The guessing game keeps fashion fun for observers, that and its magpie habit of plucking from the cultural grab bag anything bright or unexpected with which to keep us amused.
I am thinking of a micro-fad recently noted among privileged young women in elite neighborhoods of Manhattan's Upper East Side, the wearing of bedroom slippers on the streets. "It started at boarding schools two years ago, when every single boarding-school kid was wearing them," Signe Conway, a senior at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, explained last week, as she stood outside Yura & Co, a coffee shop that doubles as a private neighborhood clubhouse.
Conway, 17, was wearing a pair of fuzzy suede moccasin-style slippers, the sort lined with shearling and with a roll of fur turned down on each side. The slippers are sold by L.L. Bean; they caught on when girls' school administrators banned the wearing of the now ubiquitous Ugg boots.
Like flip-flops in January, slippers on the sidewalk flout logic. They blur lines. They catch the eye and jolt one into the subtle realization that boundaries between public space and private are permeable. The gesture is small but it reminds one that fashion is a monumental system built on coded details.
If one suddenly decides to colonize the sidewalks and treat them as though one were home in the bedroom, it is fashion that issues the license to proceed.
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