I’m watching commercials for back to school clothes. It’s important to predict the styles that I’ll be up against when I return. I consider each possible combination that could arrive in my classroom. No, I don’t want to own them, I want to be ready to mock them, and some heads up is helpful in improvisational comedy.  Sometimes I think Fashion Avenue visited Wheel of Bad Fortune over too many $15 martinis. They spun the roulette wheel, creating combos no sober person could take seriously but teens everywhere would flock to buy in this largest-shopping-season-outside-Christmas. Add in a marketing genius, a three-digit price tag for a ridiculously cheap to produce item, and a celeb or two for good measure, and you’ve got a formula outfits I can mock clear till spring. That entertains me.   The fashion designer who gets them to buy the dumbest looking, least practical fashion item wins. “Let’s put leg warmers….” spin the wheel “with cardigans!”

I’m not innocent here–I’m a school child of the 80’s. I’ve admitted to swimming in $3 discount-rack teal, wearing tin earrings, thinking the worst perm in the world would make me cool. An icepack couldn’t have made me cool. Not to mention the jelly bracelets–very little more than thick elastic scraps from some manufacturing process. Some guy swept them up and said, “Make them pretty colors…the Americans will buy them. The British, too.”

Friendship pins (see credit below)

We had “friendship pins.” Safety pins with colored beads in patterns of coded significance on them. Doesn’t get cheaper and stupider than that. You put them on your sneakers. You made one for each of your friends. I loved them. The kids with the most pins were the most popular. It was our equivalent of goths wearing soda tabs. Are you recycling, or too cheap for jewelry? Much like liking your own stuff on social media, people made their own pins to bolster their popularity, but if you got caught, it was “reset to zero” time. Not cool. You were not just a loser who had no friends, you were a loser who got caught. I didn’t have many pins. It was a big deal if someone didn’t give you one–we didn’t care so much about self-esteem in the 80’s.

There were several 80’s fashions that should never come back, but they seem to be. The colors that remind me of Attack of the Highlighter, the skinny jeans, the leopard print. Heck, we wore old-school skinny jeans before spandex–when you had to hold your breath all day to fit in.  When they went out of style, everyone took one big breath heading for the loose and sagging 90’s…to make up for the decade without air. That’s when global warming accelerated. Look it up. It’s true.

Teen fashion just cycled through some regurgitated 60’s fashions followed by some 70’s. It’s like a time machine on crack. Each decade lasts a week, it seems. In real life, it took us ten years to impose and escape a decade of bad fashion, but now it seems that the cycles compress faster and get more extreme as the trends pass by, getting more and more expensive all the while.

I did like the neat suits the students sported a la Mad Men. Those were classy. Students in suits and ties looking suspiciously like interviewees… “Nah, Miss, no reason.” Society’s gotten so casual that students will dress up to rebel and tell me such. What kind of awesome is THAT?

So, we’ll see what they come up with this season, and I’ll mock it in due time. In the mean time, I’ll watch commercials and trends. The K-mart “Yo mama is so fiscally responsible,” commercial made me applaud, but the “Back to School Style Guide” advertising Flashdance midriff shirts for back to school? Not so much… maybe for a pole-dancing PE extracurricular activity, but not in my world. Not while my mind is still alert.

I have commented on teens before. Saggers and goths and preps, oh my! Give it your best shot, future students–it’ll be hard to outdo my bad fashion, but you’ll push the limits this school year, and I’ll do my best to chronicle it here. In twenty years, you’ll all come back and say, “You were right. I did look ridiculous.” And the worst part–they charged you for the privilege.

[images: Copyright Kim Dietrich Elam 2010 (Friendship Pins) http://www.betterphoto.com/gallery/dynoGallDetail.asp?photoID=9747583

and polyvore.com and tumblr 1960’s fashion]

Edit and correction: I thank Kim Dietrich Elam for providing the correct photo credit–I credited the pinner. My screw up meant I got to meet a really interesting person. Kim has a super business: K*Notes (Creative Stationary and Photography).  I loved her selection and gallery, and she’ll make pretty much anything for you.