The street report: What people are wearing this week at the Union Square farmer’s market
There’s a beautiful and ancient tradition about open-air market shopping that is social and alive and inspiring -- the clothes are only half of it
See the last street report here.
There’s a tender quiet about the farmer’s market if you can get there early enough on a summer morning. When it’s really hot, you can smell the basil from two blocks away. The soft aroma almost creates the illusion of a breeze.
You hear the small murmur of transactions in progress, and produce bags crunching and bunching while shoppers pick at the bounty of stone fruit, each peach more juicy than the one next to it.
But to get the best sense of how the style code of the farmer’s market works — to understand what makes an outfit for the market unique to it, it’s best to pay three separate visits on: a Monday, a Wednesday, and a Friday.
The market’s open on Saturday too, but the dressing cues are less direct. The vibe on Saturday is probably most similar to what you’ll find mazing through the more sparse tents set up on a Monday morning.
These are basically morning coffee run looks, or pre/post-work out dependent. At worst, the market was an afterthought, so in the clothes, you get nothing intentional. But at best, the looks you see on a Monday morning are like the pre-game for what comes later in the week, which amounts to the in-between consensus of “not dressed, not not dressed.”
Wednesday at the market
Ya, if you can handle having your head explode from all the stimulation, you’d best visit on a Wednesday.
This is when the market is biggest, when the most vendors come from their farms and sell the best of what they’ve got to what is probably their most sought-after clientele: the chefs of New York.
Sometimes when I’m zig-zagging through the tents observing as: the corn is evaluated and the beets are picked at and crowds pack around the lemon cucumbers and tiny Japanese watermelon or purple peppers and the ombre tomatoes get oohed and aahed while the unanimously firm nectarines are shoveled into arms en masse and price checks are shouted across the tents, I feel a bit like I’m at the center of a middle eastern shopping excursion.
The comfort of walking through a market
There is little resemblance between what is sold at this market and what you’d find at a shuk or bazaar in the middle of Istanbul or Tel Aviv or Marrakech (dried fruit, nuts) but there’s a subtle bustle about open-air food shopping that makes the experience, no matter how it plays out, a little more delectable.
It’s comforting to walk through the tents at the farmer’s market and interact with the vendors and food, even if it’s not particularly convenient given the distance: 74 blocks from home where there’s a Whole Foods 3 blocks away, or a Morton Williams down the street (not my fav, but they do carry frozen artichoke bottoms).
But I like the long distance walk (the time alone, I’ve said, is like a psychic clean up, and the observations that come to me on the way over can be like a sort of runway pre-game). Given the recent foot injury though, most likely incurred because of these walks, which I tend to take in really stupid shoes, it’s been mostly on and off the subway to get to and from the market for this report.
There’s less mental clean up when you’re en route like this because there’s less blood flow. And I’m more inclined to let my nose get lost in my phone screen, which rarely happens when I’m on foot. It makes locking into the insidious but magical and often spiritual energies that percolate underground in New York a little more challenging.
But then again, that time on the subway does create its own sort of pre-show.
The subway runway rundown
My route is the 6-train: 86th to 14th. I could take the 4, but I’d rather stop more often to get a detailed view of how the quality of person getting on and off starts to change as the train gets further downtown.
If it’s mostly “professionals” (silk shell tanks, lightweight wool pencil skirts that hit just above the knee and commuter sneakers) that get on at 86th, where what seem like service employees (nurses, contractors, housekeepers, busboys etc) are already on board, gearing up to get off at the stops along the UES, the mass exodus and turnover that demarcates up and down takes place between 59th and 42nd.
Then there’s a lull, a sort of quiet on board until 23rd street when the traveler gets younger, the clothes get a bit trendier and the facial hair seems more intentional.
By 14th street, it’s like you’re on a different train and once out of the station and ready to walk the block and a half through Union Square Park into the market, you may as well be in a different world.
This runway — the Wednesday farmer’s market — is shared between two phenomena: the food and the fashion.
Can I focus on the red striped shirt grazing up against the plastic cobalt basket when the bounty of melon genera promise crunch, sweetness, or a tart fleshy bite? Vice versa, must I buy the circular carrot if it means missing the perfect in-between look?
In-between dressing (not so dissimilar to aspirational boredom) was practically invented at the farmer’s market. The clothes you’re most likely to see, especially if you’re to take a morning visit, come directly from this category of dress.
