Hi John,

Is this fashion’s way to express the imbalance of our times, a dress code revolution?

But then, fashion is after all ephemeral, as Oscar Wilde said: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

That’s how I feel about the pictures you showed and I just look forward to it changing in the next months.

Because I live in New York fashion often evades my sensors. It flashes across the peripheral and then slides into the nothingness of my subconscious where it muddles around doing this and that and more than likely influences my own sense of style.

But sometimes I leave the city for extended periods of time. And then I return, like I did a few weeks ago, and twist my neck this way and that way and up and down back and forth at all the strangeness of dress until I complain audibly of a crank in my neck and some yuppie passerby on the street recommends I go to yoga. Thank you stranger, but I'm 21 years old and an inhabitant of this island. I obviously already go to yoga.

One of my friends takes credit for predicting the explosive popularity in cut offs as far back as two summers ago. Now I normally hate to add to his already booster-sized ego but I rightly remember his fashion forward fortune and fairly enough am forced to give him the deserved honor of being clairvoyant of the hip. And right he was. It's impossible to walk the everyday blazing hot streets of New York without seeing a billion variations of the cut off. Jean cut offs, canvas cut offs, skirt cut offs, my personal favorite corduroy cut offs, and so many others. Now I've noticed that the trend is to self-hem the cut off, but instead of folding the hem neatly inside and under the short leg, the hippest of the hip are folding their hems untidly up and in front. Urban Outfitters is already selling pre-hemmed cut offs made to look like self-hemmed cut offs. 

But I've gotten a little off the point. My intention was to paint a brief image of the current youth-fueled fashion scene. An update to the state of hipsterdom fashion.

Cut offs I've already mentioned so short you can see the pockets sticking out from beneath. Tank tops for men are fully in. Hair that covers one hemisphere much more fully than the other. Sneakers of the simplest quality, flat and single colored and preferably beat up. Loud loud loud colors. Neon is heading in. As well as headbands. And my god tattoos are everywhere and fill entire arms and legs and there is just so much unapologetic skin. Oh and thick burly ironic moustaches. And I like it all though I don't want to. Everyone's got some sort of print of a white tiger or else some ironic t shirt of a muppet or bands to impress people with but have never been listened to by the wearer and big black rimmed glasses and hats with unbent rims and I think I figured what has happened it is that the unhip has become hip.

I saw one little man with big brown curly hair. On top of this big mop of hair was a small little green baseball cap, just floating way up there and not pulled down. Big Dopey red framed glasses. Matching red suspenders not connected to the plain white t-shirt tucked into bright green shorts pulled way way up but falling from his behind and straddling his legs which led down to big white reebok shoes. And around his neck hung a camera. Obviously not a digital one. And there was this sense that here was this little dude and somehow he is the king of hip on this incredibly hip soho street. (There was a party at a surf shop. Believe me, it was a scene.)

And so I've spent the last week trying to figure out how to be unhip without being hip. But there's no solution! It's all hip! The unhip is the most hip and there can be no hip because then you will be unhip! Oh it hurts my brain!

So in my own pursuit of style I aim to blend unhip and hip so that I pass by as nothing other than myself. Comfortable and quirky and pass me by without cranking your neck. Oh how difficult it is to be an individual in a place where everyone is trying to be one and unwittingly becomes just like everyone else. Annoying.