Fashion

Fashion has left me behind. Or maybe I never caught up with it to begin with. I was always the one wearing the hippie look in the seventies, the preppie look in the eighties. As a pre-teen, I once studied faithfully from the Bible--Susan Dey’s Guide to Glamour, but the only thing that stuck was that you should never wear “socks” and never let bare leg show between pants cuff and shoe. I hope knee-high stockings with a run in them are OK.

Now that I’m supposedly grown-up, a competent businesswoman of the nineties, I’m still chasing the sartorial holy grail. I expect to look in my closet and find tailored business suits and flowing silk blouses, clothes that that project an air of studly competence while hinting at the sensual red-hot mama lurking underneath.

What do I end up with? A flannel shirt my brother gave me because the sleeves were too short for him, a pair of blue jeans I picked up at Wal-Mart in the fourth month of pregnancy because all my others were too small, and dorky brown loafers my mother bought for herself off the markdown rack but grew tired of after one wearing.

My closet is disfunctional. It always fills itself up with dress clothes that I don’t really like but are too good to throw away. In the arena of casual, I find tee-shirts with “sentimental value”, and day-old blue jeans with knees in them. On a really bad morning, I get to choose between dress slippers with mud on them or hiking boots that I don’t want to get mud on.

Remember back in the last century, when a woman had one everyday dress and one Sunday dress? Those were the days! You didn’t have to make decisions and you could suggest your innermost yearnings through the sassy floral pattern on your delicate calico apron.

The world must have been subtler then. Now you have to suggest your innermost yearnings through your tee-shirt. I have one:

My

Christine Dior

was in the wash.