And Crunchy Frog has yet to chime in about the Mood Jacket?
That is one unique jacket.
Well I’ll confess that the uniforms of the cheerleaders and the pep club of my high school are forever burned into my brain. Every game day 90% of the females in the school wearing flippy mini skirts in a school with a lot of stairs. So close, and yet, so far.
From the movies in Rear Window all the great Edith Head dresses that Grace Kelly wears especially the big black and white dress.
And from me. Remember back when you bought a pair of jeans and they were all stiff and hard and you had to wash them about a dozen times to be comfortable in them at all but how they really seem to conform to your particular body in a way that jeans today don’t? Now do you remember the horror of the leg seam that ends up for some reason, (cursed by the Gods) twisted around you leg like a barber pole stripe. I remember those.
I remember standing in line at the grocery store behind a HUGE woman wearing a black polyester muu-muu emblazoned with portraits of Elvis. BRRRRRRRRR… makes me shiver just thinking about it!
One summer my Mom sent me to a sewing class at a Singer store in a vain attempt to both get me out of her hair and put an end to those wails of “I’m bored!” Anyway, the fabric was dark blue with little red apples all over it. And I made a pair of pants. This was the early 70’s, and the pants were fairly close fitting down to my knees, where they flared out. The hems were about 26 inches around and took forever to hem. Ugh!!! And I loved them, and was proud of them, and wore them until they didn’t fit anymore!!!
A beautiful Asian woman walking across O’Connell bridge in front of me one day caught my attention.
Until, I saw her shoes.
They were beaten leather high heeled shoes, with a brown fabric rose on the toe.
I’m not a fashionable guy, but these shoes were hideous.
<sniff>
I just gave away my favorite dress I made for a “tropical-themed” cast party that I liked so much I would wear it to work at the bookstore. I’ve lost so much weight that the dress was huge on me.
Non-descript plain shirt dress (elastic waist, button up front, short sleeves, side pockets) in a medium green with large (about 6-8 inches tall) pink flamingoes, standing, stooping, looking over their shoulders. And pink buttons to blend in with the flamingos.
Screaming Florida. I loved that dress. You certainly knew where I was in the bookstore at all times.
crazy4chaucer, I had a dress in that same fabric (blue with red apples) in jr. high school. Loved that dress too.
Well, the best article of clothing (aside from some Adrian and Travis Banton gowns I was in the movies) was a coat I used to have. Bought it at Veteran’s Warehouse in B’more in the '70s. It was a black c1950 “swing” or car-coat. Huge shoulder pads, two big wooden buttons, and it was hip-length. Perfect over anything, for any weather, day or evening; dresed-up nicely with a brooch or dress clip. Wore it till it fell apart. Gosh, but I miss that coat.
[sub](coding fixed. – Uke)[/sub]
Goddam. I need more caffeine, to jolt my coding brain-cells back in order . . .
My mom dressed me funny for a long time. Purple and gold striped bellbottoms and red white and blue plaid bellbottoms come to mind.
But what is really burned into my brain is what I was wearing the day I figured out my mom dressed me funny.
I was 14, almost 15 (what can I say, clueless to the end, me) and one day in school I looked down at my clothes to see–
gray wide wale cordoroy flares, with the Mom Hem ™, remember, the six inch hem so there would be room to grow, and when you sat down, it was so big it stuck out from your leg at an odd angle, and when she let it down, there would be this embarrassing white wear line around your ankle?
a matching gray and blue and red plaid cowboy shirt with fake mother-or-pearl buttons
those saddle shoes from the 70s with the round toe and the stacked heel, beige and brown
I clapped my hands to my face, Munsch-style, as the scales fell from my eyes. And I rushed to the head shop and bought me an Allman Brothers T-shirt, the one with the magic mushroom on the front.
Thus beginning an obsession with T-shirts that lives to this day. I button a shirt once a month, maybe.
Good thread, Eve.
Three items come to mind:
The ex’s mother gave me an AWFUL baby blue acrylic sweater, shot with silver threads. High collared with that nasty princess puffy shoulder thing. Oh. And it was a size too small.
- She KNEW acrylic made me break out HORRIBLY
- She KNEW I hated baby blue
and - She OBVIOUSLY KNEW I didn’t like her, lol.
The other two items are akin to essvee’s problem–my momma dressed me funny (but I figured it our a bit earlier, lol):
The “Punctuation Dress” made by my gramma when I was 6 (1975). Lovely double knot polyester in a barely muted electric blue with exclaimation points, colons, semicolins, question marks all over. And the punctuation marks weren’t little… oh no… they were at least 3" long. I looked like the femme version of the Joker
and
The pink cordouroy pants with matching jacket. This was circa 1978. I was not allowed to wear jeans (Only poor people wear jeans! Well Ma, you always complain that we don’t have money for things, doesn’t that make us poor? Shut up), so cords it was. Now this “outfit” wasn’t just pink. It was PINK. The pink as noted in the OP. The pants were belled and the coat was like a bomber jacket. But, again, PINK. It was painful to see a tall Pepto Bismal colored child walking down the street.
