“About seven or eight months ago, I got really serious about buying things that were pastel or rainbow,” Chelsea Fesik, 33, said as we walked along 14th street in Manhattan on an August evening, just as the sun had begun to set. A product manager at Microsoft, she and a friend were visiting New York City from Seattle. They were headed to Chelsea Market for dinner and had plans to go dancing at the club Le Bain afterward.
Her ensemble of hot pink leggings, cropped denim jacket and yellow crop top recalled the fashion from the 1980s cartoon “Jem and the Holograms” — a comparison she emphatically agreed with. “When I wear these items, I just feel more like myself,” she said, before describing how she loved wearing tutus as a young girl. But with maturity came the expectation to dress her age, she explained, which, in the Pacific Northwest, meant a lot of earth tones and dark colors.
Her decision to wear more vibrant attire was “to delight myself,” as she put it. But she noted that her clothes have also sparked joy in others. “The other day, I was wearing a cloud cardigan,” she said. “Someone just was like, ‘You made my day with your outfit.’ So I feel it’s weirdly like a service to other people, which I never thought of it that way before. I thought it was just for me, but it’s kind of for other people, too.”
Simbarashe Cha is a Times photographer and visual columnist documenting style and fashion around the world.
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