Until around the rise of the tech sector (the middle of the previous decade), Seattle was a city run by and proud of its drab dressers. Both men and women refused to make the kind of effort that an elegant or striking appearance demands. For Seattle, clothes were like sacks thrown on a body. A transition from home space to public space did not exist. Outside and inside were one and the same thing. What Seattle people—no matter what color, gender, sexuality—wore in the living room was what they also wore in a bar or cafe or restaurant. If you saw someone on the sidewalk or bus who coordinated an ensemble of shoes, socks, pants, dress, shorts, hat into a single and impressive effect, they almost always came from places where style mattered: New York City, Los Angeles, Montreal, London.
Even I became lazy. I recall attending a party in Beverly Hills around 1999 and confusing everyone who looked at me. By then, I had lived in Seattle continuously for 7 years; and that was enough time for the city to erode my fashion sense so much that I baffled the party's Hollywood people. My clothes garbled. My shoes said one thing. My pants said another. My shirt, which I bought at a Value Village near Puyallup River, was not even a hieroglyphic of an unknown language. It was just saying things wrong. Because my clothes provided no clear direction for a conversation, I found myself alone in the living room of the mid-century house and the garden, which had an unusually tall palm tree.
Finally a woman, whose torso was often featured on the covers of mass market paperback books (particularly novelizations of Hollywood science fiction movies), approached me in the garden and asked where I had come from. (I was standing by a pool that looked like the one in Boogie Nights—indeed, I was certain it was that pool, and one person not far from me actually did have a cowboy look.) I told her Seattle. She had never been there, she said. It's gotta be somewhere up north, she guessed? The city was not very well known at that time. Its obscurity, however, helped to explain my look's lack of a coherent language.
But here is an image of me before I settled in Seattle and was still something of a dandy, whose style was informed by trends in London and Harare.
But around the middle of the previous decade there was some improvement in Seattle's fashion sense. This can be attributed to its profound transformation into a global tech hub. This process, which rapidly increased the city's population, introduced a good dose of tech-related chic. (Most tech people, true, also can't dress; but those who do, tend to do it very well.) So, some progress was made. It could be seen in the cars of the light rail trains or the new restaurants that appeared during the boom. Seattle was slowly but surely waking from years of slumber—years of loose-fitting lumberjack shirts, bland Chucks sneakers, wool leg warmers, and the like. (The MOHAI devoted a whole exhibit to the clothes of Seattle in the show Seattle Style: Fashion/Function.)
By 2017, you could see the city was spending more time with the mirror and becoming aware of the semiotic significance of not just designer clobber but the art of selecting and coordinating treads to a singular effect. This is how you cut a figure.
But all of that progress might be lost because many workers were sent home to prevent COVID-19 from spreading. And these men and women have stopped wearing public clothes entirely. Be they inside or outside of the house, they are always found in something comfortable. And comfortable clothes are either bland or ugly. I fear this long period of staying at home will bake the bad habit of being comfortable into a permanent Seattle standard. Indeed, the city is in danger of becoming uglier than it was before 2013. And to make matters worse, its seems we are becoming a little too creative with the least thing that should be fashionable, protective masks. The horror of horrors.
