Day-Glo in a sea of black pea coats

Dear Hipster:

Please explain why Californians fear bright colors in their clothing. In San Diego; on the trolley; in the long lines crossing the border; everywhere you go, 98 percent of people are wearing drab colors like navy, brown, gray, and black! What’s up?

— Vivian

If you’re right, we Californians are still doing 2 percent better than East Coast folk, who pretty much wear all black all the time, or at least it seems that way. Ever been to Boston or NY in the winter? Youch. Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more black pea coats — more black pea coats!

Reminds me of a funny story some friends from Hawaii once told me. Two mainlanders from the right coast, let’s call them Bob and Steve, went to visit Maui. The aforementioned friends took Bob and Steve to a kind of weekly Burning Man luau fusion drum circle of sorts. Bob and Steve, intoxicated by the island vibes, promptly got lost in the crowd. My friends spotted Bob pretty quickly, a black T-shirt in a sea of floral prints and general shirtlessness. In fact, there was only one other guy wearing dark clothes on the beach ... aaaaaaand, as you might guess, it was Steve. I’m not so sure there’s a moral there, but it’s a fun story.

I can’t speak for the business elite, but we hipsters aren’t afraid of threads that pop, so to speak. The early 2000s may have been an Ugg-boot beige era, but a couple years back, in the roaring early 2010s, lime-green trucker cap with purple shorts and a nyancat-print tanktop would be de rigueur hipsterwear for a night out on the town. I think the recent trendiness of bright colors arises from a retro fondness for the DayGlo early-’90s, because only hipsters could find a good cause for dressing like white, bizarro-world versions of the Fresh Prince.