Five Strangers, One Perfect Elvis Shirt
The "I Love New York" shirt has been dead longer than any of us have been online. It ran its course—spawn, clone, ironic inversion, finally landfill—sometime before the end of the nineties, then crawled back out of the souvenir bin. Taylin Elisa Yasmin from Montreal somehow makes the thing look good again at 18, which is either a tribute to her or evidence that context is everything, and I genuinely can’t tell which.
Sebastien Taberlet is a 22-year-old fashion designer from Paris, which means he’s professionally obligated to be dressed well at all times. He delivers: red Vans, H&M trousers so tight they function as documentation, a Zara jacket. The Elvis shirt, though—that’s the real question. Where did he find it, and is there another one somewhere, because I need it in my life immediately.
New York operates in a different fashion timezone. While the rest of us are still deciding what to wear in October, Manhattan has moved on to the exhibitionist wars: show what there is to show, uncover what there is to uncover, keep going until law enforcement weighs in. As a tourist I’d recommend watching rather than participating, unless you have a good sprint in you.
Romina is 15, from Düsseldorf, wearing Chucks and a ponytail. Her style is every teenage blogger in 2010, and there’s something in the way she looks at the camera—pure delight, completely un-self-conscious—that’s more interesting than any outfit. She just looks happy to be in the picture. That’s rarer than it sounds.
And then there’s Clark and Jennifer, deep in some pharmaceutical territory, wearing neon and Pokémon iconography and apparently doing fine. Drugs and raves and the specific delusion that a Pikachu-adjacent costume constitutes an aesthetic statement aren’t new—Hipster Runoff documented the entire species extensively—but every generation rediscovers it, takes one great photograph, and then goes home to stare at the ceiling until Thursday. Some traditions endure.