My teenage fashion fail: a re-post up at The Perennial Gen today

The Perennial Gen, a site for people in midlife and beyond, has a "Fashion and Beauty" theme this month, and today they're running a post of mine from a few years back.

Click here to read "My Teenage Fashion Fail" -- and enjoy reliving with me my moment of youthful humiliation!

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Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash.

Five Minute Friday: REFINE

Today I'm linking up with Kate Motaung for Five Minute Friday.  This week's prompt is "REFINE."

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Downton Abbey ended a year ago, and I'm still missing it. I loved that show. I still re-watch old episodes so that I can go back into that world again. I felt like the Crawleys and their staff were my friends, and sometimes I have this sense that they're still all out there going on with their lives, only without billions of pairs of eyes watching them.

The Crawleys were so refined. The women would come down to dinner in gorgeous, decadent dresses, dripping with jewelry. They'd sit straight-backed, their wrists (never their elbows) resting elegantly on the edge of the table.

And those voices! I loved their sophisticated English accents. If you want a good laugh, CLICK HERE to see a clip of Downton Abbey actors reading their lines in American accents. It's pretty hilarious to see Lord Grantham as an American mogul, pontificating to his kids about properties and acquisitions .... on second thought, let's change the subject. 

It's so easy to get starstruck by elegant people. Their beautiful houses, sophisticated clothing, refined manners ... they must be doing something right. They must be just a bit better than the rest of us.

But the truth is, we're all equal. No one is better than anyone else because of their status, their inheritance, their possessions, or their refined manners. This Irish song that I love, "John O'Dreams," reminds us that at the end of the day -- or the end of life -- we are all on the same level ground:

Both man and master in the night are one;

All things are equal when the day is done.

The prince, the ploughman, the slave, the free man

All find their comfort in old John O'Dreams.

The Bible also reminds us of the surprising humility of Jesus:

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. (Philippians 2:5-7, The Message Bible)

It's fun to immerse myself in the world of the rich and refined for a while, but my comfort comes in knowing that the trappings of wealth and power are not what matter to God. He is a friend to the poor, the weak, the lonely, the powerless. He became one of us to prove that.

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My teenage fashion fail

Something I read on Twitter last week got me thinking about the clothes that were in fashion when I was a teen.

Lee overalls were a popular item, and I had a pair in navy-blue corduroy. Overalls are kind of impractical when you stop and think about it, but I didn't care about that: I was just extra cautious in the school washroom so that I didn't come back to class with my straps twisted -- or with one strap wet from falling in the toilet!

Levi's were also very much in style: the jeans and cords, of course (I had rust-coloured Levi's corduroys), and those gingham shirts with the all-important tag on the front pocket.

We wore hoodies back then, too, except we called them kangaroo jackets. (Did anyone outside Prince Edward Island call them that, I wonder?) I had a red pullover one that I wore constantly, often under a denim jacket. It strikes me now that many of the clothes that were trendy at that time were quite unisex -- not to mention timeless. I wish I still had all those items. Well, not the overalls, maybe...

And let's not forget Adidas sneakers. Some of them were white-with-blue-stripes, and some were blue-with-white-stripes. I had a pair that looked very much like the ones in this picture; I wore them till they fell apart. Actually, I think I ruined them when I was working as a flagger on a road construction crew and accidentally stepped on hot asphalt.

It might sound like I was always buying the latest styles or begging Mom and Dad to buy them for me, but I think these examples stand out because they were exceptions. A lot of the time, in fact, I wore hand-me-downs from my cousins or other relatives. I didn't mind, though; I thought it was fun to dig into a bag of clothes in the hope of finding some treasures. I still do!

Once when I was around 14, somebody gave us one of those bags of hand-me-downs. In it I found a pretty blue flowered shirt that buttoned up the front and had white trim at the collar and cuffs. It was loose and flowing and very striking. I thought it was beautiful, and I proudly put it on and wore it to school.

The second time I wore it, we had a substitute teacher, and she was wearing the very same shirt, only the flowered print was brown instead of blue. 

This could have been nothing more than a eyebrow-raising coincidence -- except she was pregnant.

It was -- no doubt about it -- a maternity top.

I'm sure the teacher never said a word (though she may have kept an eye on me for signs of morning sickness), and I don't remember if anyone else did either, but I know I endured a day of mortification. After school I came home, stuffed the blue flowered shirt at the bottom of a drawer and never wore it -- or even mentioned it -- again.

It doesn't take much for me to conjure up that teenage feeling of wanting to get it right, look right, be right -- and the shame of thinking I'd gotten it wrong. I didn't have a strong enough sense of self to say "I'll wear what I want and make my own statement, no matter what anybody thinks" -- but I wasn't mature enough to laugh it off and turn it into a funny story at the supper table, either. I guess I was a pretty typical teen in both respects.

If only we could believe, at age 14, that it really, truly doesn't matter what shoes we buy ... or whether we have the "right" tag on our pocket ... or whether we're wearing the "wrong" shirt.
 
If only we could believe, at age 14, that one day we really, truly will laugh at these moments of humiliation.