Spotted: Blonde Redhead, "Top Ranking" Video

Lately we've been playing this game, which we call "spot the high-waisted jean," particularly those with that 70s babysitter flair that we love. They're starting to pop up here and there, and personally I don't mind at all. (I had fond memories of my 70s babysitter.) Here's our favorite blip on the radar: Blonde Redhead's video for "Top Ranking," off their recent record, 23. It stars one of our favorite ladies ever, filmmaker/artist/all-around genius girl Miranda July (read her new book now), and is directed by Mike Mills, who also directed the super-good Thumbsucker, which featured one of our most favorite Keanu performances ever.

Spotted: Burnout Tee from Alternative (Apparel)

Spotted this weekend, on lots and lots of people everywhere we went: the subtly badass burnout tee at Alternative. Formerly known as Alternative Apparel, like a similarly named t-shirt company, Alternative makes t-shirts in a mind-boggling array of styles, cuts and color. And like the aforementioned similarly named company, Alternative are also known for their position against sweatshop labor and other exploitative practices in clothing manufacturing. (Unlike the similarly named company, though, we've never seen a quasi 70s-porno advert from Alternative.) And while we're not interested in pitting one against the other, for the sake of comparison we do note personally that Alternative's fits are looser, but the fabric has held up better throughout multiple washings. What can we say? We like a tough shirt, and we think you should know.

(We also love their Rondstadt tunic, and can't wait for it to be in stock...)

Spotted: Sperry Topsiders

A little less than a year ago, I spotted a very cool-looking girl wearing kickass green suede Topsiders. And lo and behold, I'm seeing boat shoes again this spring on many more fashionable ladies, and they still look completely fresh to my eyes. Sort of like the spring equivalent to the fringed ankle-length Minnetonkas everyone loves (or perhaps an update to the moccasins that people were wearing awhile back), Topsiders have a bit of that outdoorsy prep aesthetic to them. (Prep, no matter how ironic, is not really my thing, but in my mind, the outdoorsy mitigates it.) And as a total bonus, they are incredibly comfortable. Trend in the making? I'm not foolish enough to guess, but I do know that they do look pretty awesome with skinny jeans and short denim skirts.

Spotted: "Soundtrack to Nothing" Opening at Bespoke Gallery

The best place to people watch while grabbing some free wine are art exhibitions, receptions and openings: art is one of those fields where all tribes of people collide, from the well-heeled and wealthy to the most art-damaged hipsters. We were at the opening for Christy Bush's rock photography exhibition "Soundtrack to Nothing" at Bespoke Gallery and took in not only the moody, French New Wave-type stills of rock fans but the plethora of stylish threads on display. (Not to mention feeling like I was in an indie rock version of Gawker Stalker for a moment, having sighted R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe there, along with Interpol, one of the twins from Blonde Redhead, and, um, Samantha Mathis.) There were the usual style suspects floating around: skinny jeans, pointy boots, vests, pretty dresses, wickedly cool shoes. But I was looking at all the women who were wearing short, flowing tunic-style dresses, slouchy boots and flowing hair when I realized they all had sort of a Native American princess silhouette going. (This especially popped in my head when I saw one woman wearing a headband over her hair like a headdress.) It's a nice thing: comfortable, not trying to hard, just insouciant enough towards the conventional rules of fashion engagement. And the pictures were cool, too.

"Soundtrack to Nothing: Photographs by Christy Bush" at Bespoke Gallery, 57 W. 27th St., 6th Floor, New York, NY, through May 27, 2006

(Sofia Coppola at a Marc Jacobs costume party, rocking the headdress.)

Spotted: Tara Subkoff for Easy Spirit Wedges

I spotted a few very cool-looking ladies wearing these Easy Spirit by Tara Subkoff wedges at the opening night reception of the Whitney Biennial. They're incredibly amazing-looking in person. Oh, and the art was pretty cool, too.

Spotted: Men's Edition!

In the span of two hours while out and about yesterday evening, I counted 25+ occurences of the blazer-over-hoodie combination that all the fine young men of today are sporting. (I stopped counting after my second drink.) This combination has been the thing for awhile now, of course, but I was just bemused that everyone is down with it: lawyers, rockers, business types, artists, homeless. The world seems so much more orderly when everyone's got the uniform.

