"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Coolhunting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Always alert for a new combination, a new look. But it wasn't as easy
as all that. The look was a sense, a third eye, a way of seeing that most
people didn't have.
She wasn't looking so much for the new trend as she was for the person
who would set that trend.
Back when coolhunting started in hype-filled '90s, the coolhunter's
goal was to find the cool kid, the one who would be the innovator, the one all
the other kids wanted to copy. But what the early coolhunters never realized
was that cool itself was a transient state: a cool kid one week would be passe
the next.
Cool was easy to spot.
Pre-cool was hard.
And she had the hardest job of all. She was in New York, not Phoenix or
Dallas or Santa Fe, those hotbeds of the newest trends. Here she had to work
harder because everyone knew that fashion moved north and east. It started in
the southwest and traveled, slowly through the south, up the middle, then over
to the eastern seaboard.
Coolhunting in New York was like deep-sea diving in Arctic: Not
recommended.
Which made it all the more challenging.
Which meant it was for her.
She settled onto the iron bench. It was still a bit cold to be sitting
still, but she had two dogs to settle and that encounter to put in place.
Strangers rarely spoke to her. She put up an invisible barrier: if she was
noticed it was in passing. If she wasn't, even better.
Casual people didn't speak to her on the street.
This guy knew her.
And if he knew her, he'd be here, sometime soon.
In the meantime, she'd hunt.
****
The nice thing about New York in the spring was that everyone came to her.
After the winter cooped up in high heat flats, ThermalTemp All-Weather
Gear(tm), and Footsnugger Boots(tm), the city's residents wanted to strut
their stuff. Cool happened fast here in the spring: trends among the setters
ran hourly. The early adapters spent only days in the new styles before moving
onto something else. Even the herd, the followers, only spent a few weeks in
the style before changing, and the laggers never caught the spring rush.
Last spring, she'd cleared 30 million credits in one month.
This spring, she hoped to do better.
She leaned back on the bench, feeling its chill permeate her '01
vintage sweater. Her stomach churned restlessly, disturbed by too much food
and that stranger's face.
Teenagers walked in front of her, laughing, the girls with their hair
short and spiky, the boys with theirs down to their knees. Two-year-old
fashions: these were laggers who really didn't care about their position. They
were not the architects of cool that she wanted.
Sometimes, though, sometimes she envied them their easy walk, their
uncaring laughter. Her life had become so focused on trends and styles, on the
way that clothing -- appearance -- reflected thought that she wondered if she
ever made decisions all on her own any more. She wouldn't think of wearing