Like an obscure band that high school kids you once mocked now call their god, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about purple entering the pedestrian American fashion lexicon. In an attempt to spur myself to introduce myself to strange women and simultaneously spare myself inevitable humiliation, I’ve made it a point to approach women wearing aubergine overcoats, those black swans of fashion inhabiting the improbable intersection of a practical garment and a color apparently not as practical. As a sign, it tells me that the wearer, first, loves the color enough to be clad in it neck-to-knee, second, has the confidence to own that color, damn the common advice of a neutral palette, and third, understands that the point of a cornerstone is to be built upon. If purple is the chromatic love of your life and it flatters your complexion, then I see no reason not to rock the purple overcoat and outfit the rest of the wardrobe around it, rather than the reverse (which a neutral color too easily accommodates).
There were my brown years, the days I resembled UPS livery. And overlapping that time in my work were the purple days (months, rather, just after the oranges), which yielded lilacs and aubergines and ubes and all shades between. Not that any of this work was published as intended, because unfortunately, the stigmas associated with the hue outweighed in the eyes of clients what I felt was its singular grandeur. Because I never considered colors property, I never thought that gays or monarchs exclusively claimed purple, and damn those (lots of people) who thought otherwise. My own interpretation of it — assertive as cardinal without the abrasiveness, cool as cobalt without the inertness — is what I ascribe to its users, and more specifically, wearers.
And soon, they’ll be everywhere. There is a fourth thing about the sign, that the wearer has considered all of this and then embarked on finding it in their size and clearly didn’t give up as seasons passed and it still didn’t materialize. And this could be that season when it does, trendy as it may be. But as seasons pass, there’ll be other colors and so many aubergine overcoats will remain closeted and the status quo will re-emerge, and those just-so strange souls will make themselves known, on bicycles, cigarette in hand, as dry ochre foliage rains around us.
And in the meantime, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to introduce myself to strange women.
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