Even When Only Compared to Other Ridiculous American Trends, Modern Fashion Trends Are Really Dumb
Fashion has always been kind of a silly idea: Victorian women’s’ corsets literally moving the internal organs of upper-class English ladies, college guys wearing beanie propeller hats in the 50’s, man-dresses representing the very height of masculinity in Samoa and Scotland but the pinnacle of effeminacy in Arkansas, rappers wearing unnecessary Band-Aids for the sake of style in the late 90’s, South American tribesmen putting long, skinny rocks in their lower lips in order to purposefully stretch their lips out to anteater proportions. Yes, over the years, humans have done some really dumb stuff for the sake of fashion.
I won’t say that modern American stylistic trends are the dumbest ones in the whole of recorded human history. Seeing as adult Japanese women used to wear shoes three sizes too small in order to shrink their feet, that statement may be going too far. But, I will declare, in a loud and echoing voice, that we are in the middle of a period with some really, unbelievably stupid fashion trends. And it cuts across all of society’s dividing lines. For example:
Young Women
Young girls take the cake for dumbass fashion ideas. Hell, they ARE the cake. Young American girls now wear high heels so high that they’re starting to look more like stilts than shoes. Seeing this and its immense popularity, one is forced to ask the questions, “Can they get any higher?” and “Do they need to?”
Have you seen this trend? In Athens, a college town, I guess that I’m better able to see what college girls are wearing. I’m too old for them to want to actually TALK to me, unless they’re taking my money at Earth Fare, or selling me coffee at Jittery Joe’s, but I’m allowed to look. And yes, while many college girls do look physically attractive, they would anyway. Don’t they realize this? They’re rich, young American college girls, for Christ-sake! They don’t need high heels the size of rodents to look hot. I suppose these things do make them taller and height is always a confidence builder. I know that this fashion trend is, at least partially, meant to push their calf muscles out and raise their butt cheeks. And, while it’s hard to argue with either of those results, I still just don’t get it. They’d still be attractive even without wearing ludicrously-expensive shoes with heels the height of toy poodles. They’re as unnecessary as hair spray and probably as damaging in the long run.
When did the style gods and goddesses decide that women’s high heels needed to thicken? Just one generation ago, most heels made for the night were skinny. They were as wide as drinking straws, and not the thick, hard-plastic ones McDonald’s makes for sippy cups. These old-timey, skinny stiletto heels just aren’t around much anymore. Other than strippers and the Eastern European women who adorn Internet Mail-Order-Bride websites for lonely American men with a dream in their hearts and too much disposable cash on their hands, you don’t see the skinny high heels much anymore. Maybe this is progress. Though I don’t have much personal experience in the area (some, admittedly, but not enough for research), it’s got to be easier to walk around in thicker heels than it was in the skinny ones. That takes training. But, on the other hand, thick heels take away one more possibility for a mother to teach her daughter a useful life lesson. And tips on attracting men through the collective lie that IS women’s fashion may be dishonest in nature, even slightly evil, but they ARE useful life lessons.
Another young American girl bandwagon craze is the recent pairing of short skirts with cowboy boots (think sorority girls). Though women have worn cowboy boots in other periods of American history, they used to only wear them when they were riding a horse, which is what they were invented for. That’s why, unlike Keds, cowboy boots fit so well in stirrups. Nowadays, most women I know who wear cowboy boots wouldn’t ride an actual horse even if it dispensed fruity vodka drinks from its tail and whispered lightly in their ears that someone is going to take care of them and wipe their asses when they turn seventy. Yet, still, the cowboy boots are magnetically pairing themselves with the short skirts. I’m not totally complaining about this one either. It is cute. But, I am just far enough removed in age to realize how dumb and weird it is. Again, the same female fashion principle applies as the pogo heels. These girls would still look good even if they were wearing sensible, comfortable clothes.
Oh, and I almost forgot to make fun of the ridiculous trend of women’s blouses with cut-out shoulder holes. Nobody’s itching to see your shoulders, ladies. If you moved the holes around to other places, more tantalizing places, sure, I’d get it. But you didn’t. You bought into yet another Keeping Up with the Joneses Madison Avenue grand joke on you. If you want to show off your shoulders, wear a damn tank top.
