Fashion

It is time for me to write about fashion again. Actually, I never thought about fashion at all when I was growing up. But since I have gotten a bit older, and got outside Texas, I have started payin' a bit more attention. And I have developed my own ideas about which places are fashionable and which are not.

To be fashionable, a place has to have a couple of characteristics:

1) it must have a recognizable style of it's own,
2) a majority of the female citizens have to participate,
3) it should have seasonal and annual variation that the citizens more or less adhere to,
4) it can't just copy Paris or Milan - there should be indigenous designers and small botiques,
5) there should be an avante garde - some people on the edge.

Brisbane, for a small city, is very fashionable and has all the characteristics above. These Goths in the park are great examples. The local style is informal, changes from day to night, and is trendy. Brisbane girls look different than European or American girls.

On the other hand, Houston is not fashionable. Doha is not fashionable. LA isn't that fashionable either - there is just a small subset of the population that wears designer labels. New York is very fashionable. Tokyo is fashionable. Italians in Rome and Milan are very, very fashionable. London used to be fashionable - I don't know any more. To be honest, same way with Paris - there are some very fashionable parts but maybe not the whole city any more.

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