|
|
|
|
High school was big hair time. It was the late eighties, and Miami Vice had changed the fashion world. At school, sophomore year, my friend Tim took to wearing white and pastel-colored leisure suits with rolled-up sleeves. Baggy--thanks to the comeback of pleats--was in, though not out of control as it would be in the nineties. Skirts come off the knees, descending well below them or--to my delight (those folks in the early seventies had, until then, all the pleasure)--came well above them, as the miniskirt had returned. But there were no boots, no stacked heels; instead, there were stilettos, which at the time seemed much sexier anyway.
I was not a cool kid when it came to clothing, which is not to say I was a cool kid when it came to other things. My friend Tim was not exactly cool either, though he tried. To me, trying only seemed to emphasize one's uncoolness, not that not trying made one any more cool. Cool was something you just had, and if you didn't, you just didn't. I just didn't.
By the time I hit high school, I was not growing much anymore. What this meant was that I did not receive a slew of new clothes at the beginning of the school year. I had had some shirts, some pants, for two years at that point. In junior high, I had had a preference for pullover shirts; now button downs had taken over. I was not fashionable.
Junior year, though, the school, having grown tired of continual "dress code infractions," instituted a uniform. Now what few clothes I had gotten at the start of the year were not replaced at all. I had a uniform to wear, and at night I could wear the clothes from junior high. No one much saw me at night anyway, as I did not hold much of a night-time social life. The lack of "cool" clothes did not seem that important to me, except that my pants were painfully short.
Denied their own style of suiting up, students found voice in their hair, and as we came closer and closer to graduation, hair got bigger and bigger, as if mimicking our own journey toward bigness, toward "adulthood." Guys cut their hair between short and long and then spiked it high. My friend Brian bleached his hair (an infraction of school rules) and took to combing it back in a sort of pompadour.
But we all kept the hair on the side of our heads, no matter what the rock stars were doing. Not that this had much to do with the official rules. Granted, the faculty warned had us not to cut off our "sideburns" (as if teenagers have such things), but why would we have? No sideburns meant we were sissy, and none of us wanted to be that, even if it was "cool."
Meanwhile, girls spent hours with a curling iron, curling long bangs up above their heads rather than letting them falling down into their eyes. In the late eighties, hair was about defying gravity, and defying gravity took effort and time. Year by year, the amount of background space devoted to hair in each girl's yearbook photograph grew by centimes. By senior year, hardly any background was left.
My own hair stayed in the same style it had always had. I treated my hair much as I had my clothes, with a certain apathy. The only thing that did change was that I no longer used hairspray. While other guys were mousing their hair into spikes and pompadours, I chose instead to go with my natural wave. It worked well, for the only thing less cool than natural, was to comb one's hair straight and glue it down with hairspray and water.
And then we graduated. Seniors took their finals two weeks early and then, the last week of regular classes, headed off for a one-week trip to San Diego. The weekend before, I went shopping for clothes. After two years of uniforms and virtually no new clothes since the start of high school, I was in dire need. I bought three new shirts, two new pairs of pants, a tie, and a belt. Thin ties, this collars, pleats--these were things I couldn't avoid. I looked for things that weren't as trendy, that might last me another five years, but they were not to be had. I settled on "cool" clothes. Bagginess and pleats would stay in for another decade at least, so my fears in terms of the pants proved unfounded. And the shirts--most of them would wore out long before the fashion changed. In fact, I wish that I still had them. Only the tie remains from that time, rather stupid looking, but I still wear it every few weeks, a relic from teen years. Sometimes people comment its vintage spirit.
The clothes I purchased that weekend, along with what clothes were still in good enough repair to wear, were what came with me on the senior trip. I saved most of them for later in the week, growing--as others remarked--progressively cooler as the week continued. But it was too late. High school was coming to an end. For the next six years, until I left California, I would yearn to return to those days, a hipper version of myself.
| Previous | Next |
| Back to Main Page | Back to Archives |
bravenet.com