Strolling around Soho in Sunday's balmy evening, throngs of festive young people packed the sidewalks, lingered in stores, chatted in cafes, played pick-up games clustered in front of crowded restaurants. The women were dressed in the currently fashionable look of layered, assembled, disparate garments, checked patterns peeking from beneath solid Eisenhower jackets, short skirts only the young can wear, and knee-high calf-tight leather boots. Colors, textures, weaves--a loose fabric of solo notes. Young men are analogously clothed in multiple fabrics, jackets, shirts, dark trousers, new mimicking old, loose, flowing almost like capes and shrouds, hair and masculinity parading. All quite wonderful and stimulating. I was struck how fashion de-ethnicizes the city and homogenizes New York's notoriously class structured populace. Fashion in its diversity is equality. As if to emphasize the citizenship of democracy, Rag and Bone's fashions hinted at a military look, derived from the ferocious warriors of the Scottish highlands. Social determination masked in casual regimental.
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