“I’m tall, so I like wearing low-waisted pants because I feel like they fit my figure,” Ishika Gobin said. She had found the chocolate-colored pinstripe trousers in question on London’s famous Brick Lane, in a shop that she had heard counted Bella Hadid among its customers. At $200, they were a little pricey for Gobin, who was studying abroad at the time. But they were worth the investment, she said, because “I always get compliments whenever I wear them.”
On the Wednesday in May when I spotted her, Gobin, 22, was chatting with a group of colleagues on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. She also wore a flouncy pine green top adorned with a black satin ribbon, the first detail of her outfit that caught my attention. The top had originally belonged to her mother, a fact about which Gobin was mildly self-conscious. “I fear all of my outfits that people compliment me about when I go to work are from my mom’s closet, so that just tells you: In the 2000s, the outfits were eating.”
Though she now calls Washington, D.C., home, Gobin said she was in New York for a summer internship at Adobe. She added that she was more than anything looking forward to the start of the FIFA World Cup, during which she would be rooting for France.
“I’m originally from Mauritius,” she said. “We speak French over there.”
