Some days I look around and wonder why so many people in San Francisco dress so horribly. Some of it is an artifact of the usual influence bad pop fashion has on regular people who never look as good as their TV and magazine icons. Some of it is just an absence of common sense. There are all kinds of things fatty patties shouldn’t wear — or that we should beg them not to wear. Or skinny people marching around as if they grabbed their outfits out of a trash can. Whatever it is, San Francisco is a city with plenty of fashion, but very little style.
On one hand, it’s nice to live in a city that doesn’t seem predisposed to sucking at the grotesque tit of outward beauty, but come on — the opposite of outward beauty doesn’t have to be shlubbiness, slovenliness, wrinkles, and unflattering tightness. A person with style can assemble a few things (any things) and look good. A person without style, or who just doesn’t care about style, can assemble a few things and look like trash, if not idiotic and tasteless. A Saturday spree at Banana Republic or Old Navy doesn’t fix the problem.
I sat at a table in the window of a restaurant near Fillmore and Haight and watched a pretty representative parade of bad decisions. Of the 30 or so people who walked by while I ate, only one young girl displayed any sense of style. She looked cute and wanted to look cute and wasn’t going to let Mission-style or Haight-style drabness turn her into yet another robot in the factory of style indifference. Everybody else looked like they had slept in their street clothes.
If you march over to the Marina or to Noe Valley — cancers that must be stopped — it’s not much better. The prevalence of perky Stepford women with yoga mats slung over their backs is enough to make you want to hack your way out of the Matrix. Even if you stand around Union Square, perhaps at the door of Neiman Marcus, you scratch your head and ask, “Where is the style?” You see shopping bags presumably stuffed with pretty garments, but their owners sure as hell aren’t wearing them.
So, of the many things that continue to drive a wedge between me and San Francisco (like our embarassing newspaper, our embarassing public-transportation system, and the prevalence of overeducated, overpaid breeders with baby strollers), I simply add fashion decisions that make otherwise decent-looking people look fucking ugly.