A Woman In A Cape Passed Me By

A woman in a cape passed me by today. Not a short, over the shoulder shawl, mind you. A cape. A full blown, if I hadn't have seen your $150 shoes I'd think you were crazy, cape. But that wasn't what bothered me. Nor was it the elaborate head wrap she had on. I hardly noticed the skin-tight leggings and I wasn't even that annoyed by the black and blue color palette she chose this morning, softly saying to herself, "Yes, this matches."

Instead, what made me angry, what made me fume all the way to the Tube station on a beautiful September day was the fact that she walked by me with a slight smirk. A smirk telling me and the rest of the world, "It's a beautiful September day. And I'm wearing a cape."

Maybe she had just bought it at Harrods. Maybe her mother sent it to her after spending weeks painfully hand stitching it, after weeks painfully hand spinning the thread. Maybe it was a going away present from a friend or boyfriend; her flight to a distant land where capes are the norm leaving in an hour. Maybe she just wanted to show it off.

Whatever the reason, she was wearing a cape and she knew it. It shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did, but I couldn't get this woman out of my mind. Part of it was the way the cape flowed. It captivated me. Due to her pompous stride, the shear black material billowed in the wind. It was just like the movies. A sinister villain steals away into the shadows with a flourish of his cape, stirring the dust on the cold, stone, castle floor. A magician presents an empty top hat on a small wooden table. With a flick of his cape the hat is now full of rabbits. Batman chases after the Joker through the dark streets of Gotham, cape parallel to the road, aloft and free.

Capes have a certain way about them. A certain quality of movement that no other accessory can quite match. Bracelets fall down arms. Earrings sway back and forth. Capes billow.

She didn't look bad in the cape. In fact, without it she would have looked weird. But it takes a special type of person to actively choose a cape as part of their ensemble. It fascinated me that of all her options she chose what she did.  

Where is she going?
If she's meeting someone, are they wearing a cape too? 
Did a corner of the cape get stuck in the Tube door? I bet she regretted the cape then.

It's not that I am anti-cape. I thoroughly believe a well-placed cape can be quite effective. I am all for self-expression, to whatever lengths one wants to go to, though black-rimmed glasses without frames are never, never okay and no, they don't make you look smarter. All I am asking for is a small level of humility. Yes, I am biased. For years I bought my clothes at Old Navy because three shirts for seven dollars was just too good to pass up. I never spent over $25 on a pair of jeans and would only buy new sneakers if I had ten "Loyalty Bucks" or some other promotion like that. And for years I went around embarrassed by my clothes.

Though I shop a little better now, and I use the term loosely, I am still in the mindset that clothes are just clothes. I can justify paying $18 for a small hand-crafted notebook, but $75 for hand-stitched jeans? You must be out of your mind. Friends show me a worn T-shirt that looks as if it survived Vietnam. "Oh no," they say, "it came like that. It's vintage." Vintage. Your great-grandmother's wedding dress from 1923 is vintage. You, on the other hand, paid $45 for enough material to make a small tea cozy.

I suppose I shouldn't be offended that this women didn't consult me when picking out her outfit for the day. It's possible I mistook the floor-length rectangle of fabric clasped around her neck as a cape when really, she saw it as a jacket. This is Europe after all. And I suppose her smirk may have been in reference to something else. Say, a text message she just received saying the costume party was still on.

And who knows?

She might have been thinking the exact same thing about me. "$60 jeans? I bet he thinks they're vintage."