Notes from the Pavement
Above the waist: a sweet hairband, a nice shirt, a black jacket earning its keep. Below: white socks yanked high, a tattoo of questionable quality, and calves that could crack walnuts—the specific compression that only comes from cycling through every season without reconsidering. The outfit doesn’t hold together as a whole, but the individual pieces each have an argument to make.
Braces have always put me in a complicated place. Cute, uncanny, something in between—and why does answering feel loaded? For a while after Ugly Betty put a brace-faced protagonist on prime time, every self-conscious teenager with metalwork in their mouth seemed to recalibrate into something like pride. I’ve made peace with finding them unexpectedly endearing. Genuine thumbs up.
Berlin, fall of 2007: half the city in a gray hoodie, and it was correct. Before the pseudo-hipster migration brought horn-rimmed frames, patent leather shoes, and bodies that looked purpose-built for aesthetic suffering. The hoodie era was honest—unisex, formless, uncommitted to impressing anyone. I miss it without reservation. Buy more hoodies.
The man with the red tie is named Jerry. I know this. He takes his appearance very seriously and finds almost nothing amusing about that, which gives him an energy startlingly close to SpongeBob SquarePants—focused, earnest, functionally immune to irony. Figure out who’s standing next to him and you have the complete picture.
Legs like that in sneakers like those, with a dog also present in the frame—I am going for the dog first. It’s the safer introduction. The legs are a longer game and I’m genuinely not sure I have the standing for it. Give me the dog.
There’s a man here who has communicated his type very clearly through some combination of posture, grooming, and general bearing—he’s into a specific kind of man, built for weather and manual labor. Long walks, good company, no apologies. Good for him, I mean it sincerely.
I was a fat kid. I have to say that before I say anything about the person in this next frame, who appears to have been handed a disproportionate allotment of physical grace at birth and has been compounding the interest ever since. The jealousy is reflexive at this point, more muscle memory than feeling. Still there.
Her eyes say she’s been crying—the pose is closed, shoulders pulled in, the whole posture a small fortress. But I keep looking at the shirt: blue ground, red accents, white lines running clean across it. A beautiful garment worn through a difficult moment. Sometimes that’s exactly how you notice a thing.
And then there’s the woman in the pink top who is, without serious competition, the most beautiful person on this street today. Noted. This column is nominally about the clothes.