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There’s a curious redundancy to the new film of “Wuthering Heights,” and not just because Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, like many literary classics, has already spawned its share of adaptations. This latest effort comes from the English director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell, who previously made “Saltburn” (2023), a garish eat-the-rich satire that is best appreciated, in retrospect, as a warmup for this movie. In unleashing her camera on the fictional grounds of Saltburn, a centuries-old estate in the English countryside, Fennell was perhaps already testing out visual ideas for Thrushcross Grange, where Brontë’s heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, dooms herself to a comfortable, loveless marriage with the wealthy Edgar Linton. And, in casting Jacob Elordi as the much coveted object of desire in “Saltburn,” the director must have known that she had found her Heathcliff—a softer, more sleepy-eyed dreamboat than Laurence Olivier (in William Wyler’s adaptation) or Ralph Fiennes (in Peter Kosminsky’s), but one no less gifted at glaring magnetically into the Yorkshire wind.

The nadir of “Saltburn” was an interminably jejune sequence in which Oliver, a horndog psychopath played by Barry Keoghan, stripped down and rubbed himself against a freshly tilled grave. It was also perhaps the movie’s most morbidly Brontë-esque moment, and, settling into “Wuthering Heights,” I braced myself for a similarly debauched interpretation of the novel’s famous exhumation scene. Would Heathcliff (Elordi), digging up his late, beloved Catherine (Margot Robbie), subject her casket to desecration by dry humping? On that score, at least, the film proves uncharacteristically restrained. Elsewhere, Fennell indulges a familiar impulse to shock, or at least to jolt us awake. She deploys a heavy-breathing visual and musical style that embraces anachronism and exaggeration at every turn, and she infuses the action with a heightened sexual candor that’s meant to make past tellings of the tale look primly buttoned-up by comparison.

The film begins with a black screen and an aural Rorschach blot: are we hearing a man masturbate on a worn-out mattress? No, actually; he’s being hanged, and what we hear are his agonized groans and the steady creak of the gallows. His identity is of no consequence; among those who have gathered for his execution is a spirited young girl, Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), who lives with her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), at a craggy estate called Wuthering Heights. Catherine has pale blond hair, a love for the color red, and a habit of sprinting across the moors with wild abandon. She will soon be joined on these windy cardio workouts by a scruffy urchin named Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), whom her father brings home one day. Brontë purists will click their tongues at Fennell’s liberties: Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, is nowhere to be found, and her father, who dies early in the novel, lives to a miserable old age. The roles of father and son have effectively been merged; it is Mr. Earnshaw who will torment the young Heathcliff—and live to see the older Heathcliff bring about his undoing.

Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution of the characters’ deep bond, from steadfast sibling affection toward a combative, quasi-incestuous desire. Catherine, incensed by Heathcliff’s treatment of her, slips several eggs into his bed; it’s a childish prank with an erotic undertone, to judge by how intently the camera scrutinizes the gooey, yolky mess beneath the blankets. Fennell has a fluid fixation; she wants passion to leave a stain. This much was clear from “Saltburn,” in which Oliver laps up a man’s cummy bathwater one moment and smears his lips with a woman’s menstrual blood the next. “Wuthering Heights,” for its part, is not to be out-slurped. In one especially heated sequence, Catherine, overcome with lust, dashes off to the moors and pleasures herself ferociously against the rocks. Along comes Heathcliff, who, aroused by what he sees, lifts the little onanist up by her bodice straps and licks her fingers clean, like someone in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial.

You might chuckle, as I did, and also wonder if Fennell is courting your laughter. It’s as if, in her determination to grant these immortal characters a feral, forthright sexuality, she couldn’t help but suppress a nervous snicker. There’s a reason for this tonal confusion: underneath Fennell’s brazen streak, I think, is a certain wobbliness of conviction—a failure of nerve. The film’s advertising materials have placed the title in quote marks (perhaps I should be referring to it as “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ ”), an affectation that Fennell explained, in a recent interview, as a show of humility—an acknowledgment that her interpretation is hers alone, and couldn’t possibly capture the depths of Brontë’s masterwork. Confronted with the film itself, though, I can’t help but read the punctuation ironically, as a halfhearted signifier of mockery or camp. Is Fennell being snarky, sincere, or both? She’s blurred those boundaries before, notably in her Oscar-winning début feature, “Promising Young Woman” (2020), an archly stylized rape-revenge thriller that was, depending on whom you asked, either righteously transgressive or noxiously coy. This “Wuthering Heights” feels similarly divided against itself, and to less thematically pertinent ends.

