“He Wasn’t Lying” — Stranger Stops Woman to Critique Her Outfit, the Internet Says He’s Right
"We thought it, he said it," wrote one commenter.
Jun. 28 2024, Published 1:34 p.m. ET
Imagine if you were just walking down the street and minding your own business, when all of a sudden, a strange man you've never met in your life stops you to tell you something.
He's not there to cat-call you. He's not there to ask you for money or sell you a Hello Fresh subscription, but to comment on your outfit. Again, it's not for him to tell you that he likes the way it looks on your body; in fact, he stops you for exactly the opposite reason.
And that's to tell you that he cannot, in good conscience, allow you to walk around New York City wearing a casual white dress and shoes that are just too dressy for it. The clash of article "genres," if you will, is just something he couldn't abide by and he wanted to make sure that you knew this.
This is what a TikToker named Steph (@step_by__steph) said happened to her as she was walking the streets of NYC, and as rude as this entire interaction may seem, there were a lot of folks in the comments section of her clip who seem to agree with the advice the man gave her.
"That dude — I'm not even kidding, this just happened to me right now — this dude just stopped me in the middle of the street and he was like, 'Listen, I just need to tell you this but your shoes do not match your outfit,'" she says into the camera as she walks down a New York city street while recording herself.
Initially, she thought that the man's attempt at talking to her was actually just making a wisecrack: "And I thought he was just joking, I was like, 'Haha, what?' Then he's like, 'No, no, no, I'm serious, shoes are too dressy and your dress is too casual,'" she said.
"I stared at him for like five seconds just in total silence and then I was like, 'Why are you talking to me?' He was like, 'I don't know, I just like to give advice sometimes,' and we just stared each other in the eye for like 10 full seconds," she said, before adding how "disturbed" she was.
So what was the culmination of their meeting? According to Steph, the man ended up just "walk[ing] away," she says in another portion of the clip where she can be seen recording herself from a distance, showing off the outfit that was apparently so offensive to the man that he needed to approach a complete stranger about it.
"I thought it was cute?" she writes in a text overlay during a clip of her looking down at her shoes as she holds her iced coffee in her hands. "What did I do to him?" she asks before the video ultimately ends.
She pens in caption to the video: "What just happened?? Strange NYC encounters ... I think it was the staring contest."
In the comments section of the video, however, there were several people who said that as much as it might pain Steph to hear, the man was actually right.
One person kicked off the dog-pile fashion emergency session by referencing a fashion icon: "Girlie ... that is THE Jimmy Choo … and he was right ..." they joked.
Another user on the application teased that while it might not have been Jimmy Choo, the advice the stranger gave her was actually correct.
"I think that's not Jimmy Choo but he's definitely right," they wrote.
And then there was this person who joked that the identity of the man was someone related to Choo: "That's literally Jimmy Choo's brother Jamie Shoe. So listen to his advice."
Others simply said: "He's got a point."
While someone else replied: "The real problem is that he’s not wrong."
"We thought it, he said it," another TikToker penned.
And another user on the app said it wasn't until the end of Steph's video that they understood where the stranger was actually coming from.
What do you think? Did she commit a garment combination atrocity worthy of garnering attention from the fashion police? Or was she unjustly maligned by the stranger and you didn't think there was anything wrong with what she was rocking?