In case you don’t get the allusion to a very popular TV program about some big city on the East coast, you can stop reading right now. Trust me, you won’t enjoy this. But I hope that everyone else feels the same way as we two German exchange students do about the weekly fashion column by the great Teri a.k.a. “Carrie” Rosenbaum. Like watching the blond curly New York star editor on week nights, Teri’s weekly column became a ritual needing to be celebrated with an extra-large Café Latte and the proper devotion to secretive grinning and chuckling in the library on Mondays. It does not matter if it is sex, fashion, or hotdogs: her biting crispy writing always hits the mark. \nWe remember coming to IU and getting hooked on her columns in the last semester, being as annoyed as she is by the uniform image of American Urbancrombie-Style: we were not alone out there. Burned in our fashion-sensitive brains stays a great piece on the variety of Northface fleece coats that caused smile on the way to class from October to March.\nJust look at the last few weeks! Teri wrote with the same passion in defense of Gwen Stefani’s skimpy Lolita skirts as on the selling out of designers to the big red dot. Her talent to mix personal stories from intimate shower details to her favorite fashion items with hard-line facts is a pleasure for our foreign language feel. But Teri is more than just rhetoric and trash-talking fashion faux pas. It was really frustrating to see how students in the self-claimed birth cradle of individuality look exactly alike and that style seems to be translated as being bought at some store in the College Mall, where way-too-tanned girls lecture you on buy-one-get-one-free. Teri tells us every week that it is okay to be different, unique and to try out new things. And so to end in her own words: “more power to you, sister” – keep up the American spirit, you got the German support!
Anja Zinke and Sue Stubbe\nGraduate students
