AN ODE TO THE HOT YOUNG FEMALE FOUNDER (and Print Media)
Pilot x Hot Literati
★ Exclusive ★
Pilot x Hot Literati ★ Exclusive ★
Dagny and I had our first chat via video call.I was in my childhood bedroom in Kansas, having gone home for a local beauty pageant run by my Mother. She was across the pond in London. Dagny, not my Mother. She found Hot Literati through the piece I wrote about how ~seeing~ a forty-year-old millionaire taught me to stop dissociating from my own girlhood/womanhood/personhood. I wandered around Pilot’s website and was immediately into it. Somedays I question if I’m actually attracted to anything, but I think that I’m attracted to the Pilot landing page, with each piece in its own little picture frame, covering everything from literature to music to tech. It’s unapologetic in its curiosity in a way that I try to be each day. Scrolling through it is much better than a museum date, where you’re tied by an invisible thread to someone who may tell you why a painting you love is actually awful or wonderful in their eyes.
Exactly two weeks later, Dagny and I had dinner in Noho at Il Buco AV. The hostess got a little annoyed that I was reading in the que to tell them I had a reservation (used “que” for the british readers, hey lads and ladies) and brought me to our table curtly. The place is all moody lighting and rich wood, and it’s the sister restaurant to one of the same name around the block (which I actually went to first by mistake!). There are a lot of sisters in big cities. Sister Restaurants. Sister brands. I call Miu Miu Prada’s hot, fun, younger sister, but I love them both (vintage only).
I read at the table until Dagny arrived. The first thing that I noticed was her hair. It looked very nice, freshly blown out. The second, her voice. We’re both very soft spoken with higher pitches and spent much of our dinner asking one another to repeat themselves, or leaning across the table to hear one another better. I read last night that your voice sounds lower to you because of all the bones in your skull and what that does vibrationally. I wonder how her voice sounds to her.
Living in New York has taught me how to properly eat at a restaurant with someone. You ask the waiter what they like, order that and a lot of other things, and share. That way everyone gets a bite of something special. And if there’s a dish that you hate, no one has to bear the burden alone.
We talked about a lot of things. Books, culture, media, in print, online. She showed me a beautiful piece of writing that she authored and designed.
And somewhere between the salads and shellfish that scared me a little bit, because they still had skulls and eyes, we ended up at the point of what it means to have accidentally started a company as a woman in your twenties. 
For Dagny, Pilot is something that she started out of passion, then suddenly found herself with a team, and eventually found herself dedicating most her time to. She has a commitment to the aforementioned intellectual and cultural curiosity, but she also has this wonderful commitment to doing print in ways that maintain value and that je ne sais quas. Print media is an art form. It’s more than just words on a page. With the medium, you’re literally controlling how someone touches the pages, what they feel when they do touch the pages, the order in which they encounter each word (or the order they don’t if they read it rebelliously). The past few years of media companies looking to scale by any means necessary has left us in this place where average print media is not pretty. It’s not fun to hold. And the special editions are now the items of luxury being shipped to special consumers who will use it as a flex for their insolar circles instead of reading it in earnest, often special editions backed by huge brands that make it feel less honest with their presence, even if it’s just a little logo or a little “presented by” (and yet we all yearn for that little logo and that little “presented by”!$$$!).
Last night at the gym, I was thinking about my first sentient experiences with magazines. The first was Times4Kids. Reading about the earthquake in Haiti in a way that incited real, young, empathy and made me think about the ethics of watching, reading about suffering that isn’t in your direct community. What you can and should do about it. And then an article on why you shouldn’t eat dessert every day. I pinned that one on my bulletin board and would embark on an eating disorder roughly three years later, but those pieces had a real effect on me. I touched them. I put them in my line of sight to look at them later.
When I was twelve, my father took me to the public library in the center of our city (the same one I was practically raised in. My city has since shelled it out and built a new, cold, sanitized, lifeless one about a mile away) and bought me two used copies of Teen Vogue. One had a young Jenner sister and perfume samples that I tried to sniff even though they were already open. I took them to school and read them when I finished my work early during classes. I asked for a subscription of my own soon after and continued bringing them to school. Sky Ferreria had a feature in one. I used my youtube downloader to listen to her music on a loop. And suddenly, as a 12 year old girl in a Kansas middle school that I barely spoke up in, I felt as if I had access to a culture that I could actually imagine myself in. It didn’t matter that boys didn’t talk to me at recess or simply said “your cool” when I liked for a tbh. I existed on the fringes of Americana, but it didn’t matter because there were parts of the world that enjoyed the fringes more than the meat.
This is why I love Dagny’s commitment to print media. And her refusal to compromise with it for Pilot. It matters. It imprints on our brains in a very different way. Touch is such a vital sense and a touch screen is the same texture, the same feeling over and over and over. What is unlimited access to info, to art, if it comes with tactile monotony?
“Usually when people find Pilot, they think it’s like a British softboi.” 
This made me laugh. Culture loves a media man. A media mogul. A male artist who is a little effeminate and not afraid to show it. And I’m not speaking from a pedestal here. My roommate recently called me out for mainly dating men who love to cross their legs and talk about the state of the art world with animated hand motions. Oscar Wilde and I would have had sexual tension. But this piece on Hot Literati, by Nwakaego, recently covered Muses and how a lot of male artists gain their inspiration from women, whether it’s referencing their work, co-opting a style, or literally writing about a woman. And sometimes men write about women in beautiful ways, ways that we like to lean into. Breakfast At Tiffany’s. The Virgin Suicides. Madame Bovary. But why allow men this reference and aestheticization that we don’t grant women? For example, when a woman starts a company, she is girlboss. She is pantsuit, millennial, queen. When a woman is a good , honest writer, she is sad girl. She is internet princess. Why can’t we let women be generalists? To let them exist dancing in and out of the lines, garnering respect in business (which is very hard when you’re 23! You shouldn’t have to clarify that things are meetings and not dates this often!) and a different flavor of respect in art and media and cultural creation.
Dagny discussed how people think Pilot is cooler when they think it’s run by a man. Another friend and I recently discussed how being a man – a British man especially – is lowkey a cheat code for life. Get the shaggy haircut and the baggy jeans and you may as well call yourself King Midas.
But for some reason, this doesn’t make me sad. As we get the check and leave the restaurant, I’m sort of buzzing with excitement. Because I truly think we’re at this turning point of collective cultural attitudes that are ready to let women be generalists. That we are ready to let women be founders and artists and cons, tipping a hat to each with each piece of art, each accolade, each moment of earnest expression.
And I think about where I was when I “met” Dagny the first time. Where I was when I started Hot Literati. Where I was when I discovered culture outside of middle America. My childhood bedroom. The other day I had this epiphany that the Hot Literati colors are the colors my bedroom has always been. Pink, with accents of red, and occasional accents of white black and blue.
Teenage girls do all the cultural production that matters in America. They literally drive our consumption habits as well, even though we’re barely aware and we never give them their flowers.
Hot Literati is very girl-coded. I don’t think anyone has ever looked at it and thought that a man has made a single creative decision. Because I refuse to pander. And I will forever be speaking to the person I once was. The twelve year old girl looking for some sort of proof that it gets better. That there is a space where she can exist in a way that she enjoys.
Give the girls a magazine. Let them start companies. Read their books and watch their videos and let their art be art. We don’t want the qualifiers. Stop giving us adjectives. Labels give power to the one doing the labeling.
Anything you can do I can do. Anything I can do you can do. Anything you can do I can do.