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GREEN_FASHION

                                                  November 9, 2004

Last Sunday, the Green Festival was over in the Concourse
building in San Francisco.  I wandered the ailes hunting      FASHION_REPORTER
for free samples of organic tea, coffee and chocolate,
trying to think about coherent things to say about the
fashion.

The goth quotient of the Green Fest was tiny, as you might
expect.  There was a slightly larger punk contingent, e.g
a skinny joey ramone in black dreads, another fellow in the
solid black -- the beat-up thuggish black of a punk [1] --
his blonde girl friend in unremarkable clothes, but with
eyes rimmed in heavy black.

Most people were in fact wearing nothing terribly
remarkable, though there was a noticeable phenotype: very
few people were over-weight at all: This was a vegetarian
yoga cyclist crowd.  It was also a largely white crowd, as
is typically the case in lefty/activist circles, and many of
them regard it as very edgy and challenging to point out
that there aren't many POCs around -- they're white, but at
least they feel guilty.  (To get in, you're either comp'ed
of there's a ten to fifteen bucks charge [2], so you're
looking at a crowd that's wealthy and/or connected.  They're
also people who expect that someone will listen to them if
they complain loudly, and not just lock them up and forget
about them.)

There was a fair contingent wearing clothes with a touch of
the crunchy granola about them, e.g. a woman wearing
multiple layers of earth tone skirts over faded denim bell
bottoms.  Dreads were popular, if not common.

Among the bright colors set, there seemed to be a fair
amount of orange in play.  Noted one couple -- he a dark
african fellow, she a pale red-head -- wore multi-colored
outfits withh orange as the dominant color, the his version
being more of a patchwork look (alternating with drab
green), the she version being a louder floral print.

An asian guy on roller blades wore an interesting set of
sporty looking six pocket pants in a dull green color with
edging around the seams showing orange peeping out.

Not all of the women were doing the dress-down post-hippie
look, of course, and there seemed to be a trend among the
more elegant/fussy ones to go for pinstripe slacks.

Probably the one I liked best was a woman doing a dark look
that straddled the elegant/granola line: a black spaghetti
strap danskin-like top, a long flowing skirt, edged with
some lace, with streaks of browns, and finishing off the
outfit what I can only call "wrist-warmers" bunched up
around her wrists: a really heavy natural-looking wool,
nearly black streaked with browns.

And come to think of it, I caught a glimpse of another woman
wearing really heavy, ornate worked metal wrist gear, like
brass shields around her wrists and forearms.

[1] Which is different from the thuggish look of a rivet
head, though I couldn't say how off hand.

[2] Five bucks off if you arrive on bicycle, which is cool.
Free bike vallet parking, which is also cool.



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