Nine Strangers and What They Were Wearing
Stephanie was riding a fixie, which remains one of the more elegant ways to court serious injury in an urban environment. No brakes, no gears, just pure faith in your own legs and the mercy of traffic lights. She hadn’t crashed yet, which felt statistically improbable. She was wearing a Where’s Waldo commemorative tee and blue shorts—the correct outfit for someone actively tempting fate on a single-speed.
There are ugly children in the world. This is not a controversial observation. What IS controversial is how readily their parents take them out in public without mitigation. A paper bag is inexpensive. Everyone goes home happier.
Karla had an ankle chain. I don’t know when ankle chains fell out of fashion but I resent it—there’s something about one on a bare leg in summer that works in a way I can’t entirely explain and won’t bother trying to.
Camouflage in 2011 required commitment. Kalle and Rüdiger had that commitment. Whatever else you want to say about them, they were not hedging.
Workshop Will had done well for himself. His girlfriend—I’m calling her Thunder Doris because she had that energy, all tattoos and rivets and hair that had clearly been through something—was exactly the kind of woman who makes you feel resentful of strangers. I was jealous. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Then a yellow hoodie came around the corner and the whole afternoon rearranged itself. Blonde hair, a smile, the sun doing something cooperative, and a chest that the hoodie was barely containing. I am not above admitting it. Let there be light.
Smoking Steve—assuming that was his name, he had the bearing of a Smoking Steve—was doing ghetto-adjacent streetwear in a way that somehow landed. The key, I think, is restraint. One statement piece, not six. Steve understood this instinctively. Steve had figured something out.
There’s a particular kind of person who has been street-photographed so many times that they’ve developed a shirt about it—something directly hostile to cameras. The irony is that this makes them far more interesting to shoot than whatever they were wearing before. The shirt becomes the content.
Vintage never actually dies, it just hibernates in grandmothers’ wardrobes until someone young enough to carry it pulls it out. A wine-red floral dress from forty years ago on someone who wasn’t alive forty years ago—that’s how the cycle completes. Grandmother would approve, probably. Or be furious. Either way the dress wins.