Here in New York, mostly on the Lower East Side and certain blocks of the West Village, it is in vogue to wear clothing of random sizes and mismatched affect. The idea is that you are funky, although it is actually about nudity—advertising the raw body’s supreme unneed for the compensations of fashion.
At first I called this style “I just found these clothes on the side of the road.” But as I walked down Seventh Avenue late last night, alone, the city thronging and singing, I thought about how there are, indeed, always clothes on the side of the road, and their destiny is not the figure of a rich twenty-five-year-old. In Manhattan, in Brooklyn, on I-95, on highway feeders and scenic routes, on small-town streets and in business parks and cul-de-sac turnarounds: frequent encounters, in public space, with discarded objects made for the human form is an experience unique to our time alive in the universe.
Some will be picked up and used again. Most will go straight to a landfill. Pants and socks, underwear and blouses. Basketball shorts. Crumpled blazers. A child’s T-shirt, slaked with soil.
Tunnel of dust 