A Flashback in a Short Skirt and a Loooonnnnggg Jacket

It's the past that I'm forced to see

CW: This is about fashion and style which, inevitably, veers into some body image related stuff. In my opinion, it’s nothing particularly serious this time around. But I know some people would just rather not. And that’s fine. If that’s you, that’s okay. 

I’m surrounded by schools.

There’s a high school around the corner. A middle school up the block. And an elementary school a little beyond that which, until recently, was my voting station. (My voting station is another school now. Also…somewhere close by?) There are children everywhere. Particularly around 230p on weekdays when they love to shriek and run down my street, leaving me to wonder if someone is hurt or if they are having fun.

A few weeks ago, I happened to come up out of the subway station shortly after school was done for the day. It wasn’t a sea of children but there were a few stragglers. In front of me walked a spectre of the past. Not a person so much as an outfit. From the way they were dressed, I could have sworn it was 2003 and I was, once again, roaming the halls of Cheney High School. It was a real (reverse) That’s So Raven moment.

I may not be on social media much (or at all) these days but I’m not completely clueless. I love to peep fashions. I follow a YouTuber or two who keeps up enough so that I also feel caught up. I know that late 90s/early 2000s outfits are back with a vengeance. In theory, I think, “Okay, it’s about that time. It’s a 20-30 year cycle and it’s been about 20 years, I guess.” But this is the first time I’ve been confronted with it in my normal, everyday life. Or, at least, the first time I’ve been cognizant of it walking in front of me.

The fashion. It’s back.

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What Not to Wear was a constant in my household in my teen years. My Mom and I watched together, letting our judgements fly free. When we were out and about, we assessed people’s outfits as if we were the hosts of our own show. It wasn’t particularly kind. The show wasn’t either. But both made us feel like we understood how to dress. What to Wear, if you will. And it was a particular kind of bonding moment. I’ve often said that part of the reason why my Mom and I have ended up with a pretty good relationship is because we know how to shop together very well.

By the time I was in college, the show had died out. Or I had lost interest. Either-or. College—post high school—is often a time when you go a bit wild. You try on a bunch of different personas to see what fits (or what fits in). Anything goes in a lot of ways, partially because you know that tomorrow is another day of unabashed freedom (no classes until noon) so anything will go again then. It’s freeing and stifling all at the same time. You can be anything but you also know you’re supposed to be something. And it would probably behoove you to be a something that other people related to, felt like they could connect with. Otherwise, anything goes would become everything isssssss…lonely.

As you keep getting older, you start to figure out that everything is a racket. Or, that’s the hope. That was my hope. And guess what? I figured it out! Good job me! How fun to learn that a lot of what you bought into was fake! And is fake! 

Oof, that’s too much. We’ll stick with the fashion part of it for now. 

Good job me! How fun to learn that everything you bought was fake!

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For a while now, I’ve been a style over fashion kind of person. At some point, I realized I couldn’t keep up. Or, really, that focusing on the fashion of it all didn’t suit (ha ha) me. Fashion changes so quickly, from year to year. Well, season to season really. And granted, Miranda Priestly was not wrong, the fashion makers ultimately affect what we are all wearing. But she was also not wrong in that for the in-fashion to trickle down to us regular lot, it takes a while. I would never laugh at Cerulean in front of Meryl. But I also wouldn’t know what season that color trend came from. 

It doesn’t matter ultimately. If I like it, I’ll wear it. And that’s style, I think. 

To me, style is what you wear that makes you feel the most like you. It’s a communication tool. It can send pretty much any message you want it to. Style can help you highlight the parts of your personality you want to lead with. It can be armor, protect you. It can be a door or it can be a barrier. 

Inherent to style is experimentation. Much like growing up, you don’t figure out what your style is until you try an outfit and find out: that’s it! Or: …that’s not it. It’s trial-and-error. A lot of error. Fashion is decided by people in rooms that you’ll probably never be in. Style is a more personal thing. Fashion is a closed box called “popular.” Style is an open room. Fashion doesn’t care if you, random 37 year old in a tiny apartment in Queens, have an opinion. Style wants you to know anything goes. But really, anything goes. It’s up to you and only you. 

I think the reason I ultimately came to the “style over fashion” thing is that style feels like it leaves room for change. We’re never the same person for our whole lives. We learn, we grow, we unlearn, we get worse, we get better. The way we feel about what we wear does all those things too. I don’t want to be locked into an image perspective that is unyielding. I want to revel in the uncertainty of what feeling like myself looks like from day-to-day. Because I do know there will be some uncertainty every single day. 

