I’m hot, sweaty and my arms feel like I’ve just scaled Mt. Everest. No, I wasn’t doing push-ups or lifting weights at the gym. Those activities would have made sense. What I did was waste 35 valuable never-to-be-recovered minutes trying to make my hair look like I’d never bothered combing it; like I’d rolled out of bed and done nothing more than haphazardly pushed it around, then randomly stuck a clip in it. But the more I worked, the more I fiddled, the more I brushed and gelled and sprayed, the smoother and neater and more well coifed it looked, and the more frustrated I became.
What prompted this insanity was a recent visit to the hair dresser where I dropped enough money to pay for a plane ticket to China. During my visit I perused a number of women’s magazines and discovered I had thrown my money away. It appears that the well coifed look has been replaced by the current disheveled, I-just-rolled-out-of-bed look. Not only is messy hair fashionable, it seems that men think it’s sexy. I would love men to view me as sexy, but do I have to look like a Lhasa Apsos to accomplish that? It’s been my experience that most men don’t need anything in particular to turn them on. Finding unexpected beer in the fridge or betting on which ant crawls over a rotten apple first can accomplish that.
I wish that messy hair had been stylish when I was growing up. It would have saved me so much time and pain. I spent the first half of my life going to bed with a dozen hard tin curlers digging into my head. I still have residual dents in my scalp from that nightly assault.
It seems the casual, slipshod, free-and-easy fashion trend has permeated our culture in ways we would never have imagined when we were young. We’ve gone from refined to tasteless. We’re wearing tattered holey jeans, and T-shirts that expose our midriffs and have obscene slogans splashed across the chest. We wear skin tight pants and short shorts with suggestive words written across our behinds, and under garments are no longer limited to wearing under your outer clothing. Women’s bra straps and men’s undershorts are out there for the world to critique.
Office attire has gone from business suits to running suits and sneakers appear to be acceptable foot wear for every outfit, including wedding gowns.
I remember when we used to dress to go shopping, to the movies, to restaurants, and to travel? Back then we felt it was important to look nice because our parents told us we only had one chance to make a first impression.
As a young woman I used to shop wearing a suit and narrow two inch high heels meant for women lucky enough to have only three toes on each foot. I would take the bus from Union to downtown Newark and hobble from Orbachs, to Kleins and to Hanes with swollen, aching, feet and it never occurred to me that comfort was even an option. In fact, the sloppiest thing I owned back then was a pair of dungarees, (remember that word?) worn for play or for chores that threatened to soil my good clothes. And the waist band of my dungarees was worn at my waist and didn’t hang precariously over the middle of my derriere, with holey, elephant sized pant legs dragging tattered on the ground. I want to know what clothes today’s kids change into when they come from school. Are they even sloppier than those they wear to school?
My first plane flight was back in 1954, when I flew from Newark to Boston for a Harvard college weekend. The propelled flight was so choppy I filled three barf bags along the way, but because I was smartly dressed in a beige tailored suit, white gloves and Spectator shoes all eyes were on me and I could rest in the knowledge that I’d made a respectable first impression.
We’ve come a long way from days of corsets, crinolines and fancy hairstyles. For that I’m grateful, but I hope I’m around when the pendulum finally comes to rest.
Leave A Comment