Fashion Craze Sweeps Norfolk

Bukowski: a street heretic with style

A revolutionary and perfectly revolting and tasteless fashion craze is sweeping the streets of Norfolk.

It is odorous, aromatic and wanton.

Urban Outfitters, by comparison, sells yuppie clothes disguised as affectations street fashion, pricey and pretentious.

I speak of Homeless Haut Couture – high fashion of the streets, marked by hoodies, jeans, watch caps and some really hot kicks. 
  
Androgyny is back in style. You can't tell the men from the women until you look into their desperate and despairing eyes.

Underneath those layers of jackets, sweaters, sweatshirts, there are men and women with a sense of street fashion.

Don’t ask them where they pick their clothes; they won’t tell you.

But if you’re on the streets before dawn, just as the sun is breaking the opaque and formless shadow life of Norfolk, you might catch one or two rummaging in recycled bins or diving into dumpsters, a grocery cart brimming already with shoes, sneakers, metal, discarded food containers with stale food, items that are indescribable and indefinable but probably worth a buck or two on Norfolk’s Midnight Market.

A dog with style

There’s Miss Cool, bedecked in sunglasses, even on cloudy days.

There’s the Biker B***h, who looks as if she should could rip out your throat – and she usually does with her mouth.

But, oh, she has style.

They all have style.

Even better, you don’t have to deal with obnoxious “associates,” selling you what you really don’t want and will never wear.

You don’t have to drive to a store or show proof of identification for your credit card or fight traffic on roads filled with potholes.

You don’t have to wait 2-3 days for your order to arrive in the mail.

Just walk down some of Norfolk’s finest streets – Colley Avenue, Colonial Avenue, Granby Street, 21st Street – and you get a fashion parade.

In fact, you can buy off the rack, so to speak, right there on the street.

Negotiate a price, slip into a porta-pottie and voila, you are now wearing the latest Homeless Haut Couture.

Even the Chinese have street style

Boots, shoes, hoodies, sweaters, scarves, pencil-thin jeans, you name it. Every style for every age. Sunglasses, flipflops. Bandanas, aviator hats…

They have more inventory than 2 Urban Outfitters (which, just for the record, had its headquarters in Rittenhouse Square in Philly, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city before they revamped a warehouse on the Delaware River and moved their base there.)

Don’t worry about them: they will find other clothes.

They hang out near 7-11s and churches and take their ease on park benches in Stockley Gardens.

You don’t have to look for them; they will find you.

They have a keen sense of who will buy and who won’t.

And they are gearing up for the summer season.

And I hear their summer fashion will knock you on your ass.


Style is the answer to everything.
Fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous day.
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style.
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what I call art.
Bullfighting can be an art.
Boxing can be an art.
Loving can be an art.
Opening a can of sardines can be an art.
Not many have style.
Not many can keep style.
I have seen dogs with more style than men.
Although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style.
For sometimes people give you style.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Jesus.
Socrates.
Caesar.
García Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, walking
out of the bathroom without seeing me.

Charles Bukowski – novelist, poet, short story writer – and heretic