Letter from the Editor

MyLatest Fashion

Letter from the Editor Kick

The East Bay has always perched on the bleeding edge of what’s next. From its foodie culture and innovative arts to its music and selfmade fashionistas, the East Bay sets trends that reverberate throughout the Bay Area and beyond. They just don’t reach me. I don’t have a fashion sense so much as a costume that I wear to buttress my persona as some kind of beatnik art hack. “Dress for the job you want,” they say—well, I got it.

My costume is as dependable, replicable and machine washable as Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck. According to some wag on Wikipedia: “Howell wears a sartorial ‘uniform’ of a dark blazer, jeans and Beatle boots, which he referred to as his ‘action figure outfit’ ...” whose creations and astute curations define the East Bay style. No time is this more evident than during the holidays, when local storefronts glow with good cheer and fantastic finds. So, I heartily encourage us all to curl up with this toasty, holiday-seasoned, fashionthemed magazine and read about the local makers and purveyors who make the East Bay a gift that keeps giving. Barring that, there’s always my used boot shop on Ebay.

All true, except they’re wrong about the Beatles boots. I’ve upgraded—or downgraded, as the case may be—from English to Western wear, with cowboy boots. I don’t ride horses, and my knowledge of the West is informed solely by Spaghetti Westerns, but thanks to my deceased father-in-law’s interest in Ebay, arbitrage and Western wear, I inherited about a hundred pairs of boots. Many are my size. Many more constitute crimes of fashion. I’ve accepted that I’ll be wearing these boots for the remainder of my life.

But we're not here to read about what’s in my closet, we’re understandably more concerned about our own cultures of couture. Do our new spats match our tats? I get it, and so do the merchants and indy makers

BOOTED Too many damn cowboy boots.

Daedalus Howell, Editor

Jeffrey Edalatpour’s writing about arts, food and culture has appeared in KQED Arts, Metro Silicon Valley, Interview Magazine, Berkeleyside.com, The Rumpus and SF Weekly. Lou Fancher has been published by WIRED.com, Diablo Magazine, the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, InDance, San Francisco Classical Voice, SF Weekly and elsewhere. Jane Vick is an artist and writer based in New York, New Mexico and California. Her main fields of research include neuropsychology, psychology and the nature of the divine. Michael Giotis contributes to the Marin Pacific Sun, the North Bay Bohemian and the East Bay Express. His most recent book of poetry, Daybreak, explores existential quandaries and the vagaries of love in the postmodern era.