What the Mirror Doesn’t Warn You About
Summer announced itself again as barefoot season. No shoes means no accumulated damage, no stink, just skin against whatever surface the world is offering this week. There’s a real freedom in it, and also a kind of arrogance—the decision that the body is already sufficient without the hardware.
Some children are genuinely unfortunate-looking. Their parents know this and maintain the performance of unconditional adoration anyway, which is touching and also mildly delusional. A full-body costume addresses the immediate problem. The longer-term solution is patience—faces sort themselves out, or they don’t, and by then the kid has usually developed compensating qualities.
Andre from Manila isn’t merely slightly gay—he’s committed in the way that makes every adjacent aesthetic decision in the room look provisional. Star tattoos across a flawless face, a long blonde mane, the whole look operating at a level of internal coherence that renders everyone else accidental. There is no competing with this. Accept the loss early and move on.
Roger has the face of a man who absorbed genuine catastrophe and found it instructive. Wars, probably. Definitely women—many women. He grins through everything now, and that ancient tie goes wherever he decides it goes. No argument is possible or required.
American Apparel’s look was always specifically for the emaciated hippie-hipster who stopped updating their cultural references around 2008 and had no particular interest in correcting that. They are not wrong to love it. It fits them perfectly. But it fits only them, and they’re still in it, and they seem completely fine.
I grew up in the nineties. Disney films shaped the interior architecture of my emotional expectations. Cartoons were extended family. Anime was a parallel world operating under completely different physics. When that nostalgia surfaces as oversized shirts, I understand it immediately—it’s the private mythology leaking outward, which is honestly all clothes are ever doing anyway.
The pajama pant remains criminally undervalued as an everyday garment. Yes, most encounters with it happen in the context of insomnia or kitchen wandering. But you genuinely cannot predict who will be at the door at 2 AM, and some of us prefer to be ready.
There are moments—brief, clarifying, slightly alarming—when the human face becomes genuinely irrelevant and only the anatomical facts remain. What’s attached and what it can do. In those moments, a deer with a human penis is a completely reasonable proposition. I’m not arguing with it.
Headbands at school were the territory of the competitive overachievers in the parallel class—the ones who never acknowledged your existence but were somehow sleeping with the history teacher by spring term. Now they’re wide and colorful and worn by people who appear to mean well. A complete rehabilitation. I’m still adjusting.