Yikes Again

From the Yahoo news page, photo of generic shoppers somewhere in the USA.  Do my old eyes deceive me, or do I really see a young woman wearing high heels with big rolled-up jeans cuffs, a la the 1950's?  Is this a joke, or is this really the current fashion?

Once upon a time, in the days of my (sadly) well-spent youth, your Head Trucker was known for a snappy dresser.  But I haven't really paid much attention to the details of fashion since graduating from college, which was about the time Urban Cowboy was the current picture show, and yeehaw! - suddenly it was cool (as it had never been in my young lifetime) among city folks to go everywhere in your boots and jeans and cowboy hat.

And I still do.  It suits me.  And the cool, the very cool thing about Western style is that it's timeless, pretty much always the same.  You can dress it up or dress it down.  Here in Texas, where it's the national dress, so to speak, you can wear it 24/7 anytime, anyplace:  hell, with a decent sportcoat and bolo, you can wear cowboy boots and jeans and cowboy hat to dinner at the Adolphus in big D, and nobody will look twice at you. (But take your hat off when you get to the table, son; were you raised in a barn?) 

And speaking from my own point of view, it's a very masculine look.  Which some of us old boys think is kinda important when it comes to clothes.

But who can keep up with the ins and outs of women's styles, even if you wanted to?  A while back an elderly cousin wrote me that her granddaughters used to tease her about her bright red lipstick in old photographs; now the young'uns are in college, and wearing bright red lipstick themselves, just gotta have it.  It's just so cool, you know.

Which just goes to show, as I made remark in a comment post the other day, fashion is silly.  Damned silly, much of the time.  The herd instinct, first of all:  and deeper than that, the desire to fit in.  Deeper still, the terrible, blinding fear of being rejected - and worst of all:  ridiculed.  Physical courage is an admirable trait, but relatively common; very few people, however, have the moral courage to endure the ridicule of their peers.

Which is why the fashions you laugh yourself silly at today, you'll be wearing tomorrow.  And vice versa.  Your very own opinion of yourself, which at this second you think is entirely the product of your own judgment and reason, will be changed for you, 180 degrees.  It has nothing at all to do with what looks good on you, what flatters your face or your physique, what's convenient or comfortable.  And everything to do with what the people whose opinion matters most to you - and despite all your protests, that's usually not your nearest and dearest - what they are wearing. 

In other words:  the cool people; depending on the decade and the century, they might be rich or they might be poor, but they are always the people you would give your right arm if only you could be like them; better yet, please God, be one of them.

Right there is the ultimate, though often unconscious, motivation that underlies half the human activity on this planet at any given moment.  Think about it. 

Continue reading after the jump . . .

I well recall sitting in a college astronomy class thirty-one years ago right about now.  It was a demanding course, we covered a lot of ground; but our professor kept things lively in the lecture hall with a lot of neat demonstrations and movies.  One day, he showed us a movie about space travel, which included an old clip from NASA showing a bunch of reporters studiously taking notes during a press conference on the Mercury 7 flight, from the very early 60's. 

All the men in that clip looked like clones:  every single one was clean-shaven, with a crew cut, and narrow lapels and ties - as if they had all fallen out of a Xerox machine.  A ripple of laughter broke out around the lecture hall:  we all thought they looked ridiculous.  Naturally.  There we all were in our oh-so-cool-late-1970's-look, to a man, with hairy faces, shaggy hair, and bellbottom blue jeans (as if we'd all fallen out of a Xerox machine).  In other words, normal looking.  Not weird, like those guys from the beginning of the previous decade - oh please!

Ah, but who really was it that looked normal, and who weird?  When I see very young men in stores and shops these days, it seems to me that the clean-shaven, close-cropped look is very much the done thing now.  No doubt they would laugh their asses off at a movie of us guys from 1978.

But let the world go 'round a few more times, and I'll just bet you - before these cueball-headed young men are grandfathers, they'll be letting their now-nonexistent locks fly in the breeze, just as we did in the disco era, with sideburns down to their jawlines.  You mark my words.  And laughing their butts off at themselves when they see pictures taken today.

So how important is all this jazz about fashion, anyway?  If the look you are so deadly serious about having today is something you will curse and jeer at yourself for tomorrow?

About the lede pic above:  I'm old enough to remember a time when a young woman might have worn toeless high heels or rolled up Levi's either one - depending on whether she was going to a nightclub or to a frog giggin'.  But never, ever, under any circumstances imaginable would any sane, self-respecting girl have worn both at the same time.  She would have been laughed right out of town, moved away, changed her name, dyed her hair, and never come back again.

But now, at this particular tick of the clock, it's a la mode, apparently.

Fashion, the man said, is silly.  Very human, and thus to be expected, and forgiven.  But silly.

(P.S. - It's not just clothes and hairdos; if you examine the subject carefully, you will find that much of what we call morality is simply the fashion of a given place and time - but that's another post.)