Frat Boys
When did frat guys start dressing like their middle-aged fathers on a golf vacation? I can’t pinpoint the exact date, but it happened. Trust me. I live in a college town. I couldn’t avoid frat guys if I wanted to…and I do. I realize that the fraternity experience, from its earliest inception, has always had the effect of homogenizing young men, their ideology, their vocabulary, their habits which will last them a lifetime, AND their clothing choices. But weren’t there fraternities in the 60’s? Didn’t those dudes grow out full beards, don some bell-bottom jeans and let their hair line dip below their ears for four years BEFORE they started dressing exactly like their middle-aged fathers? Those guys were going to start raiding dad’s wardrobe a few years after college anyway, so that they could ace that interview with Morgan Stanley, but why start doing it IN college? Are they trying to show their support for the impoverished khaki miners of South America? Do they think that most of America’s problems stem from a severe shortage of patchwork shorts? Or are they just uncreative idiots?
Frat guys a few years back wore baseball caps pulled down so low that it wasn’t clear if they were able to grow eyebrows. That trend had receded a bit. Now, I see a lot of monochrome button-down shirts, a lot of flip-flops and way too many golf visors. Why the golf visors? What’s wrong with sunglasses? Aren’t sunglasses a timelessly cool fashion choice? Have you ever seen a fighter pilot in a golf visor?
Young Ghetto Guys
The low-hanging pants as popular gangsta-tough fashion phenomenon needs to end. It needs to end now. I don’t want to racially pigeonhole this ridiculous fashion trend, but I’d be lying by PC omission if I didn’t say that this trend is a young black guy thing, not entirely a young black guy thing mind you, but mainly. This is especially true now that, for the first time in American history, white guys put on airs by trying to act stereotypically “black,” instead of the other way around. Yes, that’s a reductionist conclusion, bordering on racist, but honestly, how many Asian dudes have you ever seen with low-rider jeans?
A street philosopher did once tell me that this trend started as a political statement, having something to do with jails not allowing inmates to wear belts. I can get behind political statements, but seeing as I’ve only heard one person say this and I’ve seen hundreds of teenagers looking like unfashionable, wanna-be rebellious penguins, it’s clear that, even if it started as a political statement, it’s now more of a fashion choice.
The low-rider pants thing was ridiculous to begin with. Now, after more than a decade, it’s all but become a parody of itself. Remind me again, why do we think that it’s scary and hard-ass to have to walk around holding up your pants with your hand? How does being forced to waddle like a harp seal help these guys get laid? When did the Charlie Chaplin Little Tramp look come into style AND represent the pinnacle of American male toughness? I get it. I can see your underwear. Okay, you’re wearing underwear. You’ve proven that to me beyond the shadow of a doubt. So what? My grandmother wears underwear. She just doesn’t feel the need to constantly show it off, and she manages to retain the use of both of her hands while walking. Point to grandma.
Let’s make suspenders the new gangsta cool style idea. All it’ll take is one rapper/actor/cologne pitchman or one promising and popular young professional sports figure to turn this necessary and long-overdue turn of the American sartorial corner. Admittedly, I think suspenders are kind of cool anyway, and need to make a comeback, but I do have some real, tangible reasons for promoting this as the next tough guy trend. If we make suspenders gangsta cool, it will:
1. Help the economy, at least the long-suffering suspender industry corner of the economy,
2. Bring thousands of new high-paying jobs to Thailand (where high-paying is the equivalent of old-school colonial American indentured servitude if the master drops a roast beef sandwich on the ground and can’t pick it up fast enough, and then lets his apprentice eat it once a week as per the ancient and hallowed Five Second Rule), and
3. Allow impoverished young American men with an urge to buck the system by not actually bucking the system, to walk, nay to stride, with dignity and two free hands. This way they it will be easier for them to learn how to solder computer motherboards, to design websites, or to be able to be a proper one-man band. At the very least, it’ll make it easier for them to rob you.
(To all the armchair, knee-jerk PC shouters of racism, you’re not helping race relations by being afraid to criticize anything that you consider “black.” You are, in fact, doing the opposite. It’s not racism to point out the fact that black people do stupid shit, too. It’s racist NOT TO…which is not to say that Rush Limbaugh isn’t also racist.)
Really not rebellious, not at all, not even close anymore, fashion choices
Yes, tattoos were once mainly a rebel staple, a life-long American subculture accessory for bikers, prison inmates and gang members (actual rebellious subgroups). Tattoos were rebellious…once. But someone desperately needs to tell America’s youth that, by definition, a thing CAN’T be rebellious if everybody else you know does it, too. Are shoelaces rebellious? Are undershirts rebellious? Are socks rebellious? No. The answer is no.
I’m not against the idea of tattoos. Tattoos are interesting, and I do appreciate the tenacity and endurance that it takes to stick with a drunken mistake for the rest of your life. I also kind of like the concept of verbally expressing your innermost thoughts on your innermost thigh, or, your favorite stanza of poetry just above your left breast (even if that poetry was written by some douche-bag singer/songwriter whose driving force in life is to get back at the guys who beat his ass in high school — And, even that isn’t all bad. That’s the motivation for a lot of our best art.) Also, I like Tweety Bird. He’ll always be cool.
