Saturday, June 28, 2008

The Street


Dita doing casual streetwear. A fitting vision for slipping into weekend.

Of course, that’s casual streetwear in Paris, but it does bring to mind certain nagging cross-cultural observations/peeves. Yes, the obvious: how the variations on that theme seem to reflect other, often less obvious, local currents.

Daywear on the Left Coast, for example, is all about heavy, 80s style makeup, coupled with something atrocious from the neck down. Ensembles that would be less than acceptable at a Lima, Ohio Wal-Mart. Think something in terrycloth dug out of the deepest reaches of your great-aunt’s laundry bin. Or very short cut-offs coupled with a markedly filthy t-shirt and, as fitting homage to the sweltering weather, a fetching pair of shaggy atrocious Uggs.

Dressing up, or “evening” wear, requires the same maquillage, but coyly matched, shoes and purse style, with a Dynasty-era ensemble. Streetlight red dresses [one could never call them frocks] are huge, as is anything in white, especially when combined with innumerable and irrationally positioned studs.

Uniforms reign in Dublin, mostly of the black leather jacket, black jeans and sturdy, yes, black, boots sort. Barcelona moves to very different tunes, especially in the winter. Frocks galore in the warmer months, but then an uncommon amount of tweed. Not the nubby, Irish sort, but subtle, smoother weaves, never competing with backdrop. Biarritz is exactly as one might hope of an ever so slightly time-worn French seaside resort. The ladies, and their presence, catch one’s eye as they should. Discreet, fully informed, perhaps a tad too formal for resort, but then it was winter, and the Millennium to boot, when I was living there.

Warsaw, much more complex, would require an entire brooding post.

So the Left Coast, two decades too late and awash in misplaced narcissism, lassitude and an apparent dearth of full-length mirrors.

Dubliners have much else on their minds, shudder at the thought of being noticed and, most importantly, have to deal on a daily basis with the filthiest of all possible streets.

Barcelona inhabits, as it has forever, that shadowy autonomous space between the Continent and the South. Riven equally by a need to embody artful classicism and to traverse the light transgressive, they have mastered the art of subtle reference.

Biarritz. What the hell. They’re French, Paris is a long Fast Train away and they choose to inhabit other times.

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