The Character Parade
Two people dressed as Teletubbies are standing outside the venue and neither of them looks like they’re there to party. The yellow one scans the street with the practiced calm of someone waiting for a handoff. Maybe they’re going in, maybe they’re distributing flyers for the kind of rave you wake up from in a different city with fewer belongings. Whatever their angle, it isn’t fashion.
Blue sneakers are the most underrated option in summer street style and probably always will be. Not neon, not pristine white—just blue with a stripe, the quiet correct choice that nobody makes because everyone’s committed to either safe neutrality or aggressive color. Meanwhile Richard Simmons has apparently converted his last functioning brain cells into raw aerobic energy, dancing through the most aggressively boring fitness events imaginable as a kind of flamboyant hybrid of Elton John and Big Bird. The only thing I want from Richard Simmons is his dealer’s number.
Near the back of the floor there’s a Lady Gaga fan who has dressed in a color that exactly matches the dark wall she’s standing against, rendering herself functionally invisible. Whether this was intentional is the more interesting question. Nobody’s approached her in the twenty minutes I’ve been watching. Maybe that’s the point.
One genuine upside to the season: tights disappear. I’ve never had any affection for them—something about the combination of opacity and constraint registers as unnecessary at a level I can’t fully rationalize. Their annual departure in June feels like a minor public health improvement.
The two women near the bar are wearing Batman and Robin costumes and are, I should note, genuinely attractive, which transforms the whole presentation from cosplay into something worth discussing. A Batmobile is not available. You can’t have everything.
At the entrance, a Japanese girl with a pink polka-dot tote bag has attracted an unreasonable cluster of photographers and journalists all jostling for a shot. The bag is objectively excellent—a precise pink, the dots placed with real conviction—and I understand the frenzy even if she clearly doesn’t. There’s a pile-up happening around one bag and nobody can explain it to her in a language she understands.
The bearded man in the cardigan near the exit is drawing the kind of quiet sustained attention that expensive grooming and fitted clothes never seem to generate. There’s warmth in the whole presentation—actual warmth, not performed warmth—and people respond to it in a way that’s difficult to manufacture. Someone is going home with him tonight. I hope he’s not on an early flight back to wherever he came from.
Final observation, unrelated to everything above: 16-bit era game controllers had no vibration function. You could wedge as many of those things into whatever position seemed promising and recruit whoever was nearby for assistance—the best you were getting out of it was Mario jumping. Some technological advances deserve more acknowledgment than they receive.