channonyarrow

We all believe we were slaves to fashion back in the day, but that's not true. There were, always will be, and always have been, other clothes available than what was fashionable. Granted, it might be hard - like the time I spent weeks looking, in two countries and about ten shops, for a green button down shirt - but it's always possible to get something else.

Even if it is unfashionable. Stores don't sell complete outfits (well, yes, they do, but unless you're buying a seventies-style jumpsuit, they're not holding a gun to your head and demanding that you wear the whole thing), they sell pieces. Your job is to put the pieces together in a way that pleases yourself. I have had more than one conversation in my life where people have been amazed to find out that something they took as being very punk (or pirate, or conservative, or whatever) came from a store that they didn't associate with that type of clothing. Or from a pattern that didn't look anything like what I did in the end.

And it's because you put the pieces together yourself.

Unless you are insane, you put the pieces together in a way you think is acceptable - I even include that of the woman I saw on the bus once that - I shit you not at all, and I wish to god I'd had a cameraphone - had stepped straight out of the seventies, from her glasses to her shoes. Rarely do people dress seriously in a way that they dislike - even if there is a dress code for an event, most people will find something that makes them comfortable unless it is absolutely impossible.

So why do we look at pictures of ourselves and complain? The woman who runs the coffeeshop here was given a stack of old photos of herself by her mother - in the middle of myself and someone else looking at them, she was complaining about her eighties style and how horrible it was.

Wrong. It is only horrible in hindsight because now we realise how bad most of the fashion choices that were all the go at the time really were. At the time - it was awesome. And we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present. That leads to things like saying that OBVIOUSLY George Washington can't be the father of our country because he owned slaves and that's omgeleventyone wrongzzors.

I'm sorry, that wasn't legally wrong until 1863, and whether it was socially wrong or not is a matter of opinion and rather strong ones at that. It would be wrong of me to say that owning slaves in 1799 was actually wrong - that's my opinion, not his, nor the opinion of the time he lived in. And it's fallacious to judge someone who is dead by the standards of a time past the one they lived in. It's equally fallacious to judge our fashion sense in the seventies or the eighties or the nineties or last week by the standards now. Remember, we thought we looked great in the eighties, scrunchy socks and stupid hair and all. And in the end, it all comes down to the fashion industry telling us that omg bootcut jeans are GHASTLY YOU MUST BURN THEM, when the reality is that people don't buy jeans that often - they're obviously designed to take damage - and so they change the styles to make people buy more jeans.

That's all it is. There is no mystery. This is the same logic that prevailed in the Victorian era when fabric was milled in such a way as to be very suited for specific types of dresses, or in the late forties when Lucky Strike convinced Chanel and a couple other fashion houses to make green the new colour, on the basis that women would buy cigarettes that coordinated with their clothing. It's all the fashion industry telling us that what we did in the past was horrible.

Because it wasn't. There's never been a fashion for wearing the bones of your enemies as outerwear, at least in non-native western culture (I think those Plains breastplates were animal bone anyway). Nor for walking around with feces plastered over yourself. It's simply out of fashion - not inherently horrible. We all looked fine at the time. We don't think we did now, but we generally did then.

It's all right that we all had ghastly hair in the eighties. Even I did, and I was only four when the decade started. It doesn't mean that we were stupid (well, yes, actually, we WERE, but for different reasons) or that we need to pretend that those photos aren't real. Just because we've changed and fashion has changed and now we know that no one, really, should consider bangs that stick up the be-all-and-end-all doesn't mean that we should look at photos of ourselves then and exclaim how horrible they are.

We all looked like that back then. That's why it was the fashion, after all. And it's easier to do something other than the fashion as we get older and realise that, really, it's not important to buy all our clothing from Hot Topic, which sort of limits what people can do. It's easier to go with what we find comfortable and defies fashion as we age than it is when we're younger, but that doesn't mean that the fashion of the time is inherently bad or that we need to spend a lot of time commenting on how horrible we looked.