~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Fashion is the same as it’s ever been.
The same? You ask? Hardly, you answer.
You wouldn’t be caught dead in today’s fashions. They are nothing like what you wore in 1948-’62-’85-’99. They are in fact ugly.
True in the particular. But, not in the broad sense. Fashion is what somebody’s telling us to wear, whatever the year. To buck that trend is a challenge.
When I was at Jefferson High, I wore what was worn by my friends and one particular girl two years older than I.
I couldn’t copy the teen models in Seventeen Magazine because the stores in Jefferson didn’t exactly carry the haute couture of New York City high schoolers. But this gal’s idea of style was as good as any east coast fashion mag, besides being within my means. It was her shoes (white tennies, polished) and her socks (boy’s gym socks of off-white wool) that led me by the nose when I was a sophomore. I don’t know where she came up with the ideas – possibly visiting relatives far away from Jefferson – but her choices to me were the height of something – sophistication? I thought so.
Prior to her unusual shoe fashion, we wore were rock ‘n rollers, a black and white saddle shoe style but with soft leather, soft sole and softer cut – a dance shoe.
By the time I was a senior, the shoe du jour was ever more darling, and we wore the required style fair weather or foul. I would go out the front door of my house with my boots on and a “’Bye, Mom,” leave my boots on the porch and walk the snowy path through Russell Park in my chic little black flats. That I didn’t lose a toe or two to frostbite defies science.
By the time I got to college, it was still little flats but they had to be Capezzio brand. They cost a fortune. I was a slave to fashion, as was everyone I knew.
Part of this slavish behavior was the result of buying what was in the stores; the stores being leaders in changing fashion so we would spend money there on the latest look. Not until I was a young working mother did I start to resent this, my budget for new clothes by then being spent in the children’s department.
Until the 1980s, I was unaware of secondhand stores. If they were indeed lurking down some dark alley, I would not have gone in. Wearing my sister’s hand-me-downs was further along the non-fashion road than I had ever wanted to travel as it was.
The new fashion style, or at least the one I discovered in 1983 was, finally, right up my alley. I think it’s called “anything goes.”
This purely postmodernistic viewpoint (postmodernism defined as “if you think it’s art, it’s art” serves the fashion side of this postmodern era we live in) means that I can wear last year’s fashion or my mother’s era fashion and feel as if I know and care what fashion is.
It is mine! My style, my comfort, my not supporting an industry that charges $65 for a white cotton blouse that a woman in Bangladesh earns 10 cents an hour to sew. It is what I decide, not what some skinny guy in New York or Paris or Ferenzi comes up with each spring.
Now I buy retail if I like the latest fashion, not because it is the latest fashion. But mostly I use secondhand stores, consignment stores and – believe it or not – hand-me-downs from friends who are tired of the sweater, too big for the jeans or prefer to give me their deceased mom’s earrings rather than relegate them to a box in the attic.
That autumn of 1983 in Carmel, California was the eye opener for me. The secondhand stores of the Cancer Society, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the League of Women Voters on the main drag enticed. And for their fundraising brilliance I bought several blouses, two pairs of slacks, three pairs of shorts and a jacket. Total cost? $50.
I broke loose from my entire fashion religion in one short morning by becoming a shopper of outdated fashion.
I met a woman at a party around that time who told me she gave up secondhand clothing stores as soon as she got a real job after college. I felt bad for a minute. Then I remembered finding that Hermes scarf for $5.
End of story.
