QOTD: "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does; love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up." - James Baldwin
Reading: Tom Miller, The Panama Hat Trail
Listening to: Angelique Kidjo, Fifa
Decluttering accomplishments: did laundry, caught up on household paperwork
I did a final round of shopping today, succeeding in buying a new pocketbook (in a bright red bandanna print), a linen pants suit and a pair of black knit slacks. The latter two weren't really what I had gone shopping for but are things I can use and were on sale. All the blazers for sale in Los Angeles are either black or white. The good news is that the stores had a lot of clothes in bright colors. The bad news is that those bright colors were pink and orange, rather than red and teal and purple.
Whoever came up with the idea of cropped pants? They look absurd. I tried on a pair and confirmed that they look ridiculous. The other really absurd thing that's out right now are something called foot tubes. These are sort of socks except they have neither heels nor toes. Mary Joan, who has a 12 year old daughter, told me that the girls wear them with clogs so they have something that doesn't show. That doesn't explain why they don't have toes or why they come in bright colors and patterns. (To be fair, I buy underwear in blue zebra stripes and that doesn't show. But I do that because my mother always had white underwear and I got in the habit of buying colored underwear when I lived at home to make it easier to sort the laundry.)
I suppose it is just part of the duty of each generation to find the trends of the younger to be absurd. I certainly wore some pretty ridiculous things in my day. Somewhere there is probably a photo of me in a very short purple miniskirt and high white platform shoes, for example. And then there were the "elephant bells" - extremely wide legged bell bottom trousers, circa 1971.
My high school style was sloppy and basic. All winter I wore corduroy jeans, a turtleneck sweater, and a flannel shirt (usually unbuttoned) over that. When the weather got warmer, I switched to denim jeans and and either a plain pocket t-shirt or a loose embroidered tunic. I had an army jacket that I was really fond of and that my mother hated. One of those really silly trends was the way we bleached streaks into our jeans.
In college, I lived in dancewear. I was most often seen in a leotard and tights and a wrap-around skirt. That was pretty out of the main stream, since those were the years of preppy style. I am proud to say that I have never been seen in public wearing pink and green.
My major discovery of my grad school days was how much I like wearing hats. I don't wear them as much any more, mostly because it would be weird to at work, but I still like to wear a hat when I get dressed up. Wearing a grey fedora certainly gets you attention. On the other hand, while in grad school, I bought (and wore) a dress with a white and lavendar floral print and a handkerchief hem. Not that that is absurd in and off itself, but it certainly isn't me.
Nowadays, I have serious wardrobe schizophrenia. I have my serious adult wardrobe for work. That means stuff like a hunter green wool suit, worn with a white and green striped shirt. I'm trying to upgrade my casual day wardrobe, which means more matching slacks suits. I do wear things like bright red dresses and interesting jewelry even to work, though. Then there are my storytelling clothes, which tend to be, um, less conservative. But I can't wear a lot of my jewelry for storytelling, because it would be distracting. (Major tip: big dangly earrings make noise!) Then I have leggings and t-shirts for walking and just hanging out. I have more formal dresses than events to wear them to. And then I have my vacation wardrobe of trousers with zip-off legs and shirts with roll-up sleeves and the like.
If you judge a woman by her clothes, I must be five people. And one of them has nothing to wear.
Copyright 2002 Miriam H. Nadel