Miscellaneous Thoughts on Lunch Hour Shopping and Fashion Nostalgia...

I went to Nordstrom today--Savvy/TBD (or the aging, hip Gen Xer department, as we call it around the office)--and was thrown by the overwhelming number of Lacoste (or Izod as we called it in the day) articles of clothing for sale. Maybe I'm just too old, but I feel like I've already lived through the overpaying-for-a-polo-shirt phase of my life...but I must admit that if they'd had one of those Lacoste dresses for sale, I would have bought one. I remember the one I used to have about 22 or 23 years ago...it was a tasteful red with a little matching belt. I wore that dress a lot.

That was back in the day when I remember first being really fashion-conscious. I had this good friend Brynn, and she and her older sister Etienne (their actual names) both had the coolest clothing of anyone in school. I would hang out at their house after school, and we'd watch the Love Boat and look through our collections of stickers, which were mainly scratch-and-sniff, Hello Kitty, and miscellaneous rainbows and/or unicorns. Sometimes we'd jump on the trampoline. Then we'd talk about how the other girls in school didn't have a clue about how to dress....we were so stuck up.

I remember when Guess? Jeans became really popular, and I just had to have at least one pair, even though I don't know how I talked my parents into wasting so much money on clothes for me. The first pair I had was blue denim with mid-thigh pockets that featured a splash of grayish-black denim. I remember this pair very well, because I had only owned them for about two weeks when one day I was walking home from school, and it was really icy outside... I fell down and made a hole in the knee of my brand new Guess? jeans. (Unfortunately, this was long before holes in jeans were considered cool). Anyway, when my Dad found out about the hole, he was FURIOUS! That was not a good time.