I entered junior high in 1988, a particularly unfortunate year for fashion and hairstyles (or one of the best, depending on your point of view). I followed a few of the trends. I had acid-washed jeans and a spiral perm. But since I wasn’t one of the cool kids and knew that my attempts to climb the social ladder would only lead to a world of pain, I didn’t have as much of a stake in some of the more extreme looks that were popular at the time. I never, for example, sported the claw, a.k.a. mall bangs.

Looking at what could have been fills me with deep regret.

I’ve been amused to see the comeback of skinny jeans since they were all the rage in the late eighties. The main difference now is that, thanks to stretch denim, the jeans of the today don’t require the wearer to do anything extra to make them skin-tight. I had several pairs of jeans in junior high with zippers at the ankles, and that was good enough for me. A lot of kids, however, resorted to safety-pinning the cuffs of their pants to get them as tight as possible. They stashed extra pins in their lockers, and some people even sold them for a small profit.

I actually got made fun of for not pinning my pants or ratting my bangs. Even back then, amidst all that bad fashion, I knew that this was messed up and wrong.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Friday Flashback. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.