Introducing Fluid Form

A newsletter about bathhouses and bathing culture

Hi friends!

It's been many months since my last newsletter because I've been working on something new. I took a pause to dive deep into the rabbit hole of bathing culture and decided to double down and launch Fluid Form.

Fluid Form is a platform documenting bathing culture in the United States and beyond, centering the voices of immigrants and their descendants, bathing innovators, and queer communities who shape how we bathe.

Once I started exploring the space more intently, I found that bathing culture is as deep and far-reaching as topics like food and fashion. Depending on the specific space and experience, it can be ancestral, political, artistic, spiritual, boisterous, soothing, pleasurable…the list goes on. There are other fantastic media platforms and organizations dedicated to bathing culture, some of which I profiled in my essay "Bathhouses are Back" from the summer of 2024, but I'm excited to lend my specific POV to the area and hope you'll all join me for the ride. I'm interested in not only preserving bathing culture's history but helping shape it for future generations.

This project is deeply personal. My parents and their families immigrated from the Soviet Union, bringing with them the banya (Russian bathhouse) tradition that became central to our family life. I grew up going to the banya almost every Friday for years and learning that bathing is more than just self-care, it's a loving act of community building. It was a tradition that felt joyful, informal, and in some ways, spiritual, without an ounce of judgment (save for the occasional unsolicited comment about my body from an elder relative).

Growing up in Los Angeles, I experienced bathing traditions outside my own culture—from my first fully nude (and somewhat mortifying) visit to a Korean bathhouse with my mother in Torrance as a teenager to the counterculture bathing spaces in Topanga and Desert Hot Springs. Each taught me something different about what bathing could be.

Recently, I've gotten into the habit of watching reruns of No Reservations and Parts Unknown before I travel to a new destination and have been lamenting the Anthony Bourdain-sized hole in my heart. In a smaller way, I want to do for bathing culture what he did for food: make it accessible, curious, and human without being precious, academic, or erasing the people who built it.

If you've been reading Change Notice, you know I've been circling this for a while in my writing about hospitality, community-building, cultural preservation, what it means to be second-generation American, and yes, critiques of how wellness culture commodifies what was never meant to be optimized or sold. Fluid Form is where all of that comes together. This is for you if:

• You’re traveling to a new city and want a deeper introduction to the real bathhouses and their operators

• You’ve ever wanted to go to a Korean spa but felt too intimidated to walk in naked

• You think Andrew Huberman should stay out of bathhouses

• You want to honor a Leo full moon through an intense steam session and cold plunge into a man-made pond in the Santa Monica mountains

• You’re curious about gay bathhouse history and what it has to do with bathing culture today

• You grew up in immigrant bathing spaces and want to see your culture documented

• You’re interested in how people actually feel in their bodies, not how they’re supposed to — told in their own words

Fluid Form Events

I’ve also been hosting monthly gatherings in LA (the Fluid Form Bathing Club) for the past six months. Dozens of people have joined, and this community-centered bathing experience has become the heart of what I’m building. I’ll continue to announce new events and hope to expand to other cities in the U.S.

You’re already subscribed to Fluid Form (it’s what Change Notice just became…a rebrand, if you will).

I’m so excited to share this with you! More to come.

Leah