Let me ask you a question how many of you own a pair of white socks? Sounds kind of like a dumb question doesn’t it? But there was time that a generation of us wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a pair of them. Think about it, it’s a style thing now, you wear, what do they call them now, running shoes, we called them teeny-shoes, you wear white socks right. If you wear any other color, your kids won’t let you out the house. But when we were growing up you weren’t caught dead wearing a pair. Because if you were, remember what the next thing you would hear, “Hey what’s the matter, you got athlete’s foot?” “You need to go find something to put on it.”
Isn’t it funny how styles change? The generation before us, that’s all they wore, but not kids from the seventies! That’s like hats, I don’t think I ever see a teenager these days without one on, we only wore them when we were playing ball, and that was it. I can’t say anything though; I don’t walk out the house now without one on, but at least the bill is turned around straight.
When I see a young man with a hat on, usually the bill looks like it’s turned to quarter past twelve. Like he’s not sure where he’s going, but I know I’m getting to be an old fogey, and that’s just his style. But I got to be honest, when I’m talking to one of these young men, half the time, I’m just staring at the hat, it’s driving me crazy, “For Pete’s sake, turn that hat around.”
But I guess that’s what I’m getting at, styles change so fast that most of us can’t keep up. And we tend to think it’s just the younger generation, and it’s just them trying to show us how old we are. But we did it too. Think about it. Back in the seventies, we didn’t wear jeans all that much, except to school. But if you went out on a date you had to wear those polyester pants, I still hate them. Then what happened?
Jeans came back in style. But not just any jeans, it had to be Levi’s with the patch over the right hip, or left, I can’t remember? They couldn’t be Wrangler’s, they weren’t “Cool”! And then if you wore polyester, well good luck with those! Then the next thing you knew, Wranglers were “Cool”, as long as they had the red tag on the back. Then it was khaki, and it went round and round, and we fuss about the kids these days, hey, we were as confused as they are.
Maybe it was climate change, maybe it was finally somebody got some sense, but finally we were allowed to wear shorts. I don’t know who came up with that, but he is my new best friend. Oh we had shorts alright, cutoff blue jeans that had holes in the knees, so we couldn’t wear them to school anymore, so we just swam in them. This was before the fancy bathing suits of today. But they tell me that jeans with holes in the knees go for a hundred dollars a pair now, by the end of school in May each year, I would have had me a couple hundred dollars worth. Who knew? I could have been rich!
That’s why I guess the kid’s styles these days don’t really bother me much. By the time you get round to fussing about it, the style will change again, and you wish they were still wearing what they were before. We wore our shirt tails in to school, they wear T-shirts. We wore long pants and socks, they wear Rainbows. Our teachers freaked out when they saw us with our shirttails out, me I would have loved to have wore shorts and Rainbows, we didn’t have A/C back then. So I guess the newer generation does get a little smarter as time goes by.
But we do have a tendency to want to accept the new while holding on to the past. But trust me, like a guy I saw the other day, Bermuda shorts, black socks and sandals …
Well that’s not cutting it.
You can reach Robbin Bruce by e-mail at robbinbruce@yahoo.com.