2007-07-31
what do your clothes say?
|Time and again I am amazed by the animal known as Homo Sapiens. Doesn't everyone love to people watch? I do. I don't have a particular spot that's better than another, I'm equal opportunity, but I was thinking I might hang out downtown this afternoon, outside of the library, while the babysitter is here.
My little burg is sort of like Michigan's answer to San Francisco. It seems the more flamboyant of our species tends to congregate here. That's fine by me, it makes people watching all the more fun.
So this is what I like best about people. Everyone you see, all day long, has made some kind of conscious effort to look the way they do.
While I consider myself pretty low-maintenance I do spend a good five minutes styling my bangs each day before I put my hair in a ponytail. I consider which T-shirt I want to wear and which color of Converse low tops I'm going to wear.
The red ones are the newest and I consider those the "dress up" low tops. If I'm going to the dentist I'll wear the red ones because I am attempting to look sort of nice. Standard operating procedure are the navy low tops -- they're all business and they go with everything. If I'm just running errands and it's raining I will wear the dark purple low tops because they are old and I don't mind if they get soaking wet. If I am mowing the lawn I wear the olive drab low tops because they are a couple of years old and have some holes in them. I don't mind if the soles turn green from the grass.
So while I am pretty low-key I do give my day-to-day appearance some thought. (And if I ever have a meeting with you, you can gauge your importance on the appearance of my Chucks. What can I say? I'm a pretty uncomplicated chick.)
Okay, back to the point. Everyone you see, everywhere you go, has given some amount of effort to their appearance. Just yesterday at the grocery store I saw a woman with really short red hair. It was short, like Natalie Portman's when she was letting it grow out from shaving her head for some movie. It wasn't so short that it stood at attention, but I'm betting each hair was no longer than an inch and a half. You probably couldn't wrap a piece of her hair around a curling iron.
She had a summer dress on. It reminded me of a dress you would see in a movie from the 1950s. Add some pearls and a pair of heels and you get June Cleaver. Nix the jewlery and add flip flops (like she had) and it becomes a peasant dress from Italy. She looked kind of earthy, not much makeup, and she was picking out fruits and vegetables. It seemed like an interesting ensemble to wear to Meijer on a sunny day in July.
Now contrast that with the woman I saw at Costco a couple of days earlier. She looked like she was channeling Jennifer Aniston. She had those long shorts that look like wool dress pants cut off just below the knee. She wore four-inch high heels with a really small heel, sort of like a sandal with a stiletto heel, but not quite. The floors at Costco are just cement slabs. I would have found it difficult to walk in any kind of heel but she was moving pretty fast.
I found myself wondering where she was going dressed like that. It wasn't traditional going-to-a-food-warehouse-on-a-Wednesday-afternoon garb. I guess it was going-to-Starbucks-in-Beverly-Hills-with-Vince-Vaughn garb. And since I didn't notice Vince Vaughn standing in the parking lot of our Madison Heights Costco, it struck me as odd. Just to clarify, her outfit still would have struck me as odd if I had noticed Vince hanging out in our Costco parking lot.
Even the guy wearing baggy Levis with a silver metal chain going from his front pocket to his back pocket and a black concert T-shirt is making some sort of statement. That guy usually wears black Converse high tops. I don't know exactly what he's saying with his appearance, but I know this much.
There is a difference between Converse high tops and Converse low tops.
2007-07-31 at 7:05 a.m.
