Because I sew, and people know it, October is the month when conversations tend to morph into costume consultations. The first one this year happened yesterday at the gym. Somebody had printed up a little flier with little photos of the trainers wearing their LAST year's Halloween costumes and when my trainer asked me to pick him out of the group I made several wrong guesses (the Gladiator? the Spider Man?) before he triumphantly pointed to the cheerleader with the yellow pageboy and pleated skirt.
And for THIS year he wants to be a Fixie Boy, like the thousands who fan out from the Mission to endanger the city daily on their stripped-down bikes with no brakes. (Fixies are illegal in some of the larger European cities because of the accident rate.)
Unfortunately I could not be very encouraging on this occasion. What are the elements of the Fixie Boy look? Stovepipe jeans. Rumpled tee. Neon shades. Funny hat. Geeky plaids. Since the look has already been pushed to its ironic limit, how can you push it any farther and carry it into the realm of Costume? A parody of a parody. Hard to pull that off.
Plus, Fixie Boys have to be skinny, and no way can my trainer pretend to be skinny. "Why don't you just be Tarzan?" I suggested. But we always want what we cannot have.
