One time, in first grade, I wore this rockin’ purple teddy bear shirt and sweatpants combo to school. I was a 6-year-old mid-90s fashionista, and proud of it. Unfortunately, the same day, a classmate of mine wore the same thing to school. How embarrassing! My stroke of bad luck continued — I faceplanted in some mud and had to go to the principle’s office to change into whatever non-muddy clothes they had in the appropriate size for a first grader.
I still shudder when I think back to that day.
Considering that most of us buy our clothes instead of making them, there are obviously a lot of us walking around in that exact same pair of Abercrombie jeans or that thermal top with the foxes on it from Target. (Seriously. Obsessed!) But usually you don’t run into someone wearing the exact same ensemble as you, or fall face-first into the mud, and life goes on.
But one photographer is working single-handedly to change that. (Well, not the mud thing.)
Hans Eijkelboom, a Dutch photographer who must have an uncanny ability to blend into his surroundings, has a habit of standing on street corners and photographing people wearing the same outfit. For hours and hours.
He has had this habit for about 20 years now.
Now, he has decided to reveal the results of his street-corner-lurking with a mind boggling, over 500 page mammoth of a book available for about $26 on Amazon.
His work is mesmerizing; on one hand, the images are so mundane that on their own you wouldn’t spare them a second glance. But organized as painstakingly as they are, they reveal a really telling fact about human nature: try as we might to be individuals, we really are pretty much all the same.
And after seeing some of these intriguing sets of photos, I think I’m okay with that.
