I found myself in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco late Saturday night, at a party held in a warehouse that had a bomb-blasted, post-apocalyptic look to it. Tucked away inside the building, however, was a designer kitchen, a widescreen TV, a DJ, and an amazonian blonde serving gin and tonics so strong that they jumped off my tongue and straight to my head:
This was, in short, a 30something hipster mecca. Ask some of the people what they did for a living and you would be receive answers that would either make you perk up or reconsider your own professional choices or both:
- I’m a fashion designer.
- I’m a photographer.
- I work for Lucasfilm Light & Magic.
I wore an untucked button-down black shirt and black shoes, which is what you wear to these things if you don’t want to put a lot of effort into it. At some point I had to give a final farewell embrace to my inner sophomore-year child and wave goodbye to faded blue jeans and white sneakers, watching them retreat into the mists of time along with my old Thompson Twins records: they have no place in an age where, no matter what anyone tells you, black is always the new black, as these pictures taken by the host prove:
“My God, it’s the standard uniform,” said one of my friends, looking around at the scene.
But it was possible to stand out if one was sufficiently confident with his or her sense of style. For example, you could wear a tie and a cool hat:
Or go ironically retro with cheesy sweater with a yellow collar. All he needed was some horn-rimmed glasses and he could bust out with the Elvis Costello:
Speaking of sophomores, the cute girls can always pull off the young student look. I mean...talk about rocking the socks. She did way better than the one with an indelicate pair of handcuffs slung across her blouse. Rather, with her mild aura of academic erotica, this eager scholar could either walk into a Pimps & Hos party or the more obscure yet far more sophisticated form of festivity known as Truck Drivers and Schoolgirls.
It made me think about what kind of hipster outfit I might wear if I ever wanted to give more than two seconds to the way I dress. I considered my options:
I feel bad that I give nothing back to fashion; I enjoy other people’s creativity but appear doomed to offer nothing of my own. But perhaps it’s like cooking. Some people are born for the kitchen and others are born, as Charlie Brown once put it, to make cereal and maybe toast. And besides, it allows me to fade into the sea of black and enjoy the bland anonymity.
wait, how can you tell the bartendress is blonde?
/forces self to raise eye level
oh, yeah, whaddya know. she’s got a face and everything!
clearly i’m not with it because all i can think of whilst looking at those socks is, “no. just no!”
Get down with your bad self.
every day is a battle between my black dress shoes and my chuck taylors. surprisingly, i get better feedback in a suit when i go with the chucks.