When I was a little girl, my mother bravely allowed me and my siblings to choose our outfits for a family portrait. My brother opted for a lizard shirt, my sisters picked their favorite band tees, and I reached straight for a frilly pink dress. Mom wore a loose-flowing blouse, and Dad wore a neutral color-block shirt. Today, this portrait evokes a composite of personalities: a family with unique styles particular to a time and place.
We often think of style as clothing or fashion, and this month’s issue follows suit. It includes vintage fashion trends, a Greenville resident’s wardrobe, and a menswear feature. But this issue also shows that style is more than how we look or dress. A form of expression, it’s the ways people craft their art, decorate their homes, and even live their lives. It’s historical, cultural, personal, and of a family, place, or community.
While many of this month’s stories ground style in time, Leigh Magar shows its roots in place. From the grounds of a historical indigo plantation in Charleston, Magar studies, grows, and makes her own form of non-toxic, natural textile art with the blue plant. Like Magar, Brandon Cole molds the traditions of a place into his art. A tenth-generation potter whose family established a pottery mecca in North Carolina, Cole now diverges from the traditional by forging his own designs.
Style also expresses change: a rupture from the past and into the present. In this issue, you’ll meet Greenville seamstress Cindy Ingram, who salvages ancestral lace into garments worn by granddaughters on their wedding days. As Ingram honors family legacies by grafting the old into the new, Charleston’s luxurious Pinch hotel preserves the past’s reach into the present by incorporating 1970s and contemporary decor into its Victorian-era building.
With its ties to place and time, style is also how people decorate and fill their spaces. Swordfish, a Greenville cocktail lounge, has a nineteenth-century speakeasy style, including design motifs and an intimate atmosphere. On Lake Saluda, a container home with crisp modern elements overlooks the water. The Dezens, who offer the dwelling as an Airbnb, hope to expose visitors to their life on a hobby farm. Style also reflects a lifestyle, a way of being.
TOWN has its own style, grounded in the region’s hospitality, community, and culture. It’s elegant yet accessible, luxurious but down-to-earth, and reflects the Upstate’s growth while celebrating its past. I’m grateful to those who came before me to establish it and for the people who now work beside me to maintain it. This publication doesn’t express a single style—like my families’ portrait, it’s a beautiful pastiche of a community, time, and place. And I’m thrilled to now be a part of it.
