How did I come to care so much about clothes? According to my Mum, as early as three years old I had a definite idea about my personal style. She would carefully choose my clothes  in the morning and lay them out for me, but I would come downstairs in a completely different outfit that she would have never thought to put together. She pretty much let me go at that point, realizing that some battles weren’t worth fighting. Once a week she got me into a dress, sadly it was a brown and orange Brownies uniform, but it was a dress, dammit and that’s what mattered. She had been surrounded by boys her whole life, first her brothers, then her sons, so you can’t blame her for wanting a girly-girl. Unfortunately she got me.

Being the only girl in a neighborhood of boys meant that I had no fashion role models. If that weren’t bad enough, I grew up in the Seventies, one of the god-awful worst decades for fashion. Between the swaths of poly-blends and corduroy, and the Cold War colour scheme, it’s not hard to understand why Quaaludes were the drug of choice for the era. If I saw a sorry group of kids dressed like that today I would hastily organize a telethon in their honour.

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My awesome "Dukes of Hazzard" shirt made this whale cry… on the inside.

[/twocol]What came next was in some ways worse: the label craze. The Eighties ushered in an era of status icons like Polo, Nike and Esprit.  One had to non-verbally communicate one’s income, because saying it out loud was tacky. However a ten inch neon Gucci symbol on your shirt was not. It’s not hard to understand why cocaine was the drug of choice for this era. My Mum refused to play the label game, “Those designers should be paying you to advertise for them.” So at the age of fourteen I got my first job so I could afford to keep up with the Joneses. But wearing designer clothes didn’t make me stylish, it made me a sheep. Thankfully, I outgrew that trend.
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