Plutonic Rainbows

Swimwear Thinking Made City-Appropriate

February 13, 2026 · uneasy.in/92bc6ab

Sun Studios sat on the sixth floor of 628 Broadway, between Bleecker and Houston. On the afternoon of November 5th, 1992, Liza Bruce showed her Spring/Summer 1993 ready-to-wear collection there — a small presentation in a SoHo loft space with draped white backdrops and scattered petals along the runway floor. The petals were the only decorative gesture. Everything else was restraint.

Bruce had built her reputation on swimwear. Lycra bodysuits, minimal seaming, the kind of stretch engineering where the fabric does the structural work instead of the pattern cutting. By 1993 she was translating that logic directly into daywear, and the results looked like nothing else on the New York calendar that season. Second-skin turtlenecks in white ribbed jersey. Ankle-length wrap skirts in warm stone that opened at the front to reveal a lighter underlayer beneath. Column slip dresses with spaghetti straps that owed more to lingerie than to anything you'd normally see at 4 p.m. on a Thursday in Manhattan.

The silhouette logic across both key looks was what the research calls "column plus interruption" — long, close lines broken by a single slit, overlap, or strap. The body organised everything. There was no print, no hardware, no contrast piping. The garment's entire argument was that fit, line, and fabric behaviour were sufficient. The styling reinforced this completely: hair worn long and straight, negligible jewellery, neutral shoes. Nothing competed with the silhouette.

Bruce was stocked at Harvey Nichols in London and Barneys in New York. She wasn't obscure. Yet the collection that people remember — the sheer slip Kate Moss wore, now sitting in the V&A's underwear exhibition — came a season later, for S/S 1994. What the Spring 1993 show demonstrates is that the grammar was already there. The columnar slips, the engineered wraps, the "underwear-as-outerwear" proposition in a quiet, minimalist register. The Moss moment didn't emerge from nowhere. It intensified something Bruce had been building toward on a petal-strewn runway in SoHo, six months earlier.

That second-skin turtleneck, worn without apology

The Thousand-Token Gambit

February 13, 2026 · uneasy.in/f6732e0

OpenAI shipped Codex-Spark yesterday — a smaller GPT-5.3-Codex distilled for raw speed, running on Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 3 hardware at over a thousand tokens per second. Four weeks from a $10 billion partnership announcement to a shipping product. 128k context, text-only, ChatGPT Pro research preview.

The pitch is flow state — edits so fast the latency disappears and you stay in the loop instead of watching a spinner. Anthropic is chasing the same thing with Opus fast mode. Everybody is.

I wrote about speed becoming the only moat last month. Codex-Spark is that thesis made silicon.

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Why the Seventies and Eighties Feel Like a Threat

February 13, 2026 · uneasy.in/7aa09ee

Sodium streetlights. That's where it starts for me. Not the event or the era but the colour — that flat, amber wash that turned every pavement into something theatrical and slightly wrong. Modern LEDs render the world in full spectrum. Sodium vapour didn't. It collapsed everything into two tones and left your brain to fill in the rest. The brain, filling in, often chose unease.

Something about the 1970s and 1980s registers as faintly sinister when viewed from here, and the reaction is common enough to suggest it isn't just personal. The textures of that period — film grain, tape hiss, CRT scanlines, the particular softness of analogue video — carry an ambiguity that digital media has largely eliminated. Modern footage is sharp, bright, and hyper-legible. Older material contains noise and shadow. The brain interprets visual ambiguity as uncertainty, and uncertainty triggers a low-grade vigilance that can settle in the body as discomfort. You're not scared, exactly. You're watchful.

Pacing compounds this. Television idents, public information films, educational broadcasts — they moved slowly and left gaps. Long pauses. Static framing. Sparse dialogue. Minimal scoring or none at all. Contemporary media fills nearly every second with motion or sound because dead air is considered a failure. Confronted with silence, the viewer projects meaning into the space, and what gets projected is rarely cheerful. The Protect and Survive films weren't trying to be frightening. Their flat, institutional delivery made them more disturbing than any horror film could manage.

That institutional tone is part of it too. Public messaging in Britain during this period was formal, impersonal, authoritative. It lacked the conversational warmth that modern branding considers mandatory. Government broadcasts addressed you like a patient being told to stay calm — which, if you weren't already anxious, was a reliable way to make you start. The emotional distance reads as cold now. Cold enough to feel ominous.

The broader atmosphere didn't help. Cold War nuclear anxiety sat underneath everything like a bass frequency you couldn't quite identify but could feel in your teeth. Industrial decline, unemployment, urban decay, terrorism coverage, moral panics — even if none of this was consciously processed at the time, it shaped the cultural mood. And cinema absorbed it. Halloween, The Exorcist, Videodrome, Threads — these films used suburban quiet, analogue distortion, and institutional spaces to generate dread. Their visual language has become fused with how we perceive the entire era. I can't look at a 1970s kitchen without half-expecting something terrible to happen in it.

There's also the matter of memory without metadata. Pre-internet life left fewer searchable records. Fewer photographs, no social media archives, no instant documentation. Memories from that period feel less indexed and more dreamlike as a result. Dreamlike states carry an uncanny quality almost by default — the sense that something is present but not quite accountable. Mark Fisher called this hauntology: the persistence of lost futures, visions imagined in the past that never materialised. Media from the period can feel like a signal from an abandoned timeline. That dislocation sits somewhere between nostalgia and dread, and I'm not convinced the two are as different as we'd like them to be.

I keep a folder of screenshots from 1970s Open University broadcasts. I'm not sure why. The lecturers stand in front of beige walls explaining thermodynamics in voices that sound like they're narrating the end of the world. Nothing about the content is threatening. Everything about the atmosphere is.

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