One of the biggest causes of conflict in families these days is fashion. If you want to touch off WWIII, just let Junioretta come downstairs in the outfit she’s put together for her day and watch the sparks fly.
I’ve always been interested in why people wear what they wear. I’ve come to three conclusions.
First, fashion choices are not random. What we wear makes a statement about us. Second, many people are not aware they’re making a statement with their costumes, but clothes say something about us. And third, fashion is driven by generational perceptions of what’s important in life.
I as chatting with a friend in a medical clinic awhile back. She watched as a teenaged male bent over at the drinking fountain. Even though his hoodie was a foot too long, his pants still drooped down around his hips to uncover his colored underwear. (Thank goodness for Jockey!)
“Humph,” she snorted. “When I was a girl, we tried to look our best. Now the kids don’t seem to care how they look.”
Surveying the kid’s garb, I could tell that he did care very much about how he looked. He had probably spent a great deal of time selecting the sloppy, mismatched hoody and pants that he had to keep hitching up and the shower shoes he was scuffing along in. He just didn’t care what a couple of old duffers like us thought of his choice, because the choice wasn’t made for us. He had chosen those clothes to impress his peers.
Young people today aren’t interested in impressing older people because, frankly, we don’t matter much in their scheme of things.
They care more about what those their own age think, largely because they spend more time with their peers. Most of them have been brought up not with adults, but in daycare centers and kindergartens starting at age 3 or before. So their sense of style is developed not by looking up toward what Grandma wears but outward toward what their peers are wearing.
In fact, their fashion choices are often made in rebellion against what adults wear. As a generation of parents, maybe we Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers have let them down. They’re disillusioned with our divorce rate, our tarnished morality, our religious hypocrisy and our blatant materialism.
They don’t want to be like us, so they don’t want to dress like us. In fact, I see more adults trying to dress like teenagers, which shows you who Mom and Dad are trying to impress.
Jail house attire like we saw on the young man at the clinic, began as a style that protested a sad situation. The look seeks to imitate what prison inmates wear. It comes from the fact that 1.9 million people are in jail in the U.S. today, where belts are forbidden because of hangings and pants droop too low without them, where shower shoes are the footwear distributed to slow down the progress of anyone who wants to make a break for it.
Grunge, a style from the eary 2000s with its torn, pants and faded flannel shirts, developed in Seattle, where many parents had high-paying jobs with electronics companies. They could afford to buy their kids the preppy best. Grunge was a reaction against the expectations of those parents and their values, which the kids judged to be hypocritical and shallow.
Grunge turned into Covid dressing, a style we’re still dealing with which makes the wearers look like they just reluctantly got out of bed and which they wear to occasions that used to be considered “dressy.” They’re saying, “Life depresses me and your dressy event doesn’t matter to me.”
The youth style for girls that most infuriates older people is best described as “hot.” It features lots of skin, lots of cleaveage, lots of clinging, and little of anything else. Like underwear.
The message here is that nothing matters except sex in this society, and 13 years old is old enough to be putting it out there.
I wonder if “hot” isn’t a reaction against the false modesty of a society that wants teens to cover up while parents watch the bump and grind show at concerts and the Super Bowl halftime. And aren’t adults producing those entertainments?
Do kids think all this out before they buy into a style? Of course not. Once a trend begins, kids just follow it and its philosophy tobe cool. It’s cool to look bored and uncaring. They don’t think much about what they’re reflecting as long as it’s a style their friends wear and their parents hate. They especially like it if their parents hate it.
My generation wore styles that our folks protested, but we weren’t dressing for them either.
Kids have to go through a time of rebellion or they would stay attached at the umbilical cord forever and never grow up. Many are still attached, in fact, not to a cord but to a card— the credit card of their parents. Well, somebody is paying for those revealing, skin-tight dresses and sloppy hoodies, right?
Parents have to suffer through this time of breaking away when their kids are apt to wear “inappropriate” apparel.
But if we don’t like it, maybe we shouldn’t be paying for it? Or we could wear our pj’s to their weddings in protest? “Honey, your dressy occasion bores me.” We get a choice too, you know.
