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Opening night of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival found the dedicated staff of edhat.com at the Granada Theater. Some staffers knew the right people and were able to secure seats inside the theater, but most were left outside to fight the harsh elements and the unruly crowd. The night was cool and clear. A brisk wind added to the cinematic drama of the scene. On several occasions, our keen, observing eyes were stung with blowing particulates. Our plan was to systematically catalog the outfits of each individual in line. We had developed a thorough classification system that would have made Dewey proud. Well, we all know what they say about the best-laid plans. There was really no line, per se, more a cluster, or maybe a horde. Normal people walking by on the streets must have thought it was one of those “flash mobs” they’d read about in Doonesbury. “What’s going on?” they asked us. “It is opening night of the Film Festival, of course!” Bustling throughout the crowd was a crew of energetic young adults in red T-shirts. They were evidently making a film of their own. There were film festival officials pacing the sidewalk, talking into mouthpieces hanging from their ears. A limousine pulled up in the specially designed turnout in front of the theater. No one really famous got in or out of the limo, but it stayed there for some time. Eventually, it slipped away unnoticed.
Film Festival Fashion Show The most commonly adhered to dress code appeared to be evening theater casual, also referred to as dressy casual, casual dressy, or I’m-going-to-the-opening-night-ceremony-at-the-SB-International-Film-Festival-and-I-think-I-really-need-to-dress-up-but-don’t-want-to-be-either-over-or-under-dressed-cause-nobody-really-dresses-up-in-Santa-Barbara-but-sometimes-they-do.
Men’s shoes were mostly black. We also saw lots of men and women in tailored dress pants and black wool or leather blazers. It was standard stuff - mostly black standard stuff. So what about the non-standard stuff? In that category we saw: fur-trimmed capes; sequined dresses, skirts and halter tops; chiffon tunics, dresses and skirts; velvet, black; lot’s of black leather jackets and coats; one suede duster (see old cowboy movies) – awesome! We saw a couple of gentlemen who haven’t been told that spiked hair is very nineties. We saw a nice looking woman in platform sandals with beige nylons (!) and a rabbit fur purse. One unfortunate guy was wearing a very expensive looking TAN suit. At night. Hellooo! After seeing all there was to see, the dedicated staff left our post to saunter down the street to the Arlington. We went to pick up a copy of the official film festival program that contains a very cool ad for our web site. While we were away, capacity was reached at the Granada. Dozens of ticket holders had to be turned away; eyewitnesses on the scene say it wasn’t pretty. If you recall, an owner of a local clothing store named Hillary, not a big fan of the edhat.com concept (“ ... counting palm trees, I mean, really, who cares?”), thought our fashion issue would be a total waste of time. “Everyone will be wearing jeans, of course,” she said smugly. In order to test Hillary’s hypothesis, we needed a representative sample, something which opening night was not. So, we decided to collect our jeans ratios the next day. On Saturday we walked past lines staring at people’s pants and clicking them off (and ticking them off in some cases) on our tally counters. We collected samples both day and night at the Vic Theater, Metro 4, and the Arlington (Peter Jackson). Overall we found 21% of women and 42% of men clad in jeans … a far cry from “everyone” we might add. New subscriber k2dezign had a leg up on the rest of our subscribers. K2’s guess of 18%/42% was almost perfect. BTW, the average subscriber guess was 44%/61% - maybe too influenced by our announcement of Hillary’s prediction. K2 wins a Santa Barbara gift pack that includes a genuine first-edition edhat.com hat, a jar of Marshmallow Cocoa Body Butter (for your skin) from Jaqua, 2 coupons for Cold Stone ice cream, and $10 worth of See’s Candy. K2 is also in the running for our week’s end grand prize drawing which includes lunch for 2 at Café Buenos Aires (did we mention that the opening night film was Argentinean?) Want to get instant fame and cool prizes? ... enter today’s contest We want to hear from you ... tell us what you think of this tidbit |
February 2, 2004 - Film Festival Fashion 
What does that mean? Let’s start with the shoes - we saw a lot of shoes. Most of the women’s shoes fell into three categories: chunky black leather knee-high boots (worn with short skirts and tights); very high, very pointy sling-backs (worn with slacks or dressy pants), and; very high, very strappy sandals (worn with almost everything). The only place you could find more shoes is the movie  |
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