Riot in the Streets: The Coolest Girl in the World (Montreal QC, 04/17)

Yesterday was the best day ever; the first warm day Montreal has had this whole cruel, cruel year. It was like "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks exploded into real life and I got to spend my whole day jubilantly running around inside of it. Yeah, that's exactly what it was like. I'm never one for false modesty- I looked pretty cute yesterday, fully summered out in short-shorts, sunnies and leopard print ballet flats that I ripped the bows off of. I also crossed out my "McCartney" tattoo with inky black pen and wrote "THE KINKS" overtop of it, which was clever of me. Nevertheless, I was totally upstaged: after photoboothing my face off at the McGill subway station, I re-emerged into the meteorological bliss and had my socks entirely knocked off (well, I would have, but I wasn't wearing any, because it's SUMMER!!!) by the inordinate and enchanting hotness of this girl:

Okay. Are you joking? Is this some sort of weird fashion prank that the ghost of Elsa Schiaparelli played on me? How can anyone be so cool as she is? I can't even deal with it. This girl's whole summer babe thing would be Street Style quality even without the cello/double bass/whatever-the-hell she was rolling down the block like it was nothing. I love the monochromatic brown, the shape of her glasses nails that generally unattainable midpoint between class and wack, and her vintage day dress fits her like a damned Hermes glove. But obviously the whole thing is elevated from "normal awesome" to "stunningly iconic" by the presence of the GIGANTIC STRINGED INSTRUMENT. I flipped the hell out to this girl over how amazing she looked- I was in a real dither over her and can barely remember what went down, but I vaguely recall saying something along the lines of, "That's the BEST accessory I've ever seen!"

Seriously. Who needs Chanel when you have a cello?

Summer Music Festival Chic: Lollapalooza 2006

Style.com has a wide-ranging street style editorial up on Lollapalooza, which is just about the last place we'd expected to find coverage on the long-running event. (Although they recently covered Siren Music Festival as well.) The results are an interesting jumble of people and styles; Emily Haines of Metric, Broken Social Scene and soon to be solo star makes an appearance, as does one of our favorite video directors, Floria Sigismondi. Visual evidence reveals gladiator sandals in full effect, huge sunglasses, floaty baby-doll dresses and controversial usage of cowboy boots. (Pro: practical. Cons: played out, according to some. Our opinion: they seem a lot less prissy than most dumb girl shoes at the event. I mean, heels? That is just nonsensical.)

We've always loved summertime music festivals, not only for the bands and holiday air about them, but for the clothes-watching. As a sort of petri dish of fashion, it's fun seeing all the disparate tendencies of music-centric style - rockabilly, punk, hip-hop, Britpop, indie, goth and classic rock - come together in a postmodern jumble in wardrobes as diverse as the music. The results are sometimes brilliant improvisation and sometimes old-fashioned mess (and often both.)

There's no shortage of festivals, summertime or otherwise, to choose from: Siren, Coachella, Intonation, Pitchfork, Vegoose, Iceland Airwaves and Lollapalooza. But it reminds me that this year marked the absence of probably the mother of all summer music festivals, Glastonbury. This British mainstay, always featuring a lineup to envy, was also where Kate Moss reveals her summer look for that year. Is it any coincidence that Kate's had an off summer, fashionwise, in a year with no festival? (Of course, she's also had a difficult year, with "Cocaine Kate" and all that.) In its honor, some pics from Glastonburys past of some fashionable music lovers (and lovers of musicians).

Model Behavior

I'm back from crazy-insane work/film stuff, but there's not much for me to report since we've hit that limbo between summer and fall - you know, that time when stores are trying to sell off their hot-weather inventory with a slew of sales, hardcore fashion followers are waiting for the fall stock to arrive and everyone in the hemisphere is trying to figure out how little clothes they can get away with in the heat. I have to admit that lately I'm more apt to spend time in the air-conditioned environs of record or book stores than trolling boutiques, mostly because I'm on a clothes shopping fast till this winter. I'm still interested in fashion on an anthropological level, and curious to see if people will take up all black this fall, as the mags are reporting, or see how the new variations on the grunge aesthetic that flared up on the runways for fall go over. In the meanwhile, I'm enjoying the "off-duty model style" feature over at style.com, although it's curious that they would leave out Valentine Fillol-Cordier (pictured below with her rock musician boyfriend Jamie Hince from the Kills), who I reckon has some of the most distinctive off-duty model style going these days. Oh well, at least they got Irina Lazareanu in there, another musician/model whose style resembles a hyper-pretty Patti Smith.