Clothier Fashionista

I swear there was a time where I was perfectly capable of dressing myself. I can't prove it, but I nevertheless feel quite certain it existed.

Looking back on childhood pictures of myself, I had cooler clothes during the 80s than at any other time of my life. The current version of me would kill several faceless drifters for the ability to locate and fit into the kiddie clothes my parents dressed me in. But my clothes throughout the 80s were not of my own choosing and I certainly cannot take credit for dressing myself back then.
At best, I can thank my parents for not making me look like a complete hump.

But then in the 90s, I wrongly assumed I was equipped to rebel against a system that was in no way broken. Suddenly disallowing my folks to dictate the clothes I wore, I opted instead to choose my own clothes. What resulted was nearly a decade of XXL t-shirts oddly printed with hip-hop renditions of Tweety and the Tazmanian Devil worn with track pants emblazoned with the Nike swoosh on the side.

I don't know why all that happened, but it did.
I'd like to take it back, but I can't.

Nevertheless, I swear there was a time I dressed okay. Thinking back, I don't recall feeling awkward about my clothing. I got hired at various jobs, so I couldn't have been presenting myself as a total tool, right?
Over three years ago I moved to Baltimore and began dating a girl there. Back then I wore a lot of trucker hats and board shorts. But back then, everyone was wearing trucker hats and board shorts and this girl thought me very stylish. I admitted to her that I wore what I liked and what I liked at the moment happened to be popular.
Maybe this was when I was stylish: in the autumn of 2003 and into the summer of 2004.
This girlfriend at the time was flipping through old photos of mine and came across a handful of pictures from the previous summer.
"Wait. Is this what you wore last summer? Like, all the time?" she said disgustedly.
I glanced at the series of photos prompting this question and replied that yeah, that's how I dressed.

I'll never forget the look she gave me. It started as a solid eyeball-to-eyeball stare down and eventually shifted to a slow-burning head-to-toe-to-head once-over.
Some of you have read my thoughts on the head-to-toe-to-head glance in a blog from the summer (entitled "No One Hates Women Like Women Hate Women") where I stated that a head-to-toe-to-head glance is not what you want to receive.
The look of absolute acidity on her face was something to behold - as if she could see the beast of unfortunate fashion gestating in my soul; daring to hatch and recoil out of my body again.

"But," she said confusedly, "look at those shoes. Are those Reeboks? You wore Reeboks?"
I didn't know what to say. And in the absence of my words, she added a few more of her own.
"Does the shirt you're wearing in this picture say Mossimo? Why were you doing this to yourself?"
I laughed, but on the inside I was panicked.

When I was 13, I buzzed the sides of my hair and parted the remaining hair on the top of my head, straight down the middle. I also didn't start shaving until I was 14...
...despite growing the opening hints of a mustache at the age of 12.
My favorite shirt at the time was a Nike Bo Jackson shirt that said "Bo Don't Know Diddley" on the back. The shirt was neon orange, the same color as three Long Island Ice Teas vomitted onto the backseat of gray car apholstery.
And when people run across pictures of me in this state, I immediately turn beet red and look for ways to completely embarrass and belittle the person who discovered the picture.
Why do I do this? Isn't that an accurate depiction of who I was in 1993?
Yes. And that's the problem.
The me of 1993 never stopped to think about what he looked like wearing neon orange or athletic socks with worn elastic in them. But the me from 2004 totally hates the me from 11 years previous. The me from 2004 wanted to represent a youthful exhuberance brought to life with tan skin and playful board shorts. I wanted my long hair to flop in my eyes and offset the crooked trucker brim haphazardly sitting atop my head. That's the me I wanted to be.
And you know what, when my wife looks at pictures of the 2004 me 10 years from now, I'm not going to want her to linger too long on those either because I'm sure I'll no longer desire to emote careless exuberance.
Or maybe I will and I'll be really pissed that I didin't save those trucker hats, 'cause by 2014, they'll be awesomely vintage.

All of this is troubling because I've recently been shown that I still haven't got a stranglehold on fashion yet.

Did you know that wire hangers are really bad for... well, hanging? Not just sweaters or pants, but pretty much everything.
Did you know that sweaters and hoodies shouldn't wallow on hangers, but should instead be folded and placed flat?
Did you know that the top two buttons of shirts should always be clasped so as to better maintain the shape of the collar?
Did you know that a Gap sweater from 2004 is visibly out of style when compared to a Gap sweater from 2006? Yeah. Gap sweaters from 2004 don't concave inward to fit the contours of the male abdomen (it wasn't the style two years ago), nor are the rounded collars en vogue amidst mainstream America.
Well dammit. No one told me. Here I've been dressing myself all this time and I've been making all these mistakes.
Even the rules I thought were steadfast have suddenly developed exceptions.

I was just informed that black and brown can be worn together under certain situations. This is to fashion rules what the letter Y is to vowels.
Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Have you ever been standing too close to the curb and then suddenly pulled back by a friend? If you have, you might have turned to the friend confusedly and said,
"Hey friend, why did you jerk my back so quickly?"
Your friend - slightly out of breath - might look at you for a moment and reply, "Because a bus almost plowed into you. Didn't you see it? It surely would have cracked your body into shards like an egg had I not yanked you back."
Your first reaction to hearing this news would probably be to smile and laugh. But inevitably, five minutes later, your mind might focus on exactly what just almost happened and your delayed feelings of fear and panic.
The bus is long gone, your life safe once again, but because you were unaware of your recent impending mortality, your mind and body make up for such a lag by freaking out long after status quo is restored.

This panicky freak-out is what shot through my body as my Baltimore girlfriend flipped through my photo album. It is also what zipped through my memories as I was being told that my perfectly fine wire-hanging sweater was more Cosby than J. Crew.
Why haven't I known this all along? Whose job was it to tell me these things?

When I relayed to my mother all the new information I eccrued regarding caring for my clothes, she was dissappointingly unimpressed. Apparently she already knew all these tidbits. When I asked her why she never imparted her wisdom, she smiled and shook her head.
"You never would have listened to me."

She's right. I never would have listened.

From now on, I carry a picture in my wallet of myself as a 13-year-old goober. If I should ever find myself contemplating buying pants at a Foot Locker or an Urban Outfitters, I plan to pull out my old neon XXL Nike picture and zig away from the Locker and zag toward hipstertown.

As Blink 182 once yelled, "I guess this is growing up."