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| Not an easy ensemble to pull off in Mesquite country. |
It only took 4 years to find the striped pants to go with my Ringo Starr Beatle boots...which are actually hardly vintage, being side-zip Laredo cowboy boots you can buy anywhere...
It's partly being vain and superficially bent but also I don't wear normal Gap clothes well...they are not cut for me and it's already demeaning enough to buy 2nd hand pants at a thrift store but when they don't fit it makes me even more disgusted in fashion. Obviously the parachute pants of 1986 shall never make a comeback...and the 1970s plaid lounge pants, although I've tried them on, they are definitely the worst tailoring of any era. The fabrics had loads of character but when you can't tie your shoes without tearing a hole in the ass seam of your pants then there is a problem.
Then came the Lean Sixties...so named because everything was tight (except for the bell bottoms) and people were thin and a man's pants did not lay on him like a burlap sack. All I want is to be able to walk down the street like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever...which takes clothes that fit.
I've pretty much given up trying to buy new clothes that fit and resigning myself to vintage stores, asking androgynous clerks, "Where are the bell bottoms?" and having flamboyant frail gay boys take me by the arm and lead me to the men's section,
"What's your waist, honey? 33, 34?"
"I've gained weight...I go for 36."
"Baby, you look fiiiine. MMMMM. Nice slim hips. If you can dance I'll marry you right now...baby, how about these?"
And he holds up a pair of pink pin striped bell bottoms, size 32."
"I.....HMMMMM...WELlllllllll...." I stall.
"Bring 'em to a tailor, darling. Ooooooh! You'll look smashing in these."
And he pulls out a pair of respectable dead stock flare multi-color corduroy with no back pockets...
"Try these on right now!" he orders.
"Ok."
And if they fit that's how I end up with most of my pants...worn a bit by age but still with a tag that says "$9.99" although now they cost $40...which isn't much considering they haven't been worn and have hung out for 35 years in a closet. Then I go browse the Disco shirts, these polyester nightmares that scream character but also act as a sweat bag so you basically pour perspiration the entire time you wear it...then off I go.
I didn't have a mother to dress me during my formative years and my brother was perhaps a worse fashion role-model than me. I once wore a ninja uniform to high school, complete with split toe Tabi boots. It wasn't Halloween either...it was March or April. I bragged about wearing the same pair of Levis jeans to Junior High School for 156 straight days. Oh, my ass got kicked more than once coming home from school but those jeans became legends. And I swear I would play baseball and then not take the dirty uniform off...for days...it was comfortable. Only around my junior year in high school did Banana Republic and J. Peterman's catalogs really target my romantic spirit and manipulate me into thinking clothes with character are a substitute for character in your heart...not to mention some girls with shampooed hair so sprayed and fragrant it was like inhaling pure canned lilac aroma. These girls threw themselves at the most pompous and generic assholes with J.Crew attitudes and a different button down Gap shirt every day...awful...every one of those guys is either a mortgage broker now or selling junk bonds...totally fantasy producers with high ticket suits and "German engineered" cars serviced by Mexicans...they got laid all the time by girls I drooled over. For a brief time I thought the difference was our clothes and tried to fight back...
I remember buying the most garish Don Johnson pink t-shirts...a black cardigan cotton sweater and blindingly bright white pants from Chess King in the Fox Run Mall...I wore thin leather ties and thought nothing of wearing white suspenders and fabric shoes. My hair stuck straight up! It's laughable but generic and I burned some bridges with this attempted transformation, made some new friends, got a few handjobs...etc. I don't regret it because the 1987-1989 era was one of the most neon eras of fashion and the colors and combinations were ridiculous...comical...clownish...and I embraced it...worst of all they didn't fit very good. I looked like Miami Vice threw up on The Cosby Show. Everything was too big except for the skin tight t-shirts. I remember walking down the strip in Hampton Beach wearing a pin stripe cotton jacket WITH SHOULDER PADS and someone in a muscle tank top yelled out at me, "San Francisco is tha othah way!" Casting doubt on my sexuality, I suppose...which was hard to debate since I never got laid...thus damaging my trendy clothing:sex ratio theory.
True, that brief era of fashion dominance ebbed as I was suddenly responsible for buying all my clothes. It turned out that my fashion sense was skin deep as I was soon back to wool pants and plaid hunter's shirts in Alaska. Practical clothes were important for at least 11 years. I clearly remember patching pants I was wearing with the back pockets of the same pants I was wearing. I still put my wallet in my front pockets due to this habit. Also, tearing out chunks of the pant cuff to patch the ass, ignoring my appearance completely. I really wanted to be oblivious to the superficial aspects and soon enough I was wearing only rags or patchwork hobo clothes, wool blankets as a coat, cooking vegan stew for homeless heroin junkies, protesting social injustice...blah blah blah...hippies...blah blah blah...heartbreak...blah blah.
I bicycled across the country with two shirts and one pair of pants and then hitchhiked to Alaska with only the clothes I was wearing...and I eventually came back south with a totally different set of clothes taken from the Salvation Army where I worked picking up old couches.
Then followed 10 more years where fashion had no effect on me, I'd wear whatever had the fewest holes. I bought a leather shirt that ended up as a motorcycle seat cover.
But Los Angeles changed all that as I would clearly not fit in with the cool screenwriters and underwear models and pot dealers if I didn't mind my fashion. So I overspent on ridiculous designer clothes but was surprised that the more I spent the better the clothes fit. I was probably 34 years old before I understood what someone meant when they said my shirts were two sizes too big for me. I always bought Extra Large shirts because the sleeves would go all the way to the wrist. That seemed right to me. I liked the option of wearing a coat under my shirt. But in Los Angeles I bought all slim fitting clothes and vainly preened my feathers like a gimp peacock gawking at himself in the smog of a broken mirror. More than once in the last few years when I've had absolutely nothing to eat or any money have I sneered ruefully at the memory of a pair of designer jeans I bought for $185 in a Venice trendy boutique. They were hand embroidered by Singapore Slaves. $185 fucking dollars! How much pasta that could've bought me! How many meals! But you know what, those pants fit like no other pant. The zipper was like two inches long so to take a piss I had to undress. Ridiculous. At movie screenings people asked, "Where did you get those jeans?" It's not only OK to be vain in Los Angeles, it's required. I walked like Tony Manero.
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| Rocker a'la American Pop |
That probably started my latest trend in fashion, finding clothes that fit and have character. It turns out the clothes that have the most character fit the best. Don't blame me. I'm a slave in an unemancipated fashion world.
