April, Assessed
Photo booths cannot go out of fashion—they just can’t. They belong to that category of things outside the trend cycle entirely, like road bikes and second-hand shopping. Everything else in April is negotiable, but photo booths are holding firm. So are: SLR cameras operated by people who actually understand them, pink hair worn with full commitment, pastel and coral nail polish without irony, short hair paired with a long beard, champagne on ice at whatever time you feel like it. Indie people, the real kind, doing fine.
Then the things that need to stop. Facial tattoos. Leggings worn as trousers, which they are not and never have been. Skinny jeans on men whose legs are not skinny. Nuclear disaster jokes—Fukushima is still actively failing, the cooling systems are still a crisis, sit on those for a while. Comeback albums from eighties synth bands who were mediocre the first time and have mistaken collective nostalgia for a green light. Smelly people in enclosed spaces, persistent and unreformed.
The finer distinctions: nerd glasses are fine on faces that aren’t actively performing nerdiness, which is a balance most people are currently failing. Heels worn somewhere with a sand floor—still happening, still a structural miscalculation. Blue eyeshadow is not having a moment regardless of how many people decide it is. The cabbage soup diet, which apparently survived into this decade. Rollerblades. Emos. The specific personality type that performs "trash" aesthetics while being privately uptight about everything. Chuck Norris jokes, which are objectively bad, but I will still laugh at if the delivery is right.
What’s genuinely good this month: Kreuzkölln—the corridor between Kreuzberg and Neukölln in Berlin where things are still interesting without being performed—and the freedom of not caring whether your socks match. Couples in love who aren’t announcing it. Bumming cigarettes from strangers. Red and white sneakers. White eyeliner, which only really makes sense at fashion week but makes it make sense there. The new Fanta Mango, which is the old Fanta Mango with different packaging, but still.
April is inconsistent. It always is.