I have always loved visiting the mall: not shopping, mind you, just visiting.
Give me a smoothie and I could spend hours wandering the bookstores and knick-knack shops (while reminding myself that I still haven’t finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and my shelves are plenty full of trinkets as it is). And when not browsing, I can sit and watch the roiling ocean of humanity ebb and flow.
But as much as I love the ambiance of the mall, I feel cut off from the majority of the shops. I have not set a single foot into GAP, Macy’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic or any of the other baker’s dozen worth of fashion/clothing/accessory stores that cater to the mall crowd. The designer clothing and other fashionable items they offer simply have no appeal.
Admittedly, I fall into that category of social misfits whose ability to look stylish will be forever hampered by a pair of glasses and the constant presence of a book or computer at my side. But I do have a fashion sense, and this fashion is represented by a rather simple object: the scarf. You know the scarf, dear reader, the one worn not because it is cold, not because the neck needs some extra protection, but simply worn for the joy of wearing a scarf.
The scarf is such a mundane item that it seems impossible to call it a fashion: It’s as if saying the everyday shirt is a fashion, or pants. Some shirts and some pants have become fashions, of course, but they are fashions of a different type: Dress shirts give an impression of propriety, while jeans have always been a symbol of rugged individualism. But the scarf is something else entirely because it isn’t really a symbol of anything.
I have seen the scarf appear as a fashion in a variety of places, in Old Navy commercials and on hair cut models, on a group of friends laughing its way up a Portland avenue and bedecking a student in literature class. The only commonality to each appearance is its plainness, like a blank T-shirt and light tan khakis, except without the connotation of the whitewashed average, which a blank T-shirt and light tan khakis imply.
Not only does it promote no given fashion, but the scarf also fails to create a counter-fashion. Most times when something attempts to be anti-establishment or at least anti-pop-culture, some bright-eyed CEO with dollar-signs for irises will swoop down upon it and mass market the item until it becomes another element of pop culture itself.
The fashion of the scarf doesn’t allow for that, though. People don’t wear scarves to look cool or fit into some subculture, precisely because there is no such subculture scarves are associated with. People wear scarves either because it’s cold or because they think they look good in the mirror.
And that, really, is why people should wear anything they put on: not because other people will think it makes you look cooler or hipper, but because you, the wearer, like the look.
But before you go running off to the nearest department store looking for designer scarves – stop! That’s not the point. Trying to find your inner self-esteem by madly latching on to what has made other people find their self-esteem is a bit like wearing a “Stop unfair labor standards” T-shirt that was made for three cents in an exploitive third world nation.
For that matter, scarf fashion does not even require a scarf. It just requires something you love to wear because of the look, the feel or because the utility is something you enjoy for its own sake.
And yes, I do have an item of scarf fashion of my own, but it isn’t my scarf: It’s my glasses. I wear them in part because I cannot stand contacts, in part because I would otherwise be unable to recognize faces across a room and in part because they make me look debonair.
Geekily debonair, of course, but that’s half the fun.
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