Borrowed Shorts and Better Instincts
Thirty degrees in Munich and everyone is showing their hand. Heat removes the hedging—you see what people actually know how to do with themselves when layers aren’t an option. I kept running into faces worth stopping for, and eventually that felt like enough material to revive the street style section I’d quietly let go.
Karin is 24 and from Stockholm, and the outfit shouldn’t technically work—shirt from Gina Tricot, shoes from Vagabond, shorts borrowed from her little sister—but it absolutely does. Something about borrowed pieces fits looser in exactly the right places. She looks relaxed in the way only people with real instincts manage in thirty-degree heat. Jeans look. Done.
Sarah is 16, from Hamburg, musician and student and wearer of leather bracelets that announce a clear position on school rules. A few piercings in a genuinely pretty face, white shirt, jeans. Pokémon generation on paper, but she’s figured out something most people don’t work out until their mid-twenties. I hadn’t cracked it at 16. I was very much doing Pokémon.
Antoine’s clothes are solid—leather jacket, good shoes—but the real thing is that he’s a photographer. Swimming girls, challenging compositions, cities that look slightly warped. Young and already that sure of a frame. There is a particular kind of envy for people who got the muse early and didn’t waste her.
Bianca is 18, from Toronto, dark complexion, black button eyes, hair with a plan. Zara cardigan, mall boots, Gap bag—nothing extraordinary on paper, but worn with the quiet authority of someone who knows that’s not the point. She and her twin sister Dani run a label called Plastic Skyline. Eighteen years old and already shipping product. That’s quietly embarrassing to contemplate from where I’m sitting.
Elle shares a name with one of the more significant fashion magazines, seems completely untroubled by this, and is currently employed as a waitress in Australia. Sixteen, wears a visible black bra under not very much fabric, grins at the camera like she already won. You know what? She probably has.