Stuff We’re Into September 2026

September always feels like the real new year to me. Something about the air shifting, the light changing, the sudden and very strong desire to wear a sweater and drink something warm out of a heavy mug. Fall is where my entire personality wants to live. This month felt full in the best way. The pumpkins came home, the living room project inched forward, and my brain continued its ongoing habit of collecting things at a pace my budget cannot always keep up with. Here is what caught my attention this September.

J. Press and the Season I've Been Waiting For

I have been a self-described preppy with a twist my entire life. J. Press has always been one of those brands I've loved from a respectful distance, mostly because so much of what they do has historically been cut for men, and try as I might, menswear on my frame has never quite worked the way I want it to. I have spent years quietly lobbying boyfriends and now my husband to buy from J. Press on the very slim hope that I could steal something from their closet and pull it off better than they could. Results have been mixed.

Which is why this September felt like a personal vindication.

J. Press was founded in 1902 on the campus of Yale University, making this their 125th anniversary year. The brand has long been the quiet cornerstone of American Ivy League style — the button-downs, the khakis, the blazers, the kind of clothes that don't shout but that people who know, know. Jack Carlson, who founded Rowing Blazers in 2017 and sold it in January 2024 to Chris Birch, co-founder of Tory Burch, came on as creative director and president of J. Press shortly after. His debut collection showed last September at The Explorer Club in Manhattan, marking J. Press's first ever appearance on the CFDA schedule.

But this season is the one I've actually been waiting for.

On September 9th, J. Press presented their Fall/Winter 2026 collection at Capitale on Bowery and introduced their first women's collection in fifty years. Fifty years!!!! The Shaggy Dog Sweater, the iconic Made-in-Scotland knit that has been on my wish list for longer than I care to admit, now exists in a cut that will actually fit my body! The Shaggy Dog paired with a silk taffeta skirt is a look pulled directly from the pages of the Official Preppy Handbook and I am completely undone by it.

What's also smart about this debut is the strategy behind it. Some pieces are made to order, a savvy way to test demand without overcommitting on inventory. The ready-to-wear items will move quickly. And the collaboration with Alex Mill, the brand founded by the former creative director of J.Crew, known for relaxed modern classics, brings in a slightly more casual, downtown energy that makes the whole collection feel wider and more accessible without losing any of its heritage integrity.

Carlson himself has said J. Press has always had a slightly irreverent streak and that he wants to amplify it rather than smooth it over. So far, he is delivering on that promise.

If anyone is looking for gift ideas for me this holiday season, I will simply leave this here and say the Shaggy Dog comes in several colors and I have not yet decided which one I need most.

What September Actually Looked Like

This slide is essentially a photograph of the inside of my brain at any given moment in the fall. Bear with me.

We are now in our second year of what has become a September tradition: the pumpkin run down to Lancaster County. Last year we discovered an incredibly affordable pumpkin farmer in the area and it has since become one of my favorite days of the season. This year we filled nearly three wheelbarrows with heirloom pumpkins in every shape, color, and size imaginable. We have three seasonal door stoops now locked in for design and fall is by far the most fun to put together. The corn stalks are still outstanding but coming soon. I'm also hoping we manage to get some family photos in front of the whole thing this year before the season turns.

The living room refresh continues, delayed slightly by Spanish wallpaper manufacturers who apparently take the entire month of August off. Which honestly, I respect but has meant our timeline shifted. In the meantime, with no TV hung on the wall currently, I unearthed my mini projector and my husband and I have been watching films on our empty walls. I discovered he had never seen You've Got Mail, which I immediately corrected, and I can report is still one of the best movies of all time.

On the things I keep screenshotting front: Egnarts is a Korean brand I recently discovered that takes luxury objects like a Cartier watch, a designer bag or a belt and playfully prints them onto organza pieces you can actually wear. The idea is genuinely charming. Can't afford the real thing? Wear the feeling of it instead. Unexpected and completely wearable across any season.

Lacoste continues to find its way back onto my radar every time I think I've moved on, which I have now accepted as my reality. Their latest collaboration is a seven-piece capsule collection with The Hoxton hotel and Los Angeles-based artist Michael McGregor, known for transforming hotel stationery and menus into graphic design objects. The collection is called Room Service and launched September 8th, available exclusively through actual in-room dining menus at all 19 Hoxton hotels worldwide. You order it like a cheeseburger and it arrives at your door. The embroidered breakfast tray polo with the iconic Lacoste crocodile is exactly the kind of unexpected, joyful thing I love them for. I am not currently traveling near a Hoxton hotel, but I am hopeful someone I know soon will to grab me something from this collection.

