Back to the Future

Have you heard that the 80’s are back? I guess I should be excited about this as this is the decade of my youth, but not so much. Mostly because I and others of my generation have spent the last 15 years trying to atone for sins committed all in the name of fashion. We have been mocked for our big hair, leggings, narrow jeans, flat shoes and slouchy boots. We have endured snotty teenagers saying “Oh, she’s so stuck in the 80’s” like the 80’s were some sort of hell dimension visited here on earth when everyone knows the 70’s were so much worse.

And now it’s all back. The leggings, the flat shoes and the narrow jeans, only now they call them “skinny jeans”. I think this clever name change is only a way to disguise the fact that these are in fact, tapered jeans, the very jeans the fashion industry has been trying to get us out of for the last decade. If they call them skinny jeans then only 14 year olds and people who don’t eat will wear them because the secret to these jeans is that your ass not be larger than your calves. And the slouchy boots. Look! These red boots are currently for sale at Nordstom. I owned the replica of these in 1986. I wore them with my over-bleached narrow jeans tucked into my thick socks that matched my sweater. It’s all a cruel joke, I tell you. The one upside is that big hair did try to make a comeback last year but that fell flat. Heh.

It’s hard to look at all these young girls (many of the same ones who have been ridiculing the whole existence of the 80’s in the first place) and think this is a hip, happening kind of look. I understand now why my mother wasn’t in love with the leggings and long sweaters I brought home in high school. I thought I looked so cool. She told me she had a pair of green striped leggings that looked like watermelon and a matching angora sweater. I missed the point by telling her she should have saved them for me to which she responded by rolling her eyes (how often does that happen? Aren’t kids supposed to be the eye rollers?). While we thought we were cute, she just thought we all looked like we had raided her high school closet. Yeah, I get that feeling now.

It’s the circle of fashion. At some point, likely high school and maybe college, most of us are at our fashion pinnacle. We are young, we have nothing better to spend our money on (okay, maybe we do but we’re too vain to do it. Oh. Was that just me?) and every store in the mall is marketing to us. But then life goes on and you leave school, get a job, buy a car, a house, maybe get married and you think you’re still paying attention to fashion but you’re really not. Basically, you’re on autopilot. You buy what you’ve always bought thinking that because the tapered jeans are still available at the stores that they’re still in fashion but that is not so. They sell those embroidered and bejeweled sweat suits that old women like to wear and I don’t know when those have ever been in style. You start to notice teenagers whispering behind your back, pointing and giggling about mom jeans. And you think, hey! Who are you calling mom—before realizing that the two little shorties at home do. That’s when you know you’ve become completely irrelevant. Fashion-wise anyway.

You spend the next decade or so being the generation of fashion scorn and trying to rid yourself of any proof that you ever spent any time in that particular decade. You have to relearn how to dress because you can’t just go and buy the latest trends, throw them on your body and think that you’ve wiped years off your age because it doesn’t work that way. Dressing this way actually makes you look older. Cruel, cruel joke. As if being from the decade of scorn wasn’t bad enough now you practically need to get an advanced degree just to dress yourself. The trick is to look fashionable and therefore younger without dressing young which is kind of like trying to remove the hair on your legs by plucking each hair one by one. It can be done, but it’s going to be really painful and tedious. Clothing stores aren’t really interested in dressing you and your mature body. Eventually though, you’ll get to the point where you feel pretty good about the clothes you’re wearing. Not that this makes you fashionably relevant because that train has left the station, sister. But on the bright side, you have gone so far off the track that you are now back on!

Only now you can’t wear the stuff. And it doesn’t look so good to you. And when you try, you look ridiculous. Because leggings? Not past high school. And skinny jeans? Yeah, not unless you’ve misplaced your butt. Slouch boots? I don’t know what to do with them. Should I tuck my pants into my socks? That just seems…wrong. And not so cute and not so fresh. And hey! I wore all this first so stop thinking you’re so dang cute.

So I’m not happy about the return of 80’s fashion. Perhaps I’m a little possessive and jealous. Mostly, I think I am too young to have my high school fashions come back into style again. And, truth be told, I wish my ass were small enough to fit into those skinny jeans.