My darling wife and I went to the mall on Memorial Day.
Which mall?
THE MALL!
I have been refurbishing my wardrobe as it was badly in need of it. This presented me an opportunity to alter my tenue.
Tenue?
Oh, that's French for outfit, or "bearing".
I have for some years been expressing my relationship to the culture in my clothes through obscure references to underappreciated art, like with a baseball shirt advertising a TV show that only exists in a series of novels about a murderbot who self hacked its way to autonomy. And I have also been putting a lot of my own creations on shirts, particularly bughearts and pictures of cats.
But I am moving on now to fashion- less semiology, more sense of personal style!
Or I am trying. It's hard to find much fashion out in the stores. Or maybe I don't mean fashion. Indeed, it suddenly occurs to me that fashion has two wildly contradictory meanings:
1. Cutting edge, creative and innovative displays of aesthetic style.
and...
2. What pretty much everyone is wearing, selling, or making at any given time.
The mall is fashion in the second sense.
I am looking for clothes in the first sense.
This is not impossible, but it does bog down quickly.
For instance, I did find some railroad pants. These are denim carpenter style pants in vertical stripes of off-white and denim blue.
I love these pants so very very much.
I even bought two identical pairs, that's how much I love them.
If you saw me you would definitely notice the pants. They are striking and unique to the clothes one usually can find for, or see on men.
But it's not like I could only find these pants in one place.
And, conversely, it's not like I can find them in all kinds of interesting variations.
These striking pants are available in some very similar version in at least half a dozen stores that I've seen. Which is great. But also, they are extremely close to being the same pants, in design, color, and styling, no matter what store they are in. There are no green and blue striped ones, or purple and yellow, or velvet ones, for example.
There is just this one kind of blue and white striped carpenter pants like for railroad engineer cosplaying.
It could be better, but it's better than nothing.
By a lot, actually.
After all, in hundreds of stores, there may be only one, single, tiny variety of pants for me, but...
Oh I like these pants!
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