April 2014 Archives

The judge did a double-take and there were giggles aplenty in bond court Wednesday when a bailiff announced the name of a man arrested for drug possession: Edward Cocaine.

"What?" uttered a stunned County Judge John "Jay" Hurley.

"My last name is Cocaine," proudly stated the man at the podium. His name was indeed legal and inscribed on his driver's license.

"You know, I'd thought I'd seen it all," Hurley laughed, shaking his head. "How many times have the police told you to step out of the car during your life?"

"Just about every time I get pulled over," a chuckling Cocaine admitted.

The designs themselves have a somewhat unaccountable leaning toward the medieval, or as John Ptak astutely notes, "a weird alien/Buck Rogers/Dr. Seuss/Wizard of Oz quality" to them. If indeed this was a genuine attempt by the author Gall to imagine what the future of fashion might look like, it's fascinating to see how far off the mark he was, proving yet again how difficult it is to predict future aesthetics. It is also fascinating to see how Gall envisaged the progression of fashions across the decades - considering that, from our perspective now, his vision of 1970 doesn't much look much different to 1920 - and to see which aspects of his present he wasn't even able to consider losing to the march of time (e.g. the long length of women's skirts and the seemingly ubiquitous frill).