This is hardly the first “Wuthering Heights,” good or bad, to fall short of its source material’s ambitions. Up to a point, the story unfolds as it always has: Catherine, in an ill-advised fit of pragmatism, agrees to marry Edgar (Shazad Latif), a decision that sends the rejected Heathcliff storming off into the night. He returns five years later, with a sizable fortune, the deed to Wuthering Heights, and dark-hearted motives that fall somewhere between revenge and reclamation. His ensuing scheme will ensnare Edgar’s naïve ward, Isabella (an amusing Alison Oliver), in a nightmare of a marriage, whose sadomasochistic undercurrents Fennell literalizes and carnalizes. She also shows us Catherine and Heathcliff repeatedly giving in to their desires, in the bedroom, in a horse-drawn carriage, and, most hotly and unhygienically, in the rain. (As I said: up to a point.)

Like some other adaptations—including those directed by Wyler, Luis Buñuel, and Andrea Arnold—this one steers clear of the novel’s second half, in which the torments of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance rebound, cruelly, on their descendants. Fennell has also dropped the elaborate framing devices that make Brontë’s book, among other things, a feast of unreliable narration. Everything that happens in its pages is relayed to us by Mr. Lockwood, a nosy tenant at Thrushcross Grange, or Nelly Dean, the Earnshaws’ ever-watchful housekeeper. (Fennell dispenses with Lockwood entirely; Nelly is played, with formidably chilly side-eye, by Hong Chau, but her narrator function has been excised.) The impact, on the page, is of a ghostly melodramatic hearsay: Catherine and Heathcliff, for all their vividness, can seem more like spectres than characters. They flicker in the darkness like candlelight, incandescent yet ephemeral.

Fennell, it’s safe to say, has little interest in ephemera; she wants to emblazon her Catherine and Heathcliff on our brains. To that end, she and her collaborators, including the cinematographer Linus Sandgren and the production designer Suzie Davies, paint in the broadest of strokes. They unleash a full-blown stylistic assault roughly halfway through the film, around the time that Catherine becomes mistress of Thrushcross Grange. The hallways take on the gleaming aspect of a fashion runway, and in one room the floor is such a thick, gaudy shade of red that you half expect to find the elevator from “The Shining” around the corner. A dining table overflows with jellied extravagances; I’ve never seen a film with a greater aspic ratio. As for Catherine’s bedchamber, the walls almost qualify as body horror; they match her skin tone perfectly, right down to the blue-vein marbling. If Heathcliff won’t lick them, Hannibal Lecter surely would.

I haven’t yet broached the subject of Catherine’s wardrobe, which, courtesy of the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, swells to astonishing and undeniably lovely proportions. One gown mimics the hard shimmer of latex; another looks as crackly and translucent as cellophane. (I won’t forget the cleverly matched images of Catherine dressed for her wedding and, later, a funeral; on both occasions, her veil, whipping in the wind, does nothing to obscure her sorrow.) None of this remotely fits the period, and that is surely the point: Fennell means to present Catherine and Heathcliff’s love story as something transcendent, unfolding beyond the limits of time and history. (This idea is borne out by the music, which toggles between a lush orchestral cushion of a score, by Anthony Willis, and a series of synthy, swoony ballads, by Charli XCX.) The movie seems inspired by the approach—though not the poise or finesse—of Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), which deftly used its own ahistorical details to line its heroine’s gilded cage. Fennell pushes the aesthetics of entrapment even further: Catherine is given an enormous doll house, modelled on Thrushcross Grange. A shot from inside this replica, with an enormous hand manipulating the figurines within, frames her as a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” figure, navigating an otherworldly prison that can feel too vast and too small at once.

