Fashionistas

At times, certain thoughts flash through my mind that have nothing to do with the never-ending state of the universe. They include comments such as, “Hey! Isn’t that the same t-shirt you’ve worn since time immemorial?” or, “Did you really wear diapers made from torn-up jeans?” or, “Are those hand-me-downs from your dad who got them from his dad?” These are comments that affect me deeply as I look into the past to see what they actually meant.

Back in the day, it was a must to be seen in the same clothes that Dick and Jane wore – Dick had the coolest red-plaid-lined jeans with cuffed hems. Now that was convenient – long johns sewn right into a pair of jeans. Mind you, that was 1965 and the world was much cooler then. Dick and Jane were role models for kids everywhere. For me, at least then, my jeans had to be the same as Dick’s, there was no way around it.

Ten years later, after outgrowing Dick’s ultra-cool jeans, I added long johns during the cold months and stuck to denim only. This denim phase is still going strong within my genes. I will probably die with jeans on or at least nearby my cold, stiff body.

For a while, I even wore jean jackets, which were extremely cool. In fact, jean jackets rocketed to the top of the fashion charts when Billy Jack arrived on screen and started kicking everyone’s ass. It was the next level in coolness – how to kung fu the heck out of everything.

Then the New Age began. Jeans flowered out into bell bottoms, which everyone wore during the eye-sorriest years of my life, until they came back to its senses and favoured the tight-fitting style. In those years, it was hard to breathe and walk at the same time, and getting out of cars often called for splits and tears in the loin areas when exiting a low vehicle. It was only years later we learned that most clothes were made by slave children in Bangladesh and a social conscience descended upon the fashion world of denim.

Today, most clothes are manufactured in countries that depend heavily on having thousands of people living in cities surrounding factories that produce billions of items to wear. Today, I do a lot of research for market information and it’s becoming clear how much we, as people of the north, depend so heavily on satisfying our cravings for things.

We crave to be like the rest of the world when the rest of the world craves what we have – clean air and water, decent living and social conditions, and strong government support structures. Taking all of that for granted and then crying about what we don’t have seems to be self-defeating. Why do we have to wear the latest fashions when we can always wear denim? Something familiar and comfortable and still rocks a room of tuxedos. Yeah, I could wear a denim tuxedo. That’s even cooler than James Bond’s custom-made, bulletproof and male pheromone-reeking outfit.

Recently, I changed my style to simple khaki and that seems to work for me. I just blend right into the background and can mystically disappear on a windy sandy day. Sometimes walks on the beach become like, “Hey! Where did I go?” I outlived that when my clothes started ripping apart after years of wear. Khaki tends to wear out, but only after thousands of wearing and washings. I still have some khaki clothes that I wear on special occasions.

But for timeless fashion, I’ll stick to jeans, thank you.