(A Very Scary!) Spotted

I was at Nordstroms in the San Francisco Shopping Center this weekend (buying a bottle of Chanel No 19, no clothes!) when I spotted a whole herd of girls, all wearing the same thing: puffy jacket, super tight jeans, straightened, streakily highlighted hair and Uggs. Every last one of them had the same pair of Uggs! I thought there was the remote possibility that it could have been performance art or something, but it wasn't. It was for real! And that's when I thought to myself: fashion must be stopped. It's getting dangerous out there.

Spotted: Summer Camp Style

Maybe it's the nice weather, but being able to be out and about more these days, I've noticed a lot of people wearing what I can only call "80s summer camp": clothes with white or bright piping, jelly shoes or sandals, polo shirts, bright 80s-inspired t-shirts with stripes and blocking and hints of that 80s surf aesthetic in accessories (you know, shoes, wallets and t-shirts from HOBY, Panama Jack, etc.) People are even wearing shorts: khaki shorts, gym shorts, denim cutoffs. Maybe this is Wet Hot American Summer fallout, but I'm starting to feel like I should be on my way to the crafts class in Cabin 2A instead of cruising the aisles at the record store. But where are the friendship bracelets? It's just not summer camp without them.

Spotted

Okay, I lied about summer in San Francisco. It's not a myth because it's freakin' hot here now! What's up with that? Everyone's dug out their little sundresses, sandals and flip-flops from the bowels of their closets. Or they're running around on the streets with their Dr. Scholls sandals and shorts. And yes, there are lots of early 70s-type sunglasses being spotted, as well as lots of bright colored separates with white piping that wouldn't be out of place at a roller rink. Turquoise accessories - belts, earrings and shoes seem to be the favorite - have been seen aplenty. But my favorite thing to see is this prairie chic thing going on - teeny floral-patterned dresses and girlish shirts with denim and cowboy and/or hippie type boots. If you're in the Bay Area now, enjoy the warm weather this week because no doubt the heat will disappear...

Celeb Spotted...

P. Diddy, Puff Daddy, Pooh Doody, whatever you want to call him - spotted by reader Leah in Vancouver sporting a Fucky Ducky baseball jersey. No word on whether everyone's favorite blinged-out hip hop mogul accessorized with bodyguards or diamond-encrusted cell phone...

Spotted: Rebecca Turbow

Spotted on the streets of Williamsburg (where else?): Brooklyn-based designer Rebecca Turbow. Wearing an outfit entirely of her own creation, Turbow designs a line which sells under the label "Safe Clothes" and "Made Safe."

Her highly idiosyncratic clothes, featuring modish inflections most directly evocative of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, wouldn’t seem out of place in the kogaru-dominated environs of late 90s Shibuya. Turbow herself eschews all other colors from her own wardrobe save white and turquoise and apparently owns nothing that isn't one color or the other, but she widens her palette when creating clothes for her line. With a spring line arriving soon, Safe Clothes is currently stocked by both Apollo Braun in Manhattan and the MiniMini Market in Brooklyn. Two more stores are slated to carry the line: Piece, which recently opened in Manhattan, and most fittingly, at Sheep in the famed Laforet building in Tokyo’s Harajuku district.

SPOTTED

Peter Rojas of Gizmodo sent in an item, spotting a Lost In Translation-inspired fashion statement in Brooklyn: an orange camouflage t-shirt turned inside out a la Bill Murray in the movie, with "Lost in Translation" lettering screened on the front. A few days later, another inside-out orange camo t-shirt was spotted on the L train as well.

SPOTTED: Free Martha

First there was the Free Winona shirt, and now the Free Martha, spotted at a gallery show in the Mission. Get your t-shirt here, young grasshopper.

SPOTTED, AND A NOTE

+ A lithe Japanese girl wearing a trucker hat emblazoned with the word "IRONY" on it.

+ Lots of guys wearing endearingly ill-fitting blazers with the neck and collar sticking up.

+ Furry brown Ugglike boots on a girl stomping down 16th Street, looking very pissed.

