urban tribes

Originally uploaded by al-zahra, who appears to be from the pseudo hipster tribe

the language of clothes is a way to encode all sorts of things...one of the most fascinating things to me is to "read" people in a crowd, to learn about them and understand them in the context of the world by the things that they are announcing and saying about themselves in their dress.

sxsw has been fun to stare at all the urban tribes, because the streets are literally thronged with all nationalities, ages, conditions....all the different little groups we belong to, because we believe or we want to be a certain style or way of living.....

i often feel that as i get older i am losing my handle for the language of the urban tribes, that perhaps i can't get the finer nuances of why tight jeans plus pointy toed shoes and glasses=hipster and whatnot. i never really felt an allegiance to a tribe, other than the weirdo-american community, and so tend to freely mix things up. i wonder though what it is that these little whims translate to, what i am really telling people with the way i dress.

right now i am totally in love with miniskirt plus leggings plus goofy tshirt plus chucks. but i saw very few people wearing this combo. instead there were tons of women wearing miniskirts and boots. it being texas, naturally the cowboy boot predominated, but the 80s-ish slouch boots and those weird flat heeled boots were very much in evidence.

i didn't go to any goth, punk, or major subculture bars so i didn't get any firsthand observations on those tribes. i think one of the funniest things about the bleed through of SL into RL is the skewed perspective on fashion. maybe it is just me but it seems that because i am used to seeing the most bizarre things on an avatar, that i have come to regard that as normal even for RL....which can be funny.

i notice too, in my limited forays into sl fashion, that there seem to be tribes in SL. maybe they mirror the urban tribes i see in the real world. it seems to me that there is a group of sl fashion types who seek to replicate real life fashion very closely, and those that seem to embrace the unrealistic possibilities of SL.

i was too much into everything to take major notes but i also tend to really scrutinize the noticeably foreign because they always seem to be the ones who are wearing the freshest styles..........