Best quote from Paper Magazine’s recent interview with designer and strategist David Gensler:

The British got it right when they invented punk rock. Fashion and youth culture are supposed to go hand in hand, and fashion and youth culture are supposed to push up against the mainstream and challenge it, and where do you see that? The darling of the fashion world, Alex Wang, makes black T-shirts.

If you buy a 500 dollar T-shirt, then the proceeds from that T-shirt better go towards building a school somewhere.

We have no punk rock, New York has no punk rock. The mindset of rebellion — we’ve lost it. The youth no longer want to rebel, they want to stand in line. They want to just stand there like in the army and wear a uniform.

Yes on the ridiculousness of $500 t-shirts, and yes on how most people just want to wear a uniform. It’s rather depressing to click through street style blogs from everywhere and everywhere only to find everyone photographed, whether they’re in their teens, twenties, and thirties, is dressed pretty much exactly the same. I see really interesting outfits all the time here in New York—not outrageous, mind you, but interesting in a day-to-day way that never seems to make it onto street style blogs, and so I’m beginning to wonder how much of that is bloggers feeling like they have to match what they photograph and post to the current prevailing aesthetic.
Also: how much of that is because all the street style blogs I’ve encountered are either from North America or Europe, or from Asia but clearly looking West? I’d love to see blogs from Asia or Africa with a fresh local points of view, but where do I even go to start finding them?