These are clever visual conceits, and Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel. Robbie and Elordi, gorgeous and gifted actors both, incarnate an Old Hollywood glamour; she can do fierce, irrepressible romanticism, and he can smolder as sensitively as the best of them. But the actors don’t connect onscreen in an emotionally revealing way, and the gargantuan excess of the production reduces them, in the end, to life-size paper dolls. (Or perhaps plastic dolls: Robbie’s frequent wardrobe changes made me feel as though I were watching a gothic “Barbie” sequel.) The actors generate sparks of passion, but no deeper air of tragic or romantic inevitability, no sense of a bond forged between souls, and only a smidgen of the corrosive rage that makes “Wuthering Heights” as much of a hate story as it is a love story.

Nevertheless, Fennell landed the megastar Catherine and Heathcliff that she clearly wanted—and, in the case of Elordi, to somewhat controversy-stirring effect. Over the years, the question of Heathcliff’s ethnicity has generated no shortage of debate; he is described in the book as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy in aspect,” “a little Lascar,” and “an American or Spanish castaway”—all terms that have been deemed ambiguous or inconclusive enough that the character has been played onscreen, almost invariably, by white actors. (A rare and worthwhile exception: Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights,” from 2012, in which Heathcliff is played by the Black actors Solomon Glave and James Howson.) Fennell has been forced to defend herself for casting a white male lead, and it struck me that her deployment of two actors of color, Chau and Latif, in key supporting roles could have been a calculated kind of insurance against criticism, a way of still laying claim to a token measure of diversity. But I was also reminded, once more, of “Saltburn,” in which a young biracial Black man, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), tries and fails to solidify his position within his aristocratic white family, which ultimately sidelines him, admonishes him, and expels him from its ranks. The intersection of race and class, and the sense of grudging familial obligation finally reaching its breaking point, proved by far that movie’s most intriguing wrinkle, and it, too, retroactively suggests a dry run for “Wuthering Heights,” if surely a richer, thornier one than this. ♦

A very small snowflake, you
As if dancing
As if slowly dancing, approach
My face

Instead of falling straight down like all the other snowflakes
Somehow, you spread your wings toward my face

But where did you get to, after that?
I never saw you again.

This is drawn from “Light and Thread.”

On November 21, 2020, a young woman in Brooklyn named Tanya Bush began to keep a diary of sorts. On Instagram, under the handle @will.this.make.me.happy, she posted a photo of a craggy yellow pastry that fit perfectly in her palm. “No. Buttermilk scones with lemon zest do not alleviate anxiety,” she captioned it. On December 4th, she posted again, declaring, beneath an image of a sugar-ringed cookie perched between her thumb and forefinger, “No. Pecan shortbread did not help me reconcile my massive ego with my meager sense of self.” January 7, 2021: “No. Milk chocolate tart with hazelnut praline, devoured in the wee hours of the morning in a stress-induced panic, did not begin to ease my outrage at a congressional adjournment less than twenty-four hours after an attempted coup.”

Baked goods were not making Bush happy, she affirmed repeatedly in the following months, compiling a deadpan catalogue of tantalizing desserts. And yet, as she details in her forthcoming cookbook, “Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking,” her commitment to baking, and to recording what she produced and ate, ultimately changed her life. “I was twenty-three, depressed, unemployed, and adrift. I just wanted to make something,” she writes. “Sometimes a single year can mark a sudden and definitive shift. In this one, I decided to become a baker.”

The book forfeits the puckish immediacy of Bush’s Instagram dispatches for more earnest, effortful prose. “I devoured slice after slice alone, feeling sticky, ethereal joy,” she writes, about baking banana bread during a spell of malaise. She charts her aspirations—and her romances, with characters she calls The Boyfriend and The Crush—through the seasons, as she moves from her home kitchen to an ill-fated internship in Italy to her first professional baking gig. (She is now the pastry chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Little Egg and married to The Boyfriend.) Recipes for dark-chocolate-and-toasted-coconut cake, soba-cha panna cotta, Concord-grape clafoutis, and other confections punctuate her drifting between listlessness and purpose.