I've been dreadfully busy lately! It doesn't look like it will let up soon, what with film school applications, preparing my work for a screening later in the fall and my everyday paying design stuff. I try to write something every weekday, but it looks like I'm more often going to be taking a day off even then to get everything done.

SPOTTED

Tokyo! Many thanks to Kate Riley for the photo!

NO SPOTTED BUT THERE IS ALWAYS TARGET...

I've been visiting family in the Midwest for the last week, so there haven't been any Spotteds really worth reporting, since I truly am in the middle of the land that fashion supposedly forgot. To be honest, though, it's still the jeans, cargos and t-shirts uniform everywhere else in America, only the jeans are definitely not Sevens, Paper, Blue Cult, Rogan, Saddlelite or anything remotely over three figures in price. My middle American sojourn, however, has given me an opportunity to indulge in my favorite discount pleasure, Target, which I don't get to very often. I specifically checked out the new Isaac Mizrahi line, which doesn't look like it may fare well in mainstream America. For one thing, the Target I cruised had stuck all the Isaac stuff in the back, making it hard to find, and chose instead to highlight the Mossimo clothing at the front of the store. It's classic American sportwear with polish, but it did lack that bit of Mizrahi whimsy and sauciness that the effervescent designer is known for. (Although I did open a few of the purses and enjoyed the pink linings, and the crewneck sweaters felt nicely soft.) More fashion-forward (in a more muted, classic way of course) were some Mossimo pieces, some very Marc Jacobs-y mandarin collar jackets and some conduroy skirts with satin piping that would fit in very well with the ladylike thing going on this fall. There were even some satin tops that were worthy Stella McCartney interpretations. Target adroitly diffuses trends more quickly than its competition; I even saw a pair of Ugglike boots on sale, and to be honest, they weren't all that different from the authentic item at all. (A schleppy boot is a schleppy boot, after all.) And at $25, you really can afford to dabble in the trend.

SPOTTED

A Sunday afternoon at Amoeba Records provides a nice cross-section of street fashion for anyone's people-watching pleasure. Spotted yesterday as I was scooping up the Linda Perhacs re-issue and the new Broadcast CD were lots of girls wearing all-white, which seems to be scarily omnipresent this summer and often (unfortunately) sported with platform sandals. East Village 80s punk will never die, and neither will the studded belts, dyed black hair and pale, pale skin that goes with it. A Nico lookalike riffled through the experimental/noise section wearing a suede fringed jacket and slouchy suede boots pulled over her jeans. Jewel tones - mostly turquoise and magenta - were all over, in off-the-shoulder tops, miniskirts, stilettos, tights and flats. There were lots of white leather accessories, ranging from a Marc Jacobs Stella bag to a weird lightning bolt-shaped belt. But strangely enough, there were no trucker hats (yay) and no Members Only jackets except on a pair of senior citizens amiably thumbing through the soul section, hats pulled firmly over their white hair the texture of cotton candy.

SPOTTED

Sarah Galvan. Taken at the corner of Bedford and North 1st in Williamsburg, NYC. Photo by Jeremy Sirota.

SPOTTED

Yesterday on the way to Otsu: Another pair of magenta tights on a girl wearing a black skirt and an 80s style blouson sweater, and a cream-colored blouson sweater paired with a green ruffled skirt and cream cowboy boots on a blond-haired Asian girl. By the way, if you're looking for stylish cruelty-free goods like shoes, wallets, bags and even a baby onesie or two, Otsu features a nicely curated assortment of vegan stuff, not to mention comics, records and magazines.

SPOTTED

At the YBCA art opening last Friday (I'm a little late): At an event like a gallery opening, all the hipness tends to blend together in a great blur of Members Only jackets, pointy-toed Technicolor flats, fancy jeans, schoolgirl blazers and schoolboy caps. What did catch my eye was lots of fuchsia and magenta: leg warmers, stiletto pumps, sweaters, flip-flops, piping on jeans, knitted hats, even a beret. Also spotted: a fantastic 70s rainbow striped strappy sundress with white sandals.

