Village

There are many fashion designers who have taken their inspiration from this neighborhood in New York, or better, from the multiracial population that circulates there day and night, innovating their collections, beginning from the street, from spontaneous fashion. Some, like Gianni Versace and Donna Karan, have admitted this publicly, others have not. But it is in any case here, between Washington Square and Bleeker Street, that the creativity of the American melting pot is at its best, The young people of the Village often have no money for clothes: and so they recycle old clothing and old fashions, they invent new combinations and solutions that then they will find, reworked and refined, the following season in the chic display windows of Fifth or Sixth Avenue. Merchants have long since sensed the possibilities of selling used clothing, and so they palm off at absurd prices vintage rags upon Japanese tourists or the scions of New York’s well-to-do families. The stretch of Broadway, which cuts through the Village, between Eighth Street and Twenty-Third Street, is packed with this sort of vintage clothing shops, and it is an odd coincidence because it was precisely on this stretch of Broadway, at the end of the nineteenth century, that Ladies’ Mile extended, the most fashionable shopping area. For that matter, the Village is also filled with little T-“shirt shops and large chain stores like the Gap or Banana Republic. In the West Village, around Christopher Street, gay fashion is concentrated — often only to be coopted by the heterosexuals as well — while in the East Village it is still possible to find bars and restaurants where the passage of major figures in American culture, such as Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, does not yet seem to be shrouded in the mists of the past. In the Village, in any case, it is still possible to breathe the air of freedom, outside of constricted rules, and in a costant state of evolution, despite the fact that long ago artists and intellectuals abandoned the Village in a quest for new areas in New York, such as TriBeCa or Harlem.