... works best as a vehicle that explores the fashion world, and New York media more broadly, pre- and post-2016 ... Stagg’s writing inhabits a space of contradictions. But the resulting work is incisive — only someone lucky enough to live in the center of a Venn diagram consisting of such multitudes could connect, say, Russian collusion in the 2016 election to the popularity of communist-red boots on the runway the next season. And Sleeveless is chock full of these sharp associations ... The release of this collection is timely, then, as if this book was made specifically for 2019, a time where beyond self-image nothing matters — yet everything is dialed up, put on full-volume, to be broadcast to the masses regardless ... It is refreshing to read complex observations of overwhelming doubt and confusion, rather than have to fake feeling heard by the sometimes-inflexible and sometimes-staunch opinions over-published everywhere else ... Despite the tough subject and prickly opinions, Stagg provides room for the preposterous, for small pockets of chuckles, if not outright laughter. The humor in the essays lies in Stagg’s deadpan delivery and clear cynicism, and also in these moments of surprising absurdity. It is all incredibly relatable, too. But underneath the absurdity is a sense of alarm, and panic ... it’s clear Stagg is honest. And it’s writing like hers that we need nowadays, not something that beats around the bush, but something that takes a good hard look at the ugliness of the twenty-tens ... There are a few weak(er) pieces in Sleeveless, though Stagg is a sharp critic so these moments are still worthy of your time. For a collection, however, I wish Sleeveless would have been a slightly slimmer volume with only Stagg’s strongest pieces ... it is Stagg’s cynical and honest observations, and her distinctive and advantageous viewpoint (how many other texts do you know that confront the Trump era do it through a — mostly — fashion lens?) that make Sleeveless so unlike anything else out there.

In Sleeveless, Stagg picks up where she left off in Surveys, this time pushing her observations through a kaleidoscope of cultural lenses. Stagg’s various positions in the multifaceted world of contemporary media—as an editor at a fashion magazine, an advertising copywriter, and a branding consultant—have granted her an intimacy with those spheres’ vernaculars, and Sleeveless makes good use of this. This is cultural criticism, but straight from the horse’s mouth ... The essays 'Right Place' and 'Right Time' are particularly devastating and make quick work of any illusions we might harbor about the transparency of our idols. They also challenge the consumer’s ability to differentiate the real from the false, or even care which is which ... In the strongest narrative pieces...Stagg’s prose is sparsely decorated but not devoid of its own kind of poetry and rhythm. The hyper-personal tone of these pieces, more so than the analytical essays, makes for a mode of critical observation that feels closer to the subject material. Her deadpan cynicism, as well as her knack for restrained yet vivid description of settings and interactions, endears her bleak and comical impressions to us. It also proves to be a useful means of providing commentary on social controversies without sounding either dogmatic or contentious ... Stagg writes from inside an insular microcosm, but it’s one that is increasingly representative of society at large. We’re so enmeshed in these processes that we feel we have no alternative but to accept them. Stagg’s dissection of these phenomena, however, reveals our complicity in a way that implies we might have more of a choice than we think. Neuromancer served, in some ways, as a cautionary tale; Sleeveless has the same capacity for revelation.

....Natasha Stagg approaches her life in New York from 2011 to 2019 as if she is not living in it. Her voice is a dry, all-seeing third eye, volleying from a helicopter view of the city to a street-level perspective. Sleeveless, a series of essays, some previously published and some new, is an anti-fantasy of New York, and the antithesis of what is usually projected in films, books, and movies. There is no grime and there is no glamour ... Stagg, a former magazine editor who has since ventured into the world of freelance and moonlights as a copywriter for Balenciaga, uses laser precision when speaking about the world of fashion ... Sure, many of these subjects aren’t explicitly New York–related—instead, they’ve all come into Stagg’s life while she worked and lived in the city. But when New York itself does directly appear, Stagg approaches it honestly.

Spanning the majority of the 2010s, Sleeveless suggests a decade that is anxious, self-immolatory, and more interested in surfaces than in significance. Stagg is particularly insightful on such subjects as the Kardashian family, influencers, and the sociopolitical importance of tall, cherry-red Balenciaga boots ... Prose has no temperature; assuming that it did, Sleeveless would bite like January in New York. Its best lines are chill as ice water: pellucid, unembellished, rich with subtext ... What is most alarming about Sleeveless is also its most radical quality: its candor, sometimes offered at the expense of the author’s dignity or liberal credibility, becomes its own sign of resilience ... Hip and jaded, within fashion and without it, an active participant in the industry at work and dispassionately removed from it in her perspective and her politics, it is her continuing willingness to contradict herself that makes her one of the best and most interesting documentarians of our modern millennial media .. Sleeveless does not offer answers, per se; what is valuable in it is its rare acknowledgement of the impossibility of modern life, the horror of having to maintain a twenty four hours a day, seven days a week lie.

Stagg’s New York tends to be flat, matte, simmering at a low temperature—it always seems to be two in the afternoon or two in the morning. She’s both here and not, both in the thick of it and watching it all float past ... Stagg’s writerly affect is not so much so bored she could die; it’s so bored and still very much alive, and well, that is just how everything feels now ... Stagg is a staunch realist about the city, although her New York is decidedly more glamorous than the one most people inhabit ... Stagg’s proximity and appreciation for the gloss of the fashion world make her eager to skewer it; she truly loves it, so she is allowed to fully hate it ... it makes sense that the strongest section of Sleeveless is Stagg’s collected fashion writing; few people are able to wring so much cultural critique and history out of individual items of clothing. She takes fashion seriously ... Stagg is clearly trying to provoke ... Whether she is trying to provoke her reader, which would be a more actively antagonistic stance, or just to provoke and humor herself out of a nihilistic spiral, like touching an exposed wire just to feel something, is not clear. She is trying to chronicle a period of decadence and folly—and also anesthetic paranoia—from the jaded edges of the party. Her voice is certainly a faithful reflection of at least one corner of the fashion and media landscape of the past decade. And yet her rootless internal monologue can also simply give way to frustration. There is still a lot to care about in the world, and still a lot to do, even as Stagg muses that her generation and those that follow are sliding into paralysis like a warm bath.

...malaise is Sleeveless’s specialty. Whether it’s a Chanel-suited fundraiser or the after-party for an 'underwear exhibition,' Stagg relates her observations and arguments in the same flat affect, making it difficult to distinguish the fictional segments of Sleeveless from the non-fictional. The blurring feels appropriate at a time when confessional Instagram captions often double as ad copy. If this is the Age of Content, Stagg is interested in finding its literary boundaries ... Even as Sleeveless perfectly inhabits the disorienting feel of our digital times, Stagg also seems self-consciously frustrated with the book’s limits ... If the traditional bildungsroman metes out knowledge in slow and painful bursts, Stagg seems to possess, at the outset, a perfect understanding of our turbo-connected era. Sleeveless resonates with recent books by Sally Rooney, Halle Butler, and Ottessa Moshfegh, in which young women come of age but never quite feel a loss of innocence, often because they started out already familiar with the world’s limits and hypocrisies ... hese writers inhabit a sense of exhausted stagnation—the quality of being young and suddenly finding, in your hand, the frayed end of some narrative rope. The impression that reality is limited and predictable means that validation or hope, if they’re to be found, exist in the smaller but no less significant enclosure of the personal.