Published: May 03, 2008 11:39 pm            

Never doubt the significance of fashion

EDMOND — I rolled up my button-fly, loose-legged blue jeans and secured the folds with giant safety pins. Dad’s white dress shirt hung off my shoulders and almost to my knees.

Mom grumbled her doubt that the colorful scarf I’d tied about my neck would keep my head on straight — or that my beaded Indian moccasins would keep me grounded — but what did she know?

It was the late ’40s, for cryin’ out loud! From head to toe — including my swinging ponytail and the obligatory bright red lips — I met the criteria for what passed as fashion among my 10th-grade friends. That’s all that mattered.

While the A-student girls did their homework after school, we B-student girls called each other every hour on the hour until bedtime to discuss what we would wear the next day. Our goal was to stand out in the high school crowd as individuals, which — in our skewed teenage logic — we sought to achieve by dressing identically. Go figure!

If one of our dads was wearing his last clean white shirt the next morning — or if a sister had called dibs on the last pair of jeans in the closet — the unfortunate girl would double over in false cramps and go back to bed, while the rest of us went to school looking, uniquely, like clones.

Sloppy Joe sweaters — not to be confused with anything edible — played a part in that blue jean era, but not for long. Next came the sweater cardigan, but buttoned in back with a long strand of beads worn in front where the buttons were meant to be. The backward cardigan required a skirt, though, never slacks. For reasons known only to our moms, jeans were tolerable but slacks were risqué.

Fluffy, colorful feathers attached to a comb were affixed to our hair, and spit-and-polished saddle oxfords — white combined with either brown or black — were “in” that year, worn with anklets whose tops must be folded down neatly.

Those and other incongruous fashion statements raged on throughout that year and the next. Then came the junior-senior prom, where we transformed B-student caterpillars hardly recognized each other in the butterflies we’d become.

I wore orchid. Not the flower, the color. It was the orchid flower that I wore to the football banquet, but I gave it back when my escort insisted it was tradition to kiss the bequeather.

My orchid-colored prom dress was made of filmy chiffon over taffeta. It was strapless, but Mom, distrusting gravity at the last minute, made a shirred taffeta stole to wear over my bare shoulders — except for the left one, where Darrell taped the gardenia he’d brought.

That would be the Darrell spelled with two ls — the one with the incredibly long eyelashes. Not to be confused with the one-l Darrel, my seventh-grade heartthrob, who also was the twin of his eighth sister.

I wore white eyelet to the prom my senior year. Mom made that dress too, ballerina length so I could swish when I danced in the white and gold flats that tried but failed to keep me from looming above Jimmy. He got taller later in life. I’d have enjoyed that evening more if I’d known he was going to.

At the appointed time, we B-student girls went off to college, where we eventually tired of conforming to the campus fashion gurus; slipped back into the jeans we’d worn in our youth, and strove with some success to become A-student girls.

Never doubt the significance of fashion. From jeans to prom dresses and back to jeans — the time-honored sequence of evolving.



MARJORIE ANDERSON is an Edmond resident.

        

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