On and Off the Avenue
Rachel Syme checks out some of the city’s trendiest piercing studios.
Like so many other mall rats of many generations, I first got my ears pierced at Claire’s, a kitschy accessories emporium for tweens and teens. I was fifteen and flush with babysitting tips; a gum-popping sales girl not much older than myself aimed a piercing gun at my lobes and fired at will. Now, thanks, in part, to Instagram and TikTok, the ear-stabbing landscape has evolved a great deal; these days, everyone seems to desire a “stack,” or an artful constellation of several earrings scattered around. Popular piercings of the moment are the “conch” (the indented crescent midway up the ear), the “rook” (the shelf of cartilage that runs across the ear’s upper half), the “cat flap” (a thin overhang of skin at the top of the ear), and the “tragus” (the tough little nubbin close to the jawbone). These placements require a delicate hand and expertise, far beyond that of a teen-ager working steps from a Cinnabon.
Illustration by Roche Cruchon
In 2019, the entrepreneurs Lisa Bubbers and Anna Harman launched Studs, which specializes in what Bubbers calls “Earscaping,” a term Studs has trademarked; they have twenty-seven piercing studios around the U.S., with four more opening this year. I visited the Nolita and meatpacking locations, and both were sardine-full, with long wait lists to get jabbed. With an Instagram-friendly aesthetic—bright-yellow jewelry pouches, neon signage—the brand is vying to become the Claire’s du jour, but for a slightly older clientele. (The average Studs customer, Bubbers told me, is twenty-seven and seeking a “second or third piercing.”) Studs offers needle-only piercings—as opposed to the imprecise gun method—and requires its employees to undergo a six-week apprenticeship. The shop’s signature is its Snakebite—two tiny studs right next to each other, anywhere on the ear—a procedure that has attracted several celebrities to Studs. (The brand’s publicist was quick to drop names such as Kaia Gerber, Usher, and Jennifer Lopez.)
Several skilled piercers, many with their own boutique studios, have lately become mini-celebrities themselves. Cassi Lopez, who owns So Gold Studios, in Williamsburg, has amassed more than a million TikTok followers. Adrian Castillo, a thirty-six-year-old veteran piercer from California with a laid-back, skaterish vibe, also has a large cult following (including, he said, several celebrities, but he won’t pierce and tell). One recent afternoon, I went to see Castillo at his elegant new studio, 108 Ceremony, in Greenpoint. I invited him to “curate” my right ear—to choose any placement, any piercing—and he suggested a small diamond stud in my antihelix, a fatty slab of cartilage near the upper ear. He deftly speared it with a thick needle; I felt a small squeeze, followed by an odd popping sound. Later, as my ear began to throb, I noticed that although Castillo was covered in tattoos, he had no piercings of his own. “I’m a wimp,” he said, adding with a sly grin, “I mean, I’m gentle. But I don’t trust anyone else to be.”
Spotlight
In her work as a curator, Elizabeth Way has introduced us to a number of fashion makers, who, without her persistence and curiosity, would have escaped notice. In the important book “Black Designers in American Fashion,” a collection edited by Way, from 2021, she wrote about the lost history of Black dressmakers in nineteenth-century Manhattan. As the associate curator of costume at the Museum at F.I.T.—headed by the brilliant and redoutable Valerie Steele—Way has had access to history and ideas through clothing, and the latitude to examine ways in which garments are often the true markers of an epoch.
In Way’s new exhibition, “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora” (at the Museum at F.I.T. Sept. 18-Dec. 29), she demonstrates how the African diaspora, which extends from the continent to Brooklyn and the rest of the world, is associated with not so much a singular aesthetic as a different aesthetic, which has influenced European fashion and fashion makers but also painters like Kerry James Marshall, who has a deep understanding of how the outside expresses the inside. This wonderful survey includes such scintillating game changers as Madame Willi Posey—the mother of the artist Faith Ringgold—represented here by a flowing tunic from the early nineteen-seventies. Also on view is the work of the incredible innovator Ann Lowe, who created the wedding dress for a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, for her marriage to John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. congressman, on that long-ago morning in Rhode Island.—Hilton Als
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