Grey Towers in Milford, PA is a place I keep returning to in my mind and have been meaning to write about properly for some time. Built in 1886 by James Pinchot, a successful New York businessman who retired to Milford and devoted himself to his community and the land, it later became the home of his son Gifford Pinchot, founder and first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and twice Governor of Pennsylvania. The estate's grounds served as the site of the Yale School of Forestry's summer camp, and in 1963 Gifford's son donated Grey Towers and 102 acres to the U.S. Forest Service, making it the only National Historic Site managed by that agency. In the fall, specific days allow access inside and a rare few days you gain access to the second floor. We were finally fortunate enough to see the inside and currently they house a wonderful exhibition about the Yale students who lived here. This place deserves its own full post and that is coming. I’m waiting for the Christmas displays to go up and to see the second floor to bring you along on the ride!

I’m really getting into my needlepoint era. Thrills of the Hunt is an Instagram account and website that curates estate sale finds and releases them in drops that sell out almost immediately. I have yet to be fast enough to actually purchase the things I love, but I save everything them all as reference and inspiration. This particular piece is exactly the kind of thing I want to make myself someday and have someone love at my own estate sale decades from now. The goal is set.

The candle with the adjustable iron spike is called a courting candle, and the modern version is sold through a company called Candle by the Hour. The history behind them is wonderful: a father would set the wick to burn only as long as a suitor was permitted to stay, and when the light went out, the visit was over. Reading Aunt Dell's diaries this year, with her packed social calendar and many admirers, I feel strongly that someone should have had one of these on hand for her. She would have found a way around it anyway.

And finally, Altuzarra. I'll be honest that I have never paid particularly close attention to this brand and I cannot fully explain why. His collaboration with Old Navy this fall has brought him to a wider audience, but it was his Spring 2027 campaign that actually stopped my scroll. The shoes and the bag are completely me. Fall is my season and I am fully in it, but these have me quietly excited for spring too, which is saying something.

Sears, Beauty, and the Millennial Beige Problem

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and this slide of old Sears catalog pages feels like the right place to put it into words.

Between 1908 and 1940, Sears sold between 70,000 and 75,000 mail-order homes across the United States. You would flip through the catalog, choose a model, place your order, and within weeks every component needed to build your house would arrive by train. Pre-cut lumber, flooring, hardware, kitchen cupboards, paint, shingles, siding, trim, varnish, windows, even a built-in ironing board. No power tools required. Most owners assembled them in three to six months. The catalog that year might offer dozens of models, ranging from the modest Natoma at $191 to the grand Magnolia, which ran nearly $6,000 and came with four bedrooms, two and a half baths, and servants' quarters at 2,900 square feet.

Sears even put dotted lines on the floor plans indicating where the phonograph should go.

A Martha Washington model that originally sold for roughly $2,700 in the early 1900s sold at auction in 2016 for over a million dollars. Enthusiasts estimate that about 70 percent of Sears kit homes are still standing today.

What ended the program wasn't that the homes were bad. It was the Great Depression. Sears had offered mortgages alongside the kits, and when homeowners defaulted, Sears foreclosed on thousands of homes, which damaged the brand so severely they exited the mortgage business in 1933. The kit home program ended in the early 1940s, eventually replaced by post-war tract housing that prioritized speed and scale over character and craft.

And that, in a sentence, is what I keep thinking about.

We made a collective decision somewhere in the middle of the 20th century to optimize for efficiency over beauty, for uniformity over personality, for speed over care. We tore down the original Penn Station in New York City to build what eventually became Madison Square Garden. We replaced handmade kit homes full of character with developments of identical beige boxes. We decided that what was practical mattered more than what gave people joy and a sense of place.

Homes should be fun. They should be comfortable. They should reflect the person living in them. A house is one of the most intimate things a person can have and we spent decades making them as interchangeable as possible.

I think about this with objects too, with neighborhoods, with the way we build and then tear down and then wonder why nothing feels worth keeping. The Sears kit home is such a perfect example of something that worked, that was beautiful, that gave people agency and ownership over their own spaces, and that we simply stopped doing because something cheaper and faster came along.

Some of those houses have been standing for over a hundred years. The tract developments that replaced them are already showing their age.

Here's to the things worth keeping.

XX, Brynn