Has Globalization Ruined Street Style?

The New York Times had a great opinion piece about street style where they opened the debate to several notable fashion experts, roundtable style. I really liked Adriano Sack's response which I've posted below.

Drawing a Distinction

At a bar in Havana two summers ago, I was surprised to see a guy in a flashy red leather jacket, tight pants, with greasy yet carefully arranged curly hair and, if I remember correctly, white gloves. It wasn’t what I expected to see in Cuba, the land of rusting 1950s American cars and decaying colonial architecture. Instead of a Michael Jackson look-a-like, I thought I’d see a bunch of older gentlemen — like the musicians from the Buena Vista Social Club.

The Michael Jackson clone didn’t deliver a Cuban flavor or have a sensibility for local style. But he embodied what, in my eyes, makes fashion so fun and relevant: courage and the desire to transform and excel. And the wish to be part of a global dialogue about style-icons, desirability and, yes, red leather jackets.

The idea that globalization might hurt street style is the fear of a saturated elite. We’d love to arrive in Mumbai, Nairobi and São Paulo and see people in their own “authentic” wardrobe, while we ourselves have access to any information and style we crave. Of course, it’s a shame to travel the world and find the same brands in every city, but who’s to judge other people’s desires? Who is to keep global companies from making money in new markets? It’s all part of the game that we have learned not to question anymore.

The one bright spot in this globalization of fashion is that on closer inspection you’ll notice the same piece of clothing changes according to cultural, social, stylistic and religious circumstances. A Gucci blouse is worn differently by a socialite in Tehran, a gay man in Cape Town and a busy mom on the Upper East Side.
Fashion is the struggle between two contradictory desires: to fit in and to stick out.

So yes, globalization has had an equalizing effect on street style. But that effect looks dramatically different depending on the street.

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Adriano Sack is one of the publishers of "I Like My Style," a quarterly fashion magazine based on the social network ilikemystyle.net. He is also the the executive editor of the forthcoming German edition of "Interview Germany."

Read the original article here.