The Mirror Test

Street style photography is surveillance dressed up as flattery. Someone stands on a corner with a camera, photographs whoever walks past wearing something that catches their eye, and puts the results online for strangers to evaluate. The subject thinks they’re being celebrated. They’re being rated. That’s a different thing, and most people participating on either side seem dimly aware of it without wanting to examine it too closely.

Pink hair looks good on maybe three percent of the population, and the other ninety-seven percent know this somewhere in the back of their skulls but dye it anyway. The girl who makes it work is always the one who clearly did it for herself and forgot about the audience—white top, huge trousers, some internal logic to the whole outfit that you sense without being able to articulate. The girl who doesn’t make it work is making it work for someone watching, and you can tell. The mirror is in her eyes before she’s even left the house.

The truly bewildering entries this week: someone in what I’m fairly certain is a medical eye patch deployed as a fashion choice, dead rabbit imagery, a fluffy tail I choose not to investigate further. New Jersey has its own relationship with self-presentation—full sleeve tattoos at twenty, professionally applied tan, hair that required tools I’ve never seen used in person—and from outside the context it reads as a lot, but from inside it’s completely coherent. I’ve been attracted to a few of those women. Terrible decision every time. Worth it every time.