A Fashion Guru I Am Not

My parents will attest that I had very few fashion requirements growing up. Most of the time I simply wore what they bought me or fished hand-me-downs out of my older brother’s drawers. I wore his old faded blue Grand Funk Railroad t-shirt more times than I can count. I’ve never been one to follow fashion rules much but I do remember a few instances from my childhood worthy of note. In kindergarten, I refused to wear any jeans that didn’t have a cowboy on the snap thingamajig above the zipper. And he had to be riding a horse. Of course it was so small nobody every noticed but I certainly knew. And in third grade I demanded Mom buy me a t-shirt all the other kids were wearing. It had a picture of JJ from the TV show “Good Times” and the word Dyn-o-mite! written above his picture. And if I remember correctly, in my hometown, you could only get it at Belks. In junior high I had a couple of those collar shirts with the alligator on the left chest. I guess everybody had to have at least one (Izod-Lacoste I think) but I never really got hooked on them. Eventually I caved in and wore one of those with the polo player on the left chest (Polo brand) but again, I wasn’t picky about having one in my closet. When I went off to college, I wore a Members Only jacket only because somebody gave it to me as a gift. Ended up being too preppy for me but I had to wear it some because everybody except a first semester freshman knows you get laughed at if you wear your precious high school letter jacket on a college campus. During my college days in the 80s, girls got away with wearing all kinds of outlandish stuff like leg warmers, jelly shoes, and shoulder pads. For no legitimate reason, when I set out to choose a future wife during my college years, I avoided girls who wore the aforementioned items. Guys weren’t much better. We wore both our long shirt sleeves and our blue jean bottoms rolled up and I still have no idea why. For a short time, we even wore our shorts on the outside of our sweat pants. Ugggh! I wish we could have worn Camo stuff back then like you can now but if you did, people either thought you were military or a terrorist. I share all this with you because kids today have their own set of requirements. My boys request items made by people with names like Abercrombie- who I think hangs around with two buddies named Fitch and Hollister. There’s also an Aeropostale guy who everybody seems to appreciate. Add to that American Eagle clothing and Oakley sunglasses that cost over $100 a pair and it gets pretty confusing to me. And hardly anyone wears Croakies to hold their sunglasses on their head anymore, a trend that ended ten minutes after I bought one. So onward I trudge. A fashion guru I will never be. Maybe that’s why my college girlfiend agreed to marry me. And so far it’s worked out well, mainly because we’re both perfectly content to buy our sunglasses at the dollar store and our jeans at the thrift shop.