Fashion & Lifestyle At The Motel
Love motels, always have! They are fetching outlets of anonymous possibility. Always a little moist, and they never feel entirely clean (even when they seem pretty clean). You are also talking to a lifelong fan of affordably priced hotels and motels; when I was Gap Kids-sized, I wrote a fan letter to Holiday Inn and rolled up to the lobby with it attached to my roller bag. This hotel was pretty tremendous — fan-letter worthy by the golden, oil-sheened Texas coast with one of the remaining few Holidomes, where the pool is always the same temperature. There was also a sauna, a jacuzzi, shuffleboard, and a playground that the sliding glass doors of rooms opened up onto. Heaven in Corpus Christi!
Motels and hotels are definitely having a renaissance, as people largely seem to be over Airbnbs (except for a really lovely one I stayed at outside of Palm Springs in a retirement community). Airbnbs and their ilk have unwieldy clean-up rules and message you after wondering where their beach towel is that you never actually touched.
And just look at this message the Radisson in El Paso has for us!
Summers are made for solo trips to motels, good for clearing your head if you’re having a rough one, or for situations like when my dad threw out his back and we all decided to just stay the night at the Courtyard Marriott in the next town over so we could run around by the pool and order pizza. One early summer night last month, I was at a bar in New York that had low-slung couches and hot, contemptuous bartenders — lots of bars have these things, but there was also a markedly liminal feeling about the space, like people were disappearing through the walls. As we peered into the other room, there was a hotel lobby and it all made sense. We were at a hotel bar, I didn’t know! Sometimes you can feel the portal before you’ve even found it.
I am also reading Molly Young’s zine Sleepy Hollow Motor Inn, which is a “true story about a homicide, the wreck of RMS Titanic, a geodesic dome, an old Cape Cod motel, a rare blood disorder, and two pandemics over time.” These are the kinds of graph-theory possibilities motels present. In her beginning ambiance-setter for the motel in this Cape Cod scientists’ town, she wrote about lodging nomenclature. The great wood & arrow design shift of the mid-2000s imbued otherwise new places with a vague sense of provenance (a word I learned when I worked for just such a business), and motor inns became lodges. “Many of today’s Lodges and Inns are just motels with an Instagram presence and a website that features the phrase ‘design-driven’,” Molly writes. Remember when Super 8 had that sparkling PR stunt of auctioning off its old art and having Amy Sedaris host? Many other motels haven’t tried things like that…
Also, I want to call every hotel a motel because it sounds cool, but that would be false — in fact, I haven’t stayed in many motels over the last few years unless you count the love-themed ones. You might already know this, but for me, it was nice to read this Amenitiz.com definition of the difference between hotels and motels. “Hotels may contain several floors and more rooms,” the sites says. “They have over one hundred rooms with internal corridors, staircases, and elevators. Motels may have only one or two floors with fewer rooms for your customers to access them easily from the car park.” Really, it’s the difference between $89 and $209. Hotel living, motel mindset!
For portals, possibilities, ice buckets, economical amenities, hotels v. motels, indoor pools, damp air, regal carpet, and continental breakfast, let us present:
Fashion & Lifestyle at the Motel…
These dresses have 6 o’clock energy. You’ve just dipped in the pool, you’ve grabbed a drink from the downstairs bar, your hair is damp, you’re laying on the bed, and the TV’s on the Home Shopping Network or Forensic Files or a televangelist or The Mask.
1. Caché cocktail dress / $95 from Sandra’s Closet
2. City Triangles tank skirt set / $48 from Snacktime Vintage
3. Positive Attitude strappy mini dress / $35 from Chandler Platte
Accessories for the ambiance of escape
Bring a transitory ambiance and anything-goes atmosphere — and an extended Marriott Bonvoy 2 p.m. checkout — into your home. Start by hanging one of these outside your bedroom door…
Gently insist your guests cover their drinks, not that they’re not safe at your place!
When you use the ice bucket in your room, you know you’re making the most of your hotel experience. This one for entertainment:
and this one for the bedroom!