The conceit of narrating a year in one’s life through the toils and sensations of the kitchen is one that many have taken up before. In the early two-thousands, the British cookbook author Nigel Slater set out to write a daily guide to seasonal eating; the resulting book, “The Kitchen Diaries” (2005), reads more like a travelogue, inviting the reader into the dulcet rhythms of Slater’s life in North London. “It is not unusual for the little stone terrace outside my kitchen doors to have a pall of smoke over it at supper time,” he writes in the entry for August 18th, introducing a recipe for whole chickens on the grill. “Smoke imbued with thyme, garlic and rosemary that wafts around the ripening tomato plants and pots of geraniums.”

Often, the year of cooking is undertaken as a quest for meaning, as it was for Julie Powell, a bored twenty-nine-year-old secretary who, in 2002, started a blog about trying to make all five hundred and twenty-four recipes in the first volume of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Powell was writing about a quarter-life crisis as much as she was writing about food, threading profane asides and meandering tangents between her experiments with flaming crêpes and butter-slicked calf liver. On day one hundred and eight, Powell, who married her high-school sweetheart, presented poulet en gelée à l’estragon to a friend who happened to be in the middle of a steamy office romance. “Gwen has a weekend of explosive sex, then comes over to my house depressed and complains about being served aspic,” Powell wrote. “This is a situation that Julia would no doubt handle with aplomb. But Julia doesn’t hate aspic as I do. And she probably gets more sex.” (Child, who died in 2004, was said to have been turned off by Powell’s salty language.)

When Ruth Reichl began recording a year of cooking, in 2009, she was despondent: Condé Nast had abruptly dissolved Gourmet, of which Reichl had been the editor-in-chief. Her cookbook, “My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life,” released in 2015, expanded on the melancholic, haiku-like tweets with which she’d chronicled her sudden glut of free time. “Chilly gray morning. Empty day looms. I will make ma po tofu sparked with the strange prickly heat of Szechuan peppercorns,” Reichl wrote, nine weeks after the magazine folded. The book illustrates how cooking, and writing about cooking, became therapeutic for her, how taking stock of tangible pleasures became an antidote to grief.

It was in a similar spirit that, in the fall of 2023, the food writer Tamar Adler, struggling with depression, began keeping a daily journal of things that delighted her: the “numbing bitterness” of a grapefruit, the “tongue tip” of a lit burner in a dark kitchen. Adler, a Chez Panisse-trained cook, is best known for her 2011 book “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace,” a reimagining of M. F. K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf,” from 1942, a manual for eating resourcefully during wartime shortages. Adler’s version, as elegant and lyrical as Fisher’s, enumerates ways to use every last scrap, bone, and core—and introduced her as a writer who made art out of the marginal.

Last December, Adler published her journal as “Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day.” The book’s vignettes are all food-related, but it contains few recipes; though it’s personal, it reads less like a memoir than like a gently philosophical prose poem—a model for invigorating one’s life with sustained and granular attention. “The sound of my little bone-handled knife scraping butter across brown toast this morning reminded me to listen,” she writes, in the entry for January 31st. “Sometimes I think bells and sirens are the only things grown-ups hear.” What we do in the contained, tactile environment of the kitchen, Adler suggests, can ground us in reality and give us a sense of place in the world. “Ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, squirrels are all in constant motion,” she writes on June 2nd. “Perhaps this is why cooking feels so primitive and vital when one is in the act—not worrying about something else, but inhabiting the act of cooking. It’s when we, like ants, bees, mites, flies, birds, and squirrels, are in natural timeless motion.”

