Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Rules of Fashion

So every once in a while I have to stop and stare at the people around me, because people dress so amusingly (here's one of my "usually amusing muses"). Like, just last night when I was walking home from the gym, I saw this kid across the street and his beanie looked like he had pulled it too far down, as it more than covered his ears and hair, and it looked as if it was even over his eyes. But I considered it only a trick of the light and the distance. Until I realized that he actually had his neck craned back. He couldn't look straight forward without tilting his head back to see from under his beanie. That, my friends and readers, is stupid. It reminds me of one of the characters from a comic book, I think one of Harvey Pekar's tomes, if I recall, with a character so strangely stylized as to have his beanie pulled down over his eyes (but if I recall correctly, he also had holes in his beanie).

But let us move on to gangstas. Gangstas, so called because they are incredibly hardcore, have often been spotted wearing airbrushed giant t-shirts of Captain Crunch and Mario (one of those two famous brothers) blinged out. This is clearly a sign of subtle corporate branding that was somehow successful when they were little children. And now that they aren't little, they see these commercial icons to be role models of cool. And Mario and Cap'n Crunch are cool, but we respect their coolness by eating their cereal and crawling through sewers. Hmm, Nintendo cereal, sounds fantastic.

And then we get to the main focus of my post on fashion. Girls who wear EVERYTHING. There seems to be this trend, intensifying since probably about 2000, where we no longer create anything new. Thus, instead of new styles (architecture, clothing, movies), new fashions, our fashions are the remixings of previous eras. And this, my dear readers, has ended in disaster. There are certainly people who know what they are doing when they select from their variety of clothes and create an intriguing ensemble. But the majority of people don't know what the fuck they are doing. Hell, I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to keeping up appearances. Just please, people, clashing clothes are, almost always (in fact, let's just say always), unpleasant to look at. Don't wear clothes over other clothes that aren't intended to be layered.

And for heaven's sake, just think about how you want people to see you. I don't care, much of the time, so that's why I wear the easiest thing I can find. If it's clean, I'll probably wear it. And that's how my rule of fashion works. How do your rules work?

No comments: