Too Cold for Color

First winter day and I’m already dead inside. Not the poetic kind—just the cold that makes you move faster without moving at all, and you dress for it by grabbing whatever was black yesterday. Coat, pants, boots, gone. Everyone looks the same, which is exactly the point. Winter here means you pick a uniform and stick with it.

I was looking at street fashion photos from Tokyo—Harajuku, Shibuya—from those last months before the cold really set in, and it was like watching people from a different planet get dressed. Bright colors, actual patterns, oversized pieces clashing in ways that shouldn’t work but somehow did. Not fashion-magazine stuff. Just kids putting outfits together without asking permission from the season.

As someone who thinks about this stuff—how people assemble themselves, what they’re saying without saying anything—it was jarring. Nobody does this here. You don’t see kids dressed like that when it gets cold. It’s like everyone’s agreed that color is impractical.

I don’t know if it’s cultural or just that teenagers in Tokyo don’t have the surrender instinct people up north do. Maybe they don’t have a reason to look like everyone else. Either way, there’s something I recognize in that refusal to let the season decide your visual life. Not that I’m going out to buy neon next week—that’s not the point. It’s more that watching people dress without apologizing for it, without letting utility kill everything, reminds you that you could choose something different whenever you actually wanted to.