Growing up with three brothers didn’t exactly expose me to the girliest-girl childhood. My mother would fight to keep me in little frilly outfits with little bows and buckle shoes. It’s easy dressing like a guy; they have such a simple but classic fashion sense, right? Wrong. Yes, women have their outfits that men will never understand, but please don’t believe you stand alone. We can start with the ever-popular boxer show when jeans are worn at half-mast. There are different reactions for when men and women have undie-slips.
Another one would have to be skinny jeans. Ouch! I mean, more power to you because there are plenty of times where even I don’t work up the day’s strength to slowly slip into a pair of skinny jeans.
Repping team apparel will always be ‘in’; I thoroughly enjoy my favorite Boston Bruins T- shirt with Patrice Bergeron’s name slapped across my back (what a babe). But to represent from head to toe is redundant, matching hat with the jersey and the color-coordinated sneakers with laced metaphors of your team colors.
Like I said, women are guilty of it too. I just find every eye roll of a man out shopping with a woman, comical. Going off comical, the man-pris, the cut-off jean shorts are giving a new meaning to high waters. Fitted, appropriately placed and rolled jeans work, but watch for the straggly strings of your jeans that wisps the top of sneaker, begging to be at a more appropriate length. Everyone is guilty of fashion slip-ups, and they are going to happen and going to continue to happen within our generation. The most we can do is watch the new phenomena’s come and go and hope for the best.
VS.
I can remember being very young and looking through my mother’s old pictures. I saw one of her with suspiciously broad shoulders, almost linebacker like, and asked her what she was wearing. When she told me she was wearing shoulder pads I asked, “Why?” Her response was, “It was popular then.”
Every generation has it’s own style, and we are no different. One can’t help but look around Plymouth State University and see our generation’s own defining styles.
Lately on the PSU campus, the lurid neon leggings (a dubstep statement?), bangs covering foreheads (cut so precisely flat they appear to be growing out of ones eyebrows), and the useless lensless glasses all can be seen regularly. As well as the baseball cap to class, saying, “I’m casual, but I’m here to learn.”
Fashion criticism is not my forte, but it’s easy to see by simple observation that girls are embracing the hipster-Snooki-era we currently live in via the clothes they chose to wear everyday on campus.
Another such style is the belt below the boobs. As in, directly underneath the breast. As in, serving no conventional purpose whatsoever. The belt doesn’t support anything, it’s just a wide chunk of leather wrapped around an upper stomach, worn in the same fashion a WWE wrestler would sport a championship belt.
Are these newly emerging styles good or bad? That’s not a decision for us to make; fashion is superficial, constantly changing, and judged through the eyes of the beholder. But this era of postmodern hipster fashion, like all the eras before it, will fade into the cliché pop culture graveyard. And like all the other generations who grew out of fads, we will look back and say, “Wow, I looked stupid.”
I am not begging the female students of PSU to drastically change their wardrobe, but for the sake of posterity and your own future embarrassment, maybe rethink rockin› those torn leggings and wrestling belt. In the long run, like generations before you, you’ll probably regret it.