Nobody Asked to Be Looked At Like This
There’s a kind of street style writing that tries hard to be cosmopolitan and accidentally reveals exactly where it’s from. This isn’t that. This week’s dispatches come from people who dress like they don’t care if you’re looking—which usually means they care enormously, in the best possible way.
Kasia is 21 and Polish and has the grin of someone who’d eat you alive and apologize afterward, which is the correct energy. She’s on a bicycle in gray shorts and black stockings, and that specific combination is doing more work than most people manage all day. Something about the contrast—the casual shorts, the very deliberate stockings—says she has thought about this more than she’d admit. I’d take her to dinner immediately.
Dorian is 20, from Massachusetts, and has made a commitment to his leg hair that lesser men turn into a whole anxious project. He’s in an H&M shirt and shorts and has apparently decided that a body with hair on it is just a body with hair on it. There’s something almost principled about a man who doesn’t perform grooming anxiety for anyone. Veet can go fuck itself. Dorian figured it out.
Isa understands something fundamental that most people spend years not getting: the most compelling thing you can wear is the suggestion that you’re genuinely interested in a good time. Her style broadcasts this without roses or dinner reservations or the whole elaborate courtship screenplay. Just the unambiguous signal of someone who’s already decided and is waiting for everyone else to catch up. A pioneer, honestly.
Joely is 18 and from London and is clearly in the process of becoming Taylor Momsen, which is both understandable and faintly alarming. The Primark shirt, the New Look shorts, the vintage shoes—the architecture is correct. The problem is the shoe polish under the eyes and the bleach situation, which are the affectations that Taylor Momsen herself will probably regret in about five years, and Joely is starting even earlier. The girl who played Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl is not the role model she appears to be. Joely still has time. Give it two years and she’ll either lean all the way in or arrive somewhere better.
And then there’s olive pizza with salami and double cheese, which is not a person and has no business being in a fashion column and I don’t care. Nothing anyone wore this week or any week compares to a properly made olive pizza, hot and charred at the edges, cheese pooling in the dips, oil running down your hand. I want to do genuinely unspeakable things to one and then call someone at 2am to confess how little I regret it. Fashion is temporary. Pizza is forever.