Spadina streetcar; new shirt, new shoes.
Caucasian male, late 20s, wearing white pressed shirt, blue dress pants, and brown leather shoes, a pale trail of virgin white outlining his freshly shorn hair.
Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, Rob Walker (Random House)
Page 29:
Consider, for example, the Red Hat Society, notable for bright costumes, exuberant group behavior, and the fact that it is made up of women age fifty and over. Here the subculture motive is to challenge the way that society expects older women to behave. "It’s a very genuine feeling–’You need to get off the stage now and go sit somewhere in the back,’" Sue Ellen Cooper, the sixty-year-old "founder and Queen Mother" of the society, told me. "Well, no, I’ll tell you when I’m ready to do that." This is not exactly the same as punk’s generalized middle finger to society, but there is an element of refusal to go along with mainstream values–a bit of an "up yours" to assigned social roles.
Growing up on an airbase, he approached the summer of his last year in high school with both fear and excitement, shorts making way for pants, T-shirts in place of sweaters, and socks peeled back to reveal the thin lines of ink yet to be filled, rainbow flags, one atop each foot.
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