These are clothes that we put on to go out short form, before returning home. In this way, they are never immortalized, can never become anything beyond the transient looks we wear without thinking too hard about who we are or what we want to say — when the process of expression is lower stakes, more effortless. When because of this, the look’s point of view actually gets sharper.
The in-between recipe contains two loose ingredients:
soft layers of seamless wear — could be a tank top, slightly wrinkled t-shirt or button down shirt or both, elastic pants, “nightgown.” Anything that could be slept in is fair game here.
an indicator you’re actually outside (usually an accessory — figure shoes like a loafer, sunglasses, a cap, your handbag)
Of course, not everyone at the market is here to go right back home. Another genre of dress belongs to those who walk through the market on a work call, or lunch break, or just to inhale the smell of fresh shiso leaves. It beats the hell — literal hell — out of the rest of the scents that tend to emerge from a steaming New York City.
The fixed uniform
And for the intentional market goers who are here but not-between: there is a fixed, if not flexible uniform template about the codes you’ll see embedded in the outfits that populate the stretch from 15th to 18th streets: they’re casual, but crafted. Not necessarily for the sake of coming to the market because there is life that gets lived between these visits, but unlike those who walk through the market as a pure directional decision, the visitors from this category take into consideration, when getting dressed, that today will be a market day.
Was there a memo I missed about practical shoes?
One thing I have been very aware of: the shoes are always comfortable. Has everyone agreed to an unspoken commitment to foot care that completely evades the principles of delicate and gorgeous but horribly impractical shoes? At the farmers market, this seems like a timeless memo that I and my tendons have missed (if I’m being a victim), straight-up ignored if I step into my agency.
But back to the construction of the looks. We know the most satisfying looks consider practical limitations and the emotional whims a dresser wants to touch into but the other piece of it on display here is wrapped in the matter of signaling. The regulars do it just the way you or I would to convey something of value about themselves in their: rubber shoes/clogs (Garden Heir, Birkenstocks) or sneakers (Gazelles, sometimes Salomon) or Teva-style sandals. With their totes and the way their spoils hang from those totes.
I guess no matter who we are and what we do and what we like or dislike, we all use our appearances to convey something we wish to make clear about ourselves. This is just what clothes do on a social level. They connect us, you know? It’s how we establish common interest with strangers — “Given what you’re wearing, you must be into x. As you can see, I am too.”
The totes and a stunning enmeshment of function and fantasy
But back to the spoils hanging from totes for a second.
Do you remember the Undercover show that presented in Paris last March? The show was met by overwhelming editorial praise.
I had a thought while browsing the photos I took over the course of the recent Monday, Wednesday and Friday spent at the market that part of the reason why Undercover touched into something so deep is because when you work in fashion and are reminded that getting dressed is an essential moment in any person’s day, it can reconnect you to a sense of vocational purpose or meaning.
When you can meld the fantasy that makes fashion so intoxicating with the genuine practicality and function-factor of what one needs to be armed with to get through a day, the outcome is reinforcing.
The trend consensus
Overall the tableau of trends featured an overwhelming number of practical shoes, which have gotten enough air time —
— utilitarian bottoms such as lightweight cotton khaki pants/shorts, or those in elastic waist linen. Tons of denim shorts and tent-style dresses too, and men on Citibikes.
There were various instances of clever graphic t-shirts, but only one can be the winner:
The less overwhelming trends included flamingo pink accents, bright party shoes
and unintentionally coordinated pairs-of-two walking through the market. I myself was in one such pair last Fri, with this perfect specimen, the closest thing I have to a sister —
—who reminded me of the matter of livestock. The other nice thing about an open-air market is that you can’t ban dogs from attending them, so there is a healthy cadence of four-legged companions who stroll through with their owners, bringing texture and playfulness, a bit of homegrown intimacy to what will no doubt become the next best intimate experience: feeding yourself or others.
It’s easy to forget that the reason we attend the market at all is because we yearn for good food. To feed ourselves, to feed those we love, to embark on creative expeditions of hospitality.
No doubt my favorite thing about going to the farmer’s market is the shift in pace that it connotes — a yearning to eat with the rhythm of the earth. A plea to better know who and where our food is from. To connect to the food and from whom you are buying it and ultimately, too, who you’ll share it with.
There’s a beautiful and ancient tradition, I think, about shopping, then cooking in this way that is social, alive and inspiring. Clothes, really, are only the half of it.
Really this was a wonderful mini vaca- thank you
Your post is such a treat, so inspiring and just what I needed on a rainy day in the south of Iceland. Thank you.