Girls like her are all over the Mission. You see them flying down Valencia Street on Vespas, their wildly improvised get-ups composed of, say, rags scavenged from the Bay Area's fabled thrift shops... You see them particularly on a stretch of 18th Street, where Dolores Park vies for landmark status with Tartine, the upscale pizza joint Delfina and Bi-Rite grocery, a kind of foodie Vatican.
... it is true that on a Friday night at Nopa the communal table can sometimes seem populated by men dressed to mow your lawn.
Yet look closer and beneath the loose-fitting, layered garments can be detected an easy athleticism that helped make California sportswear the most influential American contribution to global fashion, bar none. "It's much more about being fit than fashionable, per se," said Mr. Deegan, whose vintage Qiana shirt was stretched taut over a torso kept fit by bare-hand climbing.
"It's that people here don't want to show what they have in their closets," said Mr. Lopez, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, who opened Sui Generis three years ago with a partner to offer a style alternative to a population whose last important contribution to fashion amounted to the sanded crotch jeans and white T-shirt uniform of so-called gay clones.Lopez also offers this slightly enigmatic observation of San Franciscans: "They have the clothes, but they wear them in private."
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