UNFINISHED Business

Do you have filter fatigue? You're not alone: This season, designers are reflecting our flawed world with perfectly imperfect pieces which just so happen to be among their most creative (and most beautiful).

- MAYA SINGER

Last summer, in the midst of an emotional tangle I was struggling to unknot, I made an impromptu trip abroad. The trip itself is secondary to the story I want to tell here, a story about two long flights, the first a sleepless red-eye I spent running laps around my predicament, returning again and again to the question, why does everything have to be so complicated? Why can’t my life, for once, be straightforward, instead of this endlessly forking path into the dark?

On the flight home, I distracted myself by watching movies—notably, Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. The film turned me upside down. Its plot is a pile-up of mistakes, on a spectrum from oblivious error to historic catastrophe, yet the note Almodóvar lands on is one of uplifting: bonds of love forged out of pain and confusion and complexity. It struck me, as the credits rolled, that I could never have been so moved by a film that proceeded according to the logic I wanted to prevail over my own life—that a story about a frictionless, picture-perfect existence wasn’t much of a story at all. Perhaps, I mused, gazing out at the lowering sun, the way forward was to embrace the tangle and the work of unknotting it.