hitting the tail of fashion

i am not a trendy kind of bloke.  indeed, one could call me, alors!, a fuddy-duddy.  that's what nick says about me.  i wear the same shoes, the same jeans, the same work clothes.  i respond, cool is always in style.  but i'm not cool.  i'm light-years away from cool.

my late friend, the poet pearl stein selinsky, said that fashion is as important in culture as, well, anything else.  i agree.  i like a sort of academic louche punk rock touch.  i was just looking at photos of a favorite british poet who is in his early 60s, wears slacks, scarves and sport coats, rings on his fingers, and sports longish, messy grey hair.  something about this poet's ensemble that says to me bohemian and intellectual.

i prefer to wear my hair short.  in fact, i don't like how my hair sits on my head.  hell, i confess, i don't like the shape and size of my head.  so i use a lot of hair products on my hair to keep my hair in place.  i look at the photos of the poet described above and admire the dude's long locks.  i wish i could wear my hair like that.

and this morning on my way to work i passed a chap who could be my twin.  similar body shape and grey hair.  this dude was voluble and stopped to talk to a couple of people as i was walking behind him.  i noticed he had gold hoops in each ear.  he wore workman's clothes and held in his hand a construction helmet.  but those earrings looked, in the parlance of 1980s skaters, rad.

i have my left ear double pierced but i haven't worn a hoop since i was married.

sure, perhaps i'm revealing more my own fears and insecurities than anything else.  still, i think most of us have a style that we are attracted to.  and fashion, trendy and not, is how we present ourselves to ourselves and the world.

as james dickey, channeling charles baudelaire, said about fashion, mon frere!  a fellow phony!

but if fashion is phony, i posit that the construction of phoniness is a human construct.  even in bed i pose, wrote thom gunn, another fashion victim and fellow phony, with his leather jackets, biker boots, gold hoop and tattoo.  we have an innate need to pose and construct images of ourselves.  phoniness is real, and conditioned by our human being.

there are poetry anthologies on tattoos, sitcoms and computers.  i wonder if there is an anthology devoted to fashion.  but is there a need for such an anthology?  perhaps not, given that we are driven by our human nature to dress and redress ourselves in our own particular way.