At the dawn of Twitter and Instagram, when the internet was newly awash in photos of avocado toast and latte art, the Luddite rejoinder was “No one cares what you had for breakfast.” Nearly two decades later, this has been roundly disproved. For the past ten years at least, I have begun every Friday in eager anticipation of a new installment of “The Grub Street Diet,” one of New York’s most beloved columns, for which some person of note keeps a chatty, descriptive record of everything they’ve eaten in the course of a few days. We learn which celebrities are passionate cooks—Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick save their Parmesan rinds and shrimp shells—and who eats solely to survive. (The novelist Jonathan Ames claims that vitamin gummies are enough to satisfy his sweet tooth.) Recently, I found myself moved to tears while reading an entry by the comedian Mary Beth Barone, whose contribution doubles as a disarming portrait of eating-disorder recovery. “I snack briefly on some chocolate-covered gluten-free pretzels from Brooklyn Harvest before I have to leave for soundcheck,” Barone writes, likening the challenge of eating “real meals” to “arm wrestling with myself. Either way, I lose.”

The food-diary form thrives on TikTok, where “what I eat in a day” is an extremely popular genre. There, you can ride along with a thirty-two-year-old stay-at-home mother sipping sugar-free Red Bull and making baked-potato casserole for five children, or a self- described “fat girl who isn’t succumbing to diet culture” enjoying a slice of vanilla-coconut cake topped with a jewellike smashed persimmon. (As her defiant framing suggests, “thinspo” and calorie counting are endemic to the genre.) One of my favorite accounts belongs to a grade-school teacher who eats lunch every day with an unfailingly cheerful group of colleagues, showcasing their foil-wrapped tuna sandwiches, Tupperwares of leftover chicken Marsala, and trays of pizza and fruit cups from the cafeteria. The videos sate a curiosity, held in amber from childhood, about what those figures of great and mysterious authority get up to when students aren’t around.

A colleague recently remarked that, while reading a “Grub Street Diet,” he thought about how horrible it would be to drop dead right then—if the last thing he ever read was someone logging a piece of toast. To me, this is exactly the appeal. We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days.

In radio, it’s common for reporters to test sound levels—and break the ice—by asking their interview subjects what they had for breakfast. A segment that aired on “This American Life” last year documents a radio producer named Talia Augustidis posing the question to the same woman over several days.“The answer is probably I can’t remember,” the woman says the first time, in a tone of resignation. Then she brightens: “Oh, no—porridge, porridge. Porridge and blueberries.” “You always have the same thing for breakfast,” Augustidis replies, laughing. “It’s not hard to remember.”

The exchange repeats, the woman wrestling with her memory. “Porridge and delicious berries.” “Honestly, I can’t remember—oh, yes I can. It’s porridge, as usual.” We hear the scrape of a spoon against a bowl, the wet sound of food in her mouth. “It tastes absolutely delicious,” she says one morning, unable to summon what it’s called. “I’m flattered,” Augustidis says, laughing again. We never learn who the woman is or what happens to her—only that, one day, she barely touches her porridge, and she and Augustidis decide that it’s time to stop recording. ♦

In February, 1925, the first issue of The New Yorker was published, featuring a drawing by the art editor Rea Irvin of a top-hatted dandy examining a butterfly through his monocle. This dandy—later named Eustace Tilley—has made an appearance on the cover virtually every February since and, in the process, has become one of the most recognizable mascots in the history of magazines. After Eustace’s busy year celebrating his hundredth birthday, the artist Barry Blitt finally let him sit, for his hundred-and-first birthday, front and center at the movies. “As an inveterate hat wearer, I’ve often been asked to remove my fedora or Borsalino by a fellow audience member at a movie,” Blitt said. “It’s yet another reason I’m thankful for Netflix and the Criterion Channel.”

For more Anniversary Issue covers, see below:

“February 21, 1925,” by Rea Irvin

“Brooklyn’s Eustace,” by Simon Greiner

“Eustace Tilley at One Hundred,” by Camila Rosa

Find Barry Blitt’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.

FlameKeepers Hat Club sits on a quiet corner in Harlem where St. Nicholas Avenue, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and West 121st Street converge. The shop’s towering shelves are piled with fedoras, porkpies, boaters, and flat caps in the usual colors—browns, blacks, blues—as well as the hues of cantaloupe flesh, crème de violette, and raspberry sherbet.

