Williamsburg

East Austin is a Proust’s madeleine of a neighborhood: picture a zombified resurrection of Brooklyn’s 2000s Peak Hipster moment with a veneer of Instagrammable gloss on top. If an aging millennial cast a spell that encased just under ten square miles of Texas in a bubble made up of his happiest memories, this would be the result. Williamsburg, NYC circa 2008 was, as the zoomers now say, a whole vibe. Except that the zoomers did not say this, not then, because they were still in diapers. This was a millennial moment: we were still in our twenties then, clad in American Apparel-brand basics made of cotton so thin it was practically transparent, not yet cursed with middle-aged pudge. The millennial infestation was thickest on the ground in gentrifying Brooklyn.

'I don’t get Brooklyn fashion,’ an out-of-towner said the other day. We were brunching at a French restaurant on Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, and eyeing a couple by the door — she dressed in faded black pipe-leg men’s jeans crudely cut off at the ankles above a pair of two-inch granny heels, he in a stained and tattered, burnt-orange Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt draped like a cobweb on his skeletal frame. ‘It’s all about looking as shitty as possible,’ I told the tourist. ‘They like to blur the lines between the guy who just crapped his pants shooting up on the corner and having $200,000 in art school debt.’ In my youth I too was a thrift-store aficionado. I loved the hunt, digging around for the amusing, exquisite, old and odd.