Thank you, Ike. Now can you drop by periodically and straighten my seams?
When I was in college I had a pair of striped pants; the stripes were three shades of green. I would occasionally wear them with a bright pink shirt.
I called it my “watermelon outfit.”
Ahhh… my favorite grunge outfit was a ankle-length sack dress, in a greyish/brownish lavendar. I wore it with a copper cross on a leather string wrapped around my neck multiple times until it became a tangled choker. To this, I added black/white/grey striped wool stockings and combat boots.
I looked like a depression-era farmer’s wife, but god, I thought it was cool.
Ah, and there was my fondness for wearing neon green fishnets and a neon purple angora sweater (after seeing Ed Wood, I went through a big angora phase).
The article of clothing burned into my brain is a seafoam green scarf. I was bored while my mom was shopping at SportMart, and decided to test my memory. I stared intensly at the scarf, and told myself that the word “memory” would bring its image to my mind. It worked. Too damn well.
Visions of tassled ends have been haunting me for about 15 years now.
Okay, first of all let me be the first to say that Inky, your “feeble attempt at fashion sketching” is GORGEOUS. I think the rendering of the outfit is as lovely as the outfit itself is - well, let’s just say “aggressively themed.”
As for my own contributions to this thread, the first garment I thought of was the white thong-backed leotard worn over charcoal spandex short-legged tights that I saw clinging co-dependently to the fantastic behind of a woman on a stairmaster right in front of the treadmill I was on the one and only time I went to Mrs. Chef’s gym. She was apparently in training to climb all the stairs in the statue of liberty or something. Thanks to her, I stayed on that treadmill longer than I ever have on the one I have at home.
Anyway, I decided not to mention that one because I don’t want people to think I’m a leering pervert. (oops!) So instead I will tell you about two items from my wardrobe as a child in the 1970s. The first is a pair of blue denim cowboy boots that I insisted I MUST have when I was about five years old. I could have had any exotic leather I wanted, but I wanted “blue-jean feet.”
The other is a pair of bell-bottom jeans I wore when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old. They were that pale blue brushed denim, stitched in such a way that they appeared to have been assembled from 4-inch squares of fabric, and the bell bottom legs were SO big that I could hook them over my toes (more blue-jean feet!). Bear in mind that even at age 11-12, my shoe size was ALSO 11-12. I used to wear those jeans with either:
A. a brown velour shirt with a big floppy collar that unzipped halfway down, the better to show off your gold chains. The zipper had a big round pull-ring on it.
or
B. My “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” t-shirt, which featured a peeling image of the spaceship and the slogan “we are not alone.” A strategically placed stain above the “N” in “not” made it say, “we are hot alone.”
Somewhere there is a photo of me wearing my ultra-cool lavender hip-hugger bell-bottom cords, with a lavender top. I’m sure I am wearing my bamboo flip-flops. My hair is reminiscent of Roseanne Rosannadanna’s. My friend is wearing pink hip-hugger shorts, with a wide white belt. Her hair is bigger than mine, but brown.
Lord, we we were cool in 1973.
The only thing I ever wore that absolutely makes me want to wretch was a pair of pants my mother made for me. I was 4.
They were polyester, quilted pants. (Think cheap quilt fabric in the fabric store.) They were bellbottoms, but not in the tapered-then-flare-at-the-knee sense. The pants fit at the waist, but from there down, it was a huge, billowy pair of pants. It looked like I was wearing a skirt with a bad seam down the front. She must have made these pants from her culottes pattern. The fabric was brown, and had huge pink flowers all over it. There was lots of greenery, too. I HATED those pants. I mean, I’ve lived in the South all my life, and for the life of me I still can’t figure out what posessed my mother to make me quilted, polyester pants.
Ahhh yes, 1973.
White and maroon plaid pants, wide bell-bottoms
Midnight blue shirt
White butterfly bow-tie
Maroon jacket
White saddle shoes
Envision that on a skinny eighth grader with David Cassidy hair.
And yes, I picked it all out myself!
I once glimpsed a woman from a bus window whose outfit I will never forget.
She was wearing a bright orange knee-length dress, orange pantyhose (NOT tights! They were regular looking pantyhose, except for the color), and orange high heels.
It was winter, so she was also wearing a coat. A big, velvety-looking parka. It was dark green with bright red roses.
Okay, good outfit:
An Indian couple came in-I mean, from India. The woman was wearing one of those dress and pants outfits-I forget what they’re called. Anyway, the dress and pants are made of this gorgeous, to DIE for aqua colored silk. It was sooo silky and the color was just this absolutely lovely shade of aqua, it looked like water, it was soft and fluid looking. And the dress had an overlay of soft white lace, and then she had a huge scarf of the same aqua silk.
It was all I could do not to drool and say WHERE did you get that fabric???
As a kid in the mid 80’s I had a job at the corner store, downtown. Didn’t pay much, but the local personalities more than made up for it. There was one guy (who was pretty much insane) who used to walk around in a pirate suit. Real nice one too, blue velvet, big, shiny, black leather boots with gold buckles, big ass hat and everything. I always get a laugh when I think of this guy.