There’s a fashion/lifestyle magazine called Lucky which peddles $300 bluejeans and $900 spangled high-heeled sandals yet somehow purports to promote elegant, almost-zenlike simplicity…kind of like Dwell for the wardrobe. Any old how, I guess the implication is that you’re lucky if you can drop that kind of dough on the ephemera of fashion, but I prefer my own kind of sartorial luck.
Stray clothes.
I found a really great shirt on my way to work on Sunday on Central Ave./West 9th St. in the West Bottoms. It was just lying in the gutter, buttonless and filthy, but I liked the look of the print and colors and thought that if it cleaned up okay, I’d replace the buttons. It did, and I did, so here it is:
Here’s a detail of the buttons. They probably date back to the early 1950s – they’re recycled from a much older blouse that was too shot to keep. But they seem to fit just perfectly on this 1970s blouse, and there were exactly the right number of buttons to retrofit this blouse, so it had to be serendipity, right?
I realized today that I have enough stuff around to compose at least one outfit of clothing entirely found either on the street or in the trash. So here it is:
I have another pair of pants (full-length, brown, brushed-cotton office pants) that would have been better yet, but they were in the wash. They were from the same haul that netted these pedal pushers.
The head-scarf is something I found on the street in York on New Year’s Eve of 1999/2000, while walking home from a pretty awesome SciFi Club party out near the University. I found it within about a block of the Minster, half frozen in a puddle of slush. I’ve since taken the tag off it, but I recall that it proudly claimed composition of 80% silk, 20% “metallic fibre”. I usually wear it as a neck scarf or a belt, but it just seemed to suggest itself as a headband for this get-up.