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For someone who watched a lot of What Not to Wear, my high school “fashion” was mostly t-shirts and jeans. Play production t-shirts specifically. Well, except on opening days of said plays. Those days were usually reserved for our costumes from the show. We were the free advertising for plays that most of our classmates would not come to see. There’s probably a world in which, during that time, I should have felt really dorky in a costume during the school day. There’s probably also a world in which I should feel kind of embarrassed about that now. I don’t. I just wish I knew where my mint green tux shirt that I stole from the costume shop ended up.

I also spent a far amount of time completely overdressed. And a far amount of time in pjs. I also had some really kickass bowling style shoes with flames on the sides. Delia*s really came through for me on that one.

Of course, a lot of this has to do with all the messaging of the time we got from heroin chic and fad diets and fat jokes on sitcoms. (Still a lot of the same kind of messaging these days.) We were taught that that one type of body is “correct” and if you didn’t have that body, your job was to dress it up so it looked like what was correct. In the 90s and early 2000s there wasn’t a lot of nuance with fashion and style. There was what was wrong and what was right. And what was wrong was always your fault. Not the fact that it’s not your body’s fault if certain clothes don’t “look good on you.” Clothes are supposed to work for you. You don’t work for the clothes. What was right was never treating your body with kindness and respect because it actually does a lot for you. What was right was being embarrassed when you made whatever fashion faux pas. And then overexplaining your choices for the rest of your life. “We all make mistakes when we’re young.”  

Fondness is what I feel for the style choices of young Samantha. She was trying things out. Some of it fit. Some of it felt super weird. All of it was an attempt. That is a fondness I gained not because I figured out what was flattering on me. Or because baggy clothes actually make you look bigger. Or because, somehow, showing your flat tire stomach is the grossest thing you can do. It’s not a fondness I gained because of whatever I learned on What Not to Wear. It’s something I gained because of all the time I’ve spent unlearning the “rules” set forth by the likes of What Not to Wear. (I can’t find the exact article but Stacy London’s been unlearning them too.)

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Human beings have bodies. Somedays, we’re gonna love them. Somedays, we’re gonna hate them because of [insert whatever here]. That’s okay. Trying to force constant positive feelings about anything often heightens bad feelings when they come around. And they will. Human beings are complex and our feelings about our bodies are complex too. 

What never changes, however, is that human beings have bodies. And they do a hell of a lot for us.

*

So, on a street in Astoria in 2024, walking behind a teenager who could probably find and expose my greatest weaknesses in 2.5 seconds flat, I’m transported back into my 15 year old body in the halls of a high school in rural Washington State. And I figure, maybe, this is why older generations are always kind of horrified when the kids take up the fashion of their youth.

It reminds them of high school.

High school is not a time and/or place that most of us are eager to jump back to. It doesn’t matter if you had a good time or not. Honestly, largely thanks to my best friend (whomst is still my best friend today) and drama club, my time in high school was fine. I know that makes me pretty lucky. And you also couldn’t pay me any amount of money to go back to that time. Or really back in time at all. I like to learn stuff and then apply that stuff to the future. I don’t love to learn stuff and use it to insult the me of the past. Again, she was trying stuff. I’m content to let her be.

The fashion cycle seems inherently set up to remind us of our past selves. The world we live in is inherently set up for amnesia—of both the individual and collective flavors. It’s set up so we suppress our past selves. We’re not supposed to honor the journey we’re on. We’re only supposed to strive for more. More things. More success. More crushing it. More crushing what we’ve learned and where we’ve come from. More laughing at our past selves. Less care of them.

Which leads, ultimately, to less care of the people who are inexplicably clad in our outfits while learning and growing themselves. Oh, the mistakes are coming. We all know it even if they don’t. What we do need to learn is that their outfits are not condemnation for our mistakes. They are not a call for us to hate ourselves for who we once were. They are a reminder of what a gift it is to be experimenting, working to figure out who we are. They are a reminder that we’ll all need a hand getting back up after we’ve fallen off our cork platform sandals at some point or another. 

Someone should warn them about how much those butterfly clips hurt though. I’ve still got dents in my scalp as the inescapable evidence of that.

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Speaking of learning and growing…

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