SPOTTED

It's been slim pickings for fashion on the Internet lately. (Or maybe it's just web fatigue?) But at least I have real life to entertain me. At a bookstore picking up the latest in a string of Haruki Murakami novels for the summer, I spotted an older woman clearly still va-va-vooming it up with long, straightened blond hair with tiger-like highlights and black mascara that you could ski off. She was wearing tight American flag bell-bottom capris and very high-heeled sandals, and best of all, a big black fedora hat with feathers that was very Mick Jagger in the late 60s. But even better, she was blithely chattering on her cell phone, incurring the silent disapproval of both patrons and management as she said, "I refuse to see Charlie's Angels. I mean, I just disagree with the whole thing. The whole point of the tv show is that they were a matching set! They weren't different like they are now, with one chubby and another tall and skinny and another petite. On the show they had the same type of bodies and could trade clothes. I mean, isn't that the point of being a Charlie's Angels? Trading wardrobes?"

I wish I could make this stuff up, but people really do forget that they're talking in public sometimes...

SPOTTED

Many good-looking blokes this weekend were spotted wearing striped oxford shirts. Fitted in true metrosexual style, paired with jeans in all cases with sleeves pushed up. Blue was the most popular color of stripe, although I did catch a blonde hipster fellow with tan thin stripes and Paper jeans, his mirrored aviator sunglasses glittering in the sun as he spat, "Do you really wanna break up now? I'm on the other line!"

SPOTTED

1. While waiting in line for a burrito: Girl wearing black knit mini, black leggings underneath, with black ankle boots, all topped with a magenta-colored '80s-looking summer cheerleading camp t-shirt. No black rubber bracelets or black lace hair scarf, though, to complete the Madonna '85 Wannabe look.

2. While going to Tar-jay: Lots of people wearing all-white, especially white jeans and white tank tops. Being around these outfits makes me very nervous. I can only imagine what the wearers must feel.

SPOTTED

I spotted a punk rock ingenue rocking the Marc by Marc Jacob's bustier sweater with rolled up jeans and little stilettos on the BART train from the airport. Normally I'm not down with the head-to-toe, straight-off-the-runway thing, but I was a little impressed that she got all the key Marc details, right to a teased, fluffy ponytail. You always hear about you shouldn't wear all one designer, but it's not like a bustier sweater is something you can mix easily with other aesthetics. (By the way, the latest ELLEgirl issue featuring Ashanti on the cover has a craft project on how to make your own version of the Marc sweater, which is admittedly extremely cute.)

SPOTTED

I spent much of Saturday reading the new Harry Potter book like a nerd, but I did manage to get out on Friday to catch the nightshift party at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. YBCA's events tend to attract the typical art-damaged hipster with a leaning towards the upscale end of things. There was a lot of style to be found, though, and while there were too many people getting their Blondie, Gwyneth or Gwen on to pick out a standout Spotted, here's just an inkling of accessories and clothing grooving as the DJ spun L'Trimm's "Cars That Go Boom":

+ hot pink: newsie caps, stilettos, bags
+ Le Sportsac bags
+ lots of boys were wearing very 80s looking windbreaker jackets
+ old-school Van skateboarding shoes
+ lots of white leather
+ skirts with asymmetrical hems
+ striped t-shirts
+ torn up t-shirts
+ a few pairs of Ugg boots here and there (Uggs haven't really hit the same way it has in LA)
+ many shirts and jackets with mandarin collars
+ big hoop earrings
+ 80s surfing-related t-shirts, etc.
+ Hypercolor (JOKING! JUST JOKING!)

I wore the same torn up Martin Margiela chiffon dress over jeans that I usually do. And I would also like to mention that the "Swingers" look of guys with shaved heads wearing boxy bowling-type shirts and some sort of cap has really got to go. Please.

SPOTTED

+ A skinny white hipster boy wearing aviator sunglasses and the red Michael Jackson "Thriller" jacket. I kept waiting for him to jump up and bust into song, kicking up his little heels and singing "Whoo-hoo! Thriller night!"
+ Two teenage skater boys wearing Thrasher t-shirts and trucker hats. See, you know once it's hit the Hot Topic crowd, it's over! Finito! Stick a fork in it and call it done!
+ A punk-looking girl wearing Blue Cult-ish jeans, a black hoodie with "Skaters Suck" stenciled on the back and a white leather purse. Her friend also had a white leather purse, and I was walking behind them with a white leather purse. Spooky, no?