Barefoot Season

Summer comes and everyone wants their feet out. No shoes, no socks, just skin on concrete and dirt and whatever else gets stepped on. There’s something honest about it—the pretense stripped away—though you notice it’s usually the people whose feet don’t look like crime scenes who actually do it.

I don’t know why I watch what people wear as carefully as I do, but I keep doing it anyway. There’s the American Apparel thing where people get trapped in 2008 and seemingly never reconsider: oversized everything, worn by the same person year after year like a uniform they made once and decided was final. Nothing wrong with the clothes, but there’s something paralyzed about it.

The ’90s soaked into us. Disney, cartoons, anime when it still felt foreign and strange. Now people wear that nostalgia openly. Oversized anime shirts, pajama pants as legitimate clothing, the deliberate absurdity of not looking at your own kid’s face. It’s honest in its way—you’re saying this is what made me, instead of pretending you emerged fully formed and refined. Growing up in that stuff doesn’t leave you, it just gets worn on the outside eventually.

Fashion gets sexual in ways I don’t fully understand but also don’t judge. People want specific things, sometimes things that shouldn’t logically cooperate. You learn not to ask why. Just let people have their interests.

Then there’s fashion that comes back because it has to, like headbands. In school they were the saddest thing—worn by people desperately trying to become something other than what they were. Though that’s probably just what being young is. Now they work better. Messier. Less precious. Everything cycles back eventually, different enough that you don’t notice you’re doing the same thing for the second time.