by Cailin Smart, Fashion Editor, for Urbane Magazine
Illustration by Rachel Levit
Karen Elson, Vogue queen and Chanel gazelle, played with her new band last Wednesday night at El Mocambo. That bird-like face, and traffic-light red hair graced the webpages and concert listings for a while so I knew she was coming for weeks. I’ve heard and enjoyed her music, and Mocambo is on my daily path–I might have passed it running errands three times that day alone.
My mind didn’t buy tickets, plan a review, nor make any attempt to go. While many might have simple reasons to avoid a model-turned-Indie crooner’s show—singing model, need I say more?—my story is surprisingly complex.
Illustration by Rachel Levit
I was a hopelessly shy teenager, especially because I didn’t speak the language of my middle-school classmates. My first memory is trying to ask a girl in my class how to say “Do you have a pencil?” and instead unwittingly asking boys for tampons. I talked less and dressed more, and the result was outlandish. It wasn’t always conscious, I identified as the school’s primary Goth girl, but looking back at the (thankfully few) pictures there was beige knitwear on top of bright pink cargo pants on top of printed rubber Wellies. Plaid on silks on a particularly memorable pink lace tutu. Sequins galore, a few feather phases, and a long cocktail dresses-over blue jeans epoch. The only constant was the raccoon eye make-up (I was in ecstasy when my first passport finally expired last year.)
Peacock-style, I attracted a flock of odd birds, who soon became my closest friends. I don’t think I said two words in high school to anyone else, but never felt at odds with them. In the understanding words of my best friend “They only like you because of how you dress. If they heard what you had to say, they wouldn’t like you.” Instead of construing an insult I adapted this as a social modus operandi. Then along came Jack White, then-White Stripes front man, clad in white and red and never without his silent “sister” Meg.
Jack White stole my heart at fourteen. He had no swagger, was podgy and unbecoming. He smiled in photos. He adored the shy and the weird girls, the ones who have nothing to say and you’re always wondering what they’re thinking. You ask them questions while they conceal their thoughts which are both callous and wicked. In my eyes, it was an unprecedented celebration of the shy girl.
Then one day my friend told me my Jacky had married an (ugh) fashion model. She probably doesn’t even have the requisite red hair, I thought. Like meeting any ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend I was jittery and jealous as she brought me up to the huge billboard of the Jean-Paul Gaultier fragrance and pointed to the exalted pale crimson-haired goddess with her milky neck like a crane’s. Scowling at Karen Elson became an approved lunchtime activity.
I love Jack White for all the same reasons I love fashion. He celebrates the weird ones, the ones who don’t talk, dress strangely and think even more strangely. He knows the female language is most indecipherable in the species of “shy.” Fashion knows it too, in a perverted way. It’s about turning the silence inside out. Elson fits the introvert bill, and she got my man and my fashion in spades. That’s alright, I didn’t go to her show. (And, in the end, she probably won’t read my article.)
Amazing work Cailin!