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by Raymond Low
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I am not fashion conscious because I am financially conscious, which in layman's terms means "cheap". Call me crazy, but I have never been comfortable paying $30 for a shirt which was probably produced in some developing country for a buck.
Clothes aren't the only trend. I remember in grade two how it was really cool to have a tail. This was a "guy thing" which is why it was such a stupid concept. What happened was that a guy would have his hair cut real short at the bottom - except for a tail of hair that ran down the nape of his neck. Added to the fact that most boys didn't really care about the rest of their hair, it resulted in them looking like mutant weasels.
I tried this once, though it lasted for about 10 seconds. My mother, the barber, had been instructed by me on how the tail should look. Unfortunately, this is referred to as "the blind leading the blind", so what I ended up with was not a tail but more of a sprout of hair sticking out from the bottom like an exploding bush.
An easier-to-adapt trend was the pinning of our pants in grade five. What was required was for you to grab the lower part of your trousers and wrap them as tightly around your legs as you could, preferably tight enough to close off blood passage, and then seal them with safety pins. The results were often sorry looking, as if our mothers were still doing repairs on them and we just grabbed them off the sewing machine and went to school in them.
Another hefty cool thing the following year was the release of the Nike Air shoes which supposedly made you run faster since the soles were seven inches high. But I didn't care about that; what mattered was that they made me look ultracool which is most important in school nowadays. Of course my parents thought I was ultracrazy because for the price of a single pair of Nike Airs, they realized they could send my four sisters to university, but logic prevailed.
In grade eight I moved onto the Adidas Torsion shoe, a tennis shoe that sold for more than your average computer system simply because it contained a yellow bar on the bottom of the sole which supposedly made you a better athlete. This is equal to telling you that balancing a book on your head will cause wheat to grow on your curtains. And in case you're wondering, no, the Torsions didn't make me a better athlete, unless you think walking to the corner store without having my lungs collapse is some sort of fitness triumph.
During that time, another kind of shoe called "docks" was also making headlines. These black shoes were so popular that people wearing them would sometimes be beaten up for them, mainly by skinheads, a group of bald teenagers who could scare the pants off Dracula, if such a person existed. Of course, it was a time when everyone wanted to be tough, so sales increased, generally among high school students whose expressions seemed to gloat, "Ha ha. I have docks. I am tough. I have no money left. Have any spare change?" Of course, these same people jumped 10 feet straight into the air every time you tapped them on the shoulder.
Right now the two biggest fads are hat wearing and bloating pants. The latter is having your trousers maintain the same form as bedsheets do when you hang them on a clothesline on a windy day. If they cannot comfortably hold a major Soviet missile in each leg, they aren't good enough.
Baseball caps have become quite notorious since most of the "cool people" meaning "children who look like gangsters" leave on the little tags that come on all caps. This is thought to be hip although you don't see any adults driving cars with the base price still spray painted on the front window.
I look forward to the future when a trend might be to leave your fly open while wearing your shirt inside out with shoes that cost more than it took for Canada to build the railway. It's visions like these that emphasize the importance of locking your front doors at night.
Personally, I'm as late as ever in terms of dressing "in". For instance, I only recently got my first real baseball cap (without a tag, I might add). I'm also wearing docks, but only because it's much safer to do so since all the skinheads relocated to Mars to look for stiffer competition.
tgmag@tgmag.ca