But, and this is both huge and should be a lot more obvious than it apparently is to today’s young people: You can’t just swap out a tat like you can a pair of socks. What’s a decent fashion/identity analogy? It’s easier to transition from the Country Club Tennis Pro look to the Punk, Goth, All-Black Clothes and Nail Polish look than it is to remove a tattoo. They use ink and a needle to put them on your skin. That should’ve been your first clue that getting a tattoo ideally shouldn’t be a drunken snap decision. And yet, I’d bet that a good percentage of the kids still decide to get a tattoo when they’re hanging out somewhere other than Sober Town, USA. Some of them do look cool, I’ll admit. I guess that makes me a hypocrite, but a hypocrite without a line from a T.I. song on my arm.
The exact same thing goes for body piercing. Piercing is way too common to be inherently rebellious now. If you want to wear a nose ring, wear a nose ring, but don’t expect to land your dream job if you have a cow-style nasal septum hoop when you go in for the interview at Goldman-Sachs. Genital piercing has also gotten a lot more common lately. Granted, I haven’t been able to field research this hypothesis as much as I should (for the sake of science, of course), but I’ve seen more nipple rings in the second half of my life than I did in the first, and not just because no one was showing me their genitalia when I was eight (which goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve never been asked to be on “The Jerry Springer Show”). I’ve got nothing against body piercing. In fact, looking back, it’s kind of weird that for so long in American society having a small hole in each ear lobe was accepted, if those lobes were attached to a person with a uterus, but having similarly-shaped holes in any other body part, whether commonly visible or not, was, in no uncertain terms, totally unacceptable. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Still, and I know that I’ve sledge-hammered this point home by now, a fashion choice cannot be considered insurgent or revolutionary if your middle-aged aunt does it, too. It just can’t.
Adult Male Professional Casual
Lately, the professional adult male, standard and useful member of the American workforce uniform has gotten a bit more casual than it was. In the 1920’s, American men wore three-piece suits out for a night on the town. They had to dress up even more for work. They also had pocket watches and even pocket watch accessories, mainly gold chains connecting the pocket watches to a little clip, which was attached to a different pocket than the one where the watch lived. Getting dressed took some doing, maybe not to the same extent as British aristocrats who employed men to literally dress them, undress them, and then dress them again (but really only the idol rich landowning “Downton Abbey” class of Brits could afford to pay a guy to put their clothes on them), but still, there was a lot more fashion effort put forth then than now. By the 1950’s, the American vest was largely dropped and the overcoat was discarded, except when its presence was meteorological helpful. Discounting some of the odd turns that U.S. fashion took in the late 60’s, and the even odder twist that the 1970’s put on the same idea, ultimately corrupting it and sucking out any meaning it once had, even so, the 70’s American man sported a dressier look than the 21st century American man. The 21st century American man basically dresses like a teenager with a slightly better credit score.
I fear that the necktie is on a path to extinction. More and more suits are tieless. Two of the last three presidents have both been a little more casual and a little less rigid in their fashion choices (though it may undercut my point that I’d even take the obviously worse of the two over the current, tie-sporting psychopath Leader of the World he’s Trying his Damndest to Make Less and Less Free). Presidents Obama and Bush II couldn’t be less alike ideologically, but they both have had a decent number of photo ops while not wearing a tie. And it’s not like the president isn’t better equipped to ward off photographers than anyone else in the country. Even Hollywood actors aren’t allowed access to The Secret Service. Though I wouldn’t describe myself as a tie man, even I mourn the impending loss of the neck tie. You don’t have to be a Wall Street bond broker to appreciate the obvious dating benefits of wearing a three-foot long phallic symbol on your chest. When we do eventually have to attend the funeral services for the neck tie, what will we do then to subconsciously remind women that we have penises? I really don’t want to have to break out my dildo hat again. It’s almost not worth it. American men have gotten more casual in their fashion choices. It’s hard to deny that.
Sure, I get it that casual and formal are societal choices by nature. I understand that these trends are somewhat arbitrary and will make little to no sense when future generations look back on them. I do appreciate the undeniable fact that trends are trendy (That sounded a lot deeper and philosophically important in my head). I’ve been around long enough to see a few shifts in American fashion, half steps for men and women, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, those who own their own islands and those homeless enough to not be able to afford a used Magic Marker to make a new cardboard sign when the rain soaks through the old one. More importantly, I also get it that, in a common capitalistic fantasy way, fashion is and has often been a grand joke of a way that greedy morons have stolen our money by making us feel bad about ourselves. Even so, people are wearing some really dumb shit these days.