A few weeks ago, swept up in a certain mental mania that seeps in while covering Paris Fashion Week, a French journalist friend tried out his new theory on me: The rest of the world has outfits. New York, though? It has ’fits.
What he meant was that in most places, a good outfit, or a great outfit, doesn’t demand attention. But in New York, we measure the quality of an outfit by the amount of chaos it implies. We, he offered, are a look-at-me populace, a city of dudded-out dressers who demand validation merely for trying something.
We don’t aspire to demure outfits; we aim for gaudy fits. In this French journalist’s imagination, we’re walking around Manhattan with shoes on our heads and feathers on our feet.
He was being hyperbolic. He was struck by tunnel vision. He was being a little rude. But was he entirely wrong?
I wondered that over the last seven days as I trooped through New York Fashion Week.
Out in the streets, I saw a man clad entirely in blueberry-tinted snakeskin, from his tie to his hat to his shirt. I saw a woman in a glossy red leather trench — picture Neo from “The Matrix” meets Elmo — and star-spangled bell-bottoms.
I encountered twee bonnets, gravity-defying sunglasses, “mob wife” fur shrugs of all sizes and coats of every color in a Jolly Rancher bag — attention-seekers all.
What I saw, overall, was an awful lot of ’fits.
And so, I lob at my friend, what is so wrong with that?
There is a charm to this chaos, a pleasing audacity to seeing someone toss together an earflap trapper hat with a face-hiding veil and a shearling coat. It’s not for everyone — I sit here typing in a blue button-up shirt and unremarkable black pants — but to behold that much confidence is a treat.
Stop throwing a fit and enjoy it.
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