Fred Brathwaite, better known as Fab 5 Freddy, entered FlameKeepers on a frigid winter afternoon. Commandingly tall, he wore a fleece-lined leather coat, a gray scarf, and a black baseball cap with a Rasta-lion logo. “A buddy of mine did this brand and he calls it Heads 4 Dreads,” he said. “Because guys that wear dreadlocks, most hats don’t fit them. So he made the hats extra large.”

Brathwaite does not have dreadlocks; he has closely cropped gray hair to match his closely cropped gray beard. “But I have a large-size head, to hold all these brains,” he said. “Extra large, if you will—”

“Seven and seven-eighths,” interjected Marc Williamson, the shop’s proprietor, who was wearing a black top hat made with long-haired-rabbit fur.

“He’s the guy that knows,” Brathwaite said.

The two met thirty-odd years ago, when Williamson was a salesman at the venerable JJ Hat Center, in midtown. Brathwaite was looking for a straw panama hat. At the time, he was the host of “Yo! MTV Raps,” the program that cemented hip-hop’s transition from an underground movement to a global juggernaut. Hats, along with his ever-present shades, were key to the Fab 5 Freddy look—on TV, he interviewed a brash young Tupac Shakur while wearing a rabbinical black fedora and a droll Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, in a backward newsboy cap.

Literally and figuratively, Brathwaite has worn many hats in his sixty-six years. Along with his contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lee Quiñones, he was one of the graffiti artists whose work bounced from the streets of New York to its galleries in the late seventies and eighties. During the same period, he served as a human A train, connecting downtown and uptown by, for instance, introducing Blondie’s Chris Stein and Deborah Harry to Grandmaster Flash. “I’m the king of synthesis,” Brathwaite told a reporter for this magazine in 1991.

Now he is trying on a writer’s hat. His memoir, “Everybody’s Fly”—its title an allusion to Harry’s shout-out to him in the Blondie song “Rapture”—will be published by Viking next month. The book is an exuberant recounting of how a culturally omnivorous kid from Brooklyn willed himself into the wider, shinier world—like Moss Hart’s “Act One,” but with beatboxing and cans of Krylon spray paint.

Brathwaite grew up in a middle-class household in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the son of an accountant and a nurse. It was a jazz-loving home; Freddy’s godfather was his dad’s childhood best friend, the drummer and bebop titan Max Roach. “He wasn’t so much of a hat guy, but when he came to the house you’d see him with some fly, dapper shit on,” Brathwaite recalled.

As a teen-ager, Brathwaite felt the pull of the nascent street culture taking shape around him: guys who tagged subway cars; mobile d.j.s whose bass-booming rigs, powered by electricity “borrowed” from street lamps, shook booties by the hundreds at outdoor parties. He was one of the first to view these phenomena, along with the b-boys on the dance floor and the m.c.s who started rapping over the d.j.s’ beats, as components of one big movement. “When I do talks with young people, I’m, like, ‘Yo, this whole hip-hop thing, everybody was a teen-ager,’ ” he said. “This was all essentially the creation of teen-agers who were still living at home.”

His mischievous-urchin phase was short-lived. “The thing about the graffiti scene is that you were always fucking dirty,” he said. “Being into it was a thrill, but your clothes would get stained up. The dark dirt from the rails grinding was nasty. In terms of trying to get with chicks, they wasn’t trying to talk to you if you looked like you just came out the yard.”

Inspired by his memories of Roach and the skinny-tie look of New Wave bands, he pivoted to a nattier presentation. He pulled up a photo taken in the seventies by the Times street photographer Bill Cunningham. Walking down Fifth Avenue, Brathwaite is decked out in a trenchcoat, blazer, oxford shirt, tie, and newsboy cap.“This is me in the process of transitioning, figuring out a look to move into this new space,” he said.

At FlameKeepers, Brathwaite picked up a small-brim fedora in an ochre color that Williamson identified as “whiskey.” “I haven’t rocked one like this in a minute,” Brathwaite said. “Plus, it’s a color I’ve never had.” Williamson found one in seven and seven-eighths. Brathwaite tried it on and regarded himself in the mirror. He looked indubitably fly. “My man Marc,” he said. “You have what I need up in this place, straight up and down!” He bought the hat. ♦