Thursday, February 10, 2005

Welcome to the zeitgeist!

Melbourne is a style city, and you don't always know the zeitgeist is coming until it brushes past you on the street. It's belittled by comparison. Melbourne isn't Harajuku. Melbourne isn't the Lower East Side. Melbourne isn't Soho. Melbourne isn't South Central. Melbourne isn't the Marais. Most of all, Melbourne is not Sydney.

I shop. I socialise. I observe. I ponder. I notice global trends in clothing, nightlife and music, and analyse how they play out on the streets of Melbourne. Footpath Zeitgeist will be a mixture of photos and sketches, chain-store odysseys and boutique missions, academic essays and cafe small-talk. It's a blog dedicated to the research and enjoyment of street style.

But I don't want to fetishise street style for its kooky originality, bitch about ugly clothing, gush about the latest designers, or celebrate hipster irony. Nor do I want to treat the street as a resource for marketers to plunder. Instead, I want to write intelligently about how style moulds identity, how clothing shapes the body and the emotions, and how all this reflects the city around me.

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