Wherein DF travels to Mitteleuropa and recounts his merrie adventures to his adoring broad readership.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

How fresh are these guys?

I realize, broad readership, that I promised not to trade on amusing stories about others as a cheap way to provide the low-grade entertainment that you may crave but shall never find here, but I'm going to make a teensy exception to note that occasionally in Germany I ran across some truly spectacular examples of a male style that is at once self-conscious but lost in another era or world of passable taste so that it defies adjectival explanation (though it has been called, on another website that I always thought was lame, fresh), but does not cease to fascinate. Examples include:

==Perms galore, especially of the big-and-curly kind. Football fans may recall Rudi Voller, the star for the German national team some decades ago, sporting the frizz-perm that is probably the archetype for this style. If you know not of whom I speak, consider a Little Orphan Annie head of hair, but blond, and on a German man. N.B.: I am assuming these are perms, but only because I've never seen so much hair curl so profoundly naturally. My own curly hair has turned into nothing more than a tangled mat when I tried to grow it long during one ill-fated phase in high school.
==Moustaches, moustaches, moustaches. We're not talking "Dude from the Caucasus mountains" moustache with the big volume and length, but more trim moustaches that just cover the upper lip. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but damn there are a lot of them around. Way more than in the U.S.
==Tight, short shorts. We're talking John Stockton here. In some instances, I saw a couple pairs of jeans cutoffs--on straight men, if their presence with what appeared to be their family is any indicator of their sexuality--that made me suspect the men in question were actually never-nudes (I've now exhausted my one allotted Arrested Development reference).

Being surrounded by so much freshness has had a freeing effect on me. Given the general sence of fashion tolerance in these parts, combined with a healthy esprit of "who am I trying to impress," I've been able to let my fashion guard down, typically rolling out the same rewashable travel T-shirt and Old Navy cargoes that you'd never catch me dead in in the U.S. Thank you, fresh Germans, for giving me the gift of not caring that I am an unwashed sleazebag.