Outfit for a Thursday: Mustard and Ketchup

When I was in high school, my friends presented me with a gag ketchup bottle as a gift. The classic tomato red plastic cylindrical bottle, found in diners and dives across the county, a silhouette immediately inducing saliva for all food greasy and fried, appeared to be full, but instead only housed a bit of red string. When the bottle was squeezed, sharply, the string spewed forth, for a very transient moment almost resembling a geyser of condiment. Naturally, I took to carrying this ridiculous item with me on school field trips, needlessly tormenting the kind, generous parent volunteers who sacrificed days of soap-opera-lounging to chaperone, to the delight of everyone else on the rocking school bus. It was, of course, a simpler time, before all of us had become addicted to and enamored with the hand-held computers we now are unable to separate from our clenched fingers.

Generally, when it comes to color, I prefer jewel tones, those deep and brilliant emeralds, amethysts, rubies, sapphire blues. A life that abides by generalizations, though, is certainly a dull one. For some sartorial adventure, I opted for a sun-bursting, mustard yellow blazer, the hue of the real low-brow mustard, no seeds or fancy spices, just yellow, to pair with my ketchup-red nails. To mellow out these bold colors, and to avoid looking further like a baseball stadium meal, I selected my windowpane-patterned black and white dress. With the gridded, geometric pattern of my shift dress and the yellow accent color, the overall effect was wonderfully mod.

After a typical grueling day at the office, I sauntered downtown to the nether regions of the Lower East Side, for a Venezuelan-inspired meal of pisco and arepas with friends, and then a jaunt through the Cutlog art fair. The filmmaker composed the music for a performance piece by his longtime friend and collaborator, conceptual artist Taxiplasm, which was debuting at the French fair. Dallying downtown with artists, gallery owners, and various creative characters deserved some added funkiness; these gilded funnel cake earrings turned out to be quite the hit. While ambling through the haphazard gallery space, frenetically decorated with work from galleries scattered all over the world, I participated in two separate group art pieces. I was also mistaken for an artist, myself, twice; rather than perpetuating the illusion, adopting a personality for a bit, speaking with some affected accent, weaving some tale of growing up in Lyons or Bangkok, I always seem to just shake my head and blush. Not enough pisco.

During an after-party at a nearby bourgeois hotel, some middle-aged man was seduced by the coiled serpentine metal, then politely asked if he could take their picture. A far cry from photogenic, I posed awkwardly; luckily, the earrings were indeed his focal point, my ear and hair just happening to occupy the background space. I was delightfully flattered.

For me, these bit of soft fried dough look-alikes contrast nicely with the harsh barbed wire gold of my favorite lucite bangle, the demure, out-of-the-spotlight bit of jewelry for the evening.




Monday night at the office soundtrack: "Prince Johnny" St. Vincent (on repeat)