Now if you really dig, you will, of course, find a lot of information about yellow. But, at the risk of offending yellow lovers and yellow aficionados, if you really look at the literature, I would not say it is a color in the league of red, of which I have written.

Yellow has a number of negative connotations. We have yellow journalism. It is the color of cowardice and jealousy and is associated with aging (paper yellowed with age). Anyone looking to market teeth yellower?

On the positive side, yellow shines particularly in nature – yellow glow of sunlight, sunflowers, bananas, and canary melons. In music, we have Donovan’s Mellow Yellow and Yellow Submarine by the Beatles.
In clothing, I think yellow is difficult to carry. Historically, it has been considered tacky and gaudy. Personally, I am not a big fan of yellow clothing. From reading current fashion articles, however, yellow is the couleur du jour in 2008.

The photo of the woman in the yellow dress (top right) has been in my collection since 2005 (prior to the start of this blog). Collecting photos of people dressed in yellow is a slow, incremental process. The yellow dress was so unusual and striking that I photographed it just for that reason, not knowing if I would ever have any real use for it. A television program was being filmed. More recently, I photographed the woman with the yellow skirt in the late afternoon yellow light. This diptych is my entire yellow photo archives.

But in the end, in the card game of life, yellow trumps all others easily as the color of the sun, giver of light and life, and the color of summer – in more ways than one, the couleur du jour…

Note about yellow: Yellow is one of the three primary process colors (subtractive) in printing (CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow, plus black) but is a secondary color in the world of light (additive) and monitors (RGB -red, green, blue).

I once knew a woman who made a blanket condemnation of the way many Americans dress. I frequently reflect on this, because I am a rather casual dresser myself, and had I the motivation for this domestic pursuit, I wouldn’t mind being a better dresser. Like this young woman in the photo.

There is merit to the idea that many Americans could do better in this regard. In fact, the situation spawned a TV show – Queer Eye for the Straight Guy – where 5 gay men do makeovers of men in dire need of improvement by redoing their wardrobes, redecorating, and advising on grooming, lifestyle, and food.

There are many manifestations of the badly dressed American. When I used to travel to the Caribbean, guides warned visitors not to go to town in shorts – it was considered inappropriate. And in Europe, it is easy to spot many Americans based on wardrobe alone – very frequently with garish running sneakers and other heinous articles of clothing. We are a nation where sneakers, jeans, and oversized T-shirts rule the day.

As I have written of before, the size and style of NYC is one that really tolerates and embraces the eccentric – see the related postings below for some of the more outrageous. It also is a great place for one to dress in a stylish way that is perhaps a little unusual, like the quasi-retro look of the woman in today’s photo.
Obviously there is plenty of style and good dressers in the USA. It’s just that the bad ones really are a blight to the landscape and tar the image of people here in general.

One of my favorite quotes was from a real estate broker I was dealing with at one time. We were discussing this exact subject, and he said, “One day I hope to wake up and find that all the people with taste have money and all the people with money have taste.”

Related Postings: Out There, Fashion Forward, Spike, Narcissism Gone Wild, Color Brigade

I was really stunned at the colors on this man’s patchwork clothing. I spoke with him and learned that he was from Senegal – there are many Senegalese street vendors in the city.
There is a group of Mouride warriors known as the Baye Fall who roam the hot and dusty interior of Senegal “singing, proselytizing, and begging.” They dress in patchwork clothing and wear dreads. I don’t know if this man had some connection to this group or whether the dress is derivative in some way. A little investigation, I’m sure, would answer that question…

New York city is large enough and diverse enough to allow all manner of the unusual. Ethnic groups with traditional dress or body art can be comfortable here – their appearance will not draw much attention in a city of sensory overload, a continuous impact of colors, sights, and sounds. If you have read this blog, you know I frequently have stated that many things get overlooked, like the dessert truck in my neighborhood (see here), and then there are the eccentrics, the extreme, the fringe, and the flamboyant. This is one of the few places where they could survive and be happy. I have done a number of postings on a spectrum of colorful characters, many of whom are personal favorites of mine and readers of this site. See the links below for more of the flamboyant…

Related Postings: Spike, Fashion Forward, Out There, Narcissism Gone Wild

Some march to the beat of a different drummer. Some don’t like marching or don’t have anything worth marching for – they prefer sitting. Perhaps they can’t afford a drum or don’t like drumming. So they sit on a park bench with white plastic glasses with slits and smile.

This was the posting’s start BEFORE I tried to find some small morsel of info about these glasses to round out this tale. I did know that sunglasses like these were used by the Eskimo and Arctic explorers (where glass was either unavailable or impractical). Living in the Arctic, the Inuit soon discovered that they could develop snow blindness (Niphablepsia), a type of keratitis, and over longer periods, cataracts. And these glasses did have a period of popularity in the 1960s.

Surprise. Apparently these glasses were all the rage in 2007, popularized by rap star Kanye West in his Stronger music video. Kanye markets them as Stronger Shades. Generically they are known as shutter shades – you can find sites online, such as shuttershades.blogspot.com, shuttershadesonline.com, shutter-shades.us, strongerhsades.com, etc.

So my whole story – how this person was striking out in his own small, humble way (hence the phrase a different bummer) by donning a forgotten, cheap piece of kitsch from the 1960s (perhaps because this is all he could find) – was turned upside down. The real story is quite the contrary, as he sports the latest, (nearly) hottest trend, inspired by a major rap artist. Then again, perhaps the virulent adaptation by so many of whatever is currently fashionable is, in its own way, a different bummer…