Music or Fashion?

Though I missed the chance to track her down and say so, Laura Moriarty rocked some seriously fashionable threads at the Verdi Club this weekend. The whole event was fashion-forward, if by “forward” you mean accessorized with white autoharps. That room hasn’t held so many hat brims since the Great War.

Thanks to Brandon Downing, I felt “with it” for a full five seconds, buying the new WAVVES record just after news of Nathan Williams’s Barcelona meltdown hit Pitchfork. So everyone I was talking it up to (O.K., John Sakkis and my brother) had the incident fresh in mind. It was Brandon’s promotional clip for the Movie Nite event in NYC, which uses Wavves’s “California Goths,” that first hooked me; the “So Bored” video did the rest. (Nada, you especially have to see this.)

Thinking about Wavves and the fashion thread Laura started, I realize that music trumps clothing in my own halfhearted stabs at self-fashioning. What I listen to usually dictates what I wear when I feel like dressing up, and new bands shape my sense of self more forcefully than new clothes. Is that a guy thing? More often now though, I just dress to the stereotype appropriate for the social context. Is that a guy thing, too? More stereotypes available for men to disappear into when they want to? Time of life also does damage—short of time/money to shop, and who’s going to check my display, anyway? Not that I really mind; the preening’s in the poetry. Still, it’d be good to find a style that isn’t ambered in the last thing I was listening to before parenthood. Maybe Beach Goth?