace. Failing to find the silver platforms, I made do with these lovely Jimmy Choos that I had in the closet, and threw on an old leopard jacket to finish the look.

The Day of the Shoot

Saturday, 1:30 PM, time to head to the shoot! I ran down six flights of stairs in my Jimmy Choos and dashed through the lobby, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone in my building (no mask on as it would ruin my make-up). Already in character (a mix of ho, supermodel, and B movie star), I flagged a taxi on Sixth Avenue and soon arrived at Second Avenue and Houston. Phil and Amy—my dear friend and Phil’s lighting assistant and girlfriend—were standing along the path by the murals and I sauntered towards them.

“You wanna get lucky?” I joked.

“I think we already did. One of the artists is working today,” Phil said.

We agreed to go talk to him after we did a few shots. We started by the blue bird mural that matched my dress (shown above), and tried a few different things with the fantastic beech trees growing by the path (top image). Then we walked over to the wide, pave-stoned area between two buildings. Sure enough, a man was working on a ladder, spray-painting over a mural on a brick wall. I introduced myself and learned he was Jonathan Neville of Dripped On Productions and First Street Green (FSG).

A Global Community of Muralists

We started talking, and Jon told us that this is actually an official park of the NYC Parks Department, and FSG manages the murals. There is a small global community of muralists, and people tell each other who to reach out to. Jon has arranged for many travelling artsists to paint in the park, or else he tries to find another place for them to paint. Al Diaz—better known as SAMO©—just finished the park’s first residency. He had a spot for a month and kept changing the art on his mural throughout the month. His tag persists above the mural shown above, though the residency is now over.

FSG is a grassroots organization, all volunteers, who support the muralists for the love of New York and the creative scene. They want to foster a community within all the different arts scenes in New York and they use the space for everything from jazz performances to fashion shows, to celebrate all art forms and to give public exposure to art and the creative things going on in the city.

Jon has been involved in the park for nine years. He said, “The park is turning ten years old this spring, and we are is figuring out what special thing to do to celebrate this milestone.”

This is one of the things that keeps me showing up for this column—I get to discover hidden gems of New York, and then share them with you. Thank you for showing up too!

Inaugural KQS Photo

Style Notes for March 2022

• Owl necklace with rhinestone eyes and beautiful cream and black enamel inlays. Ritual Vintage, 377 Broome Street.

• Maria La Rosa Italian rocket bottle green and white ombré knee socks. Top Hat, 245 Broome Street.

• Sky blue minidress with gathered midriff and asymmetric shoulder ruffles. Chelle Friday (Manhattan designer now in Florida).

• Jimmy Choo silver platform sling-back sandals. Jimmy Choo sample sale, 123 West 18th Street.

• Via Spiga faux leopard jacket with wide collar and black leather detail on pockets. Variazioni, 195 Spring Street, Soho.
• Makeup inspired by Mia Anjelica, @mianjelica, who was doing an homage to Julia Fox’s makeup at the Schiaparelli show in Paris. My take on it uses blue and green lipsticks and shadows by MAC, with plum eyeliner and black Sharpie.