Vital Moments

High Resolutions

Marking new beginnings: Scott Nover, Rebecca Fisher, Leanne Shapton, Colin Grant, Christopher Browning, Laura Marsh, and more…

None of last year’s media parties gave this reporter Covid, but taking a break from this social column did. So, instead of heading out and about, this short column to start the year was reported from home.

LOVE NOTES

Photo by Aimee Custis

On New Year’s Eve, Quartz internet business reporter Scott Nover married University of Michigan third-year law student Rebecca Fisher at The Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. The couple had their first date 11-and-a-half years ago, after their sophomore year of high school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “Our parents drove us to see Midnight in Paris at the movie theater because neither of us had our driver’s license yet,” Nover told The Fine Print. They now live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but returned to D.C. — where Nover spent eight years in the interim and Fisher four — for the celebration. “D.C. feels like home,” Nover said. “A large swath of our friends and family live there and we plan to move back in the next few years.”

Though they considered other dates and locations, New Year’s Eve was one of their first ideas and one they returned to again and again. “We loved the idea of the occasion being half-wedding, half-New Years party,” Nover said. “Most importantly, this wedding fit nicely within Rebecca’s final law school winter break.” The festivities stretched past the big midnight countdown, featuring New Year’s glasses, paper top hats, confetti streamers, and noisemakers, until 1 a.m. “It was a blast,” Nover said.

NAME SPOTTING

Though The New York Review of Books has been famously unable to move offices, exciting developments are afoot in the magazine’s merchandising. The designer Rachel Comey adapted five covers published between December 2021 and March 2023 into dresses, totes, tees, pants, and bags. She also listed a six-month subscription to the Review, significantly cheaper than the price offered on the publication’s site. According to the Comey site, the idea for the collaboration started when the designer’s longtime collaborator Leanne Shapton joined the Review as art editor last year.

“We liked the idea of current events, books and writers’ bylines being a part of the literal fabric of our clothes,” reads a sliver of marketing copy on Comey’s site. The contributors whose bylines are now part of that fabric had varying degrees of awareness of their transmogrification into habiliments. “I haven’t seen the dress with my byline,” said Colin Grant, whose byline on a review of a book about the Ku Klux Klan now adorns the Nadine Dress, when The Fine Print reached out. “Can you send it to me?” Christopher Browning, whose piece on the planning of the Nazi “Final Solution” is featured on the Esmond Dress, the Native Skirt, and the Jupiter Tee, said that he became aware that it would be part of a Comey collection on April 12, 2022. “NYRB sent all the contributors a general note about the collaboration last year and I had forgotten about it, they didn’t know which covers would be used so no one knew who would be on the dresses, just that there was a possibility,” clarified New Republic literary editor Laura Marsh, whose byline on a piece about John le Carré graces the Wren Dress and the Lorenz Dress. “When I worked there, the magazine was the subject of a Martin Scorsese documentary,” she added. “They have a habit of pairing up with some very cool people.”

Now that the dresses are out there, would the contributors wear something with their names so prominently displayed? “As a general rule, I probably wouldn’t wear a dress with my name on it. But who knows? It is a very nice dress,” said Marsh. Would Browning ever let his clothes shout his name? “NO.” Okay, but how would he react if he saw someone in a dress featuring his name? “Amused.” 

UPCOMING

Tuesday
6 p.m. Guggenheim fellow Ross Benjamin will discuss his new translation of Franz Kafka’s Diaries with New Yorker contributing writer Merve Emre at the Rizzoli Bookstore in Midtown.

Wednesday
7 p.m. The Atlantic will launch its new Atlantic Editions book series with discussions about senior editor Lenika Cruz’s On BTS and staff writer Megan Garber’s On Misdirection with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg at McNally Jackson Seaport.

Thursday
7 p.m. NBC News deputy editor for diversity, equity, and inclusion Jessica Machado will launch her memoir Local with a conversation with Eater correspondent Jaya Saxena at Powerhouse at The Archway in Dumbo.

Have a moment? Let us know!