Coordinated camo contemporary fashion statement
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When did we give up thinking for ourselves?
Was that part of the school curriculum? We all remember teachers in school who didn’t appreciate a student questioning or disagreeing with them. Two of my high school English literature teachers had diametrically opposing views on this. I always thought literature was influenced by one’s own imagination, experience and terms of reference so people reading stories or poems could have significantly differing points of view.
One of my teachers would give full marks for your opinion if you could back it up. I got marks in the 90s. The other didn’t even want to hear anything other than what she told you. I almost failed.
Not completely comfortable following the masses has been a source of great pleasure for me as well as much distress but that’s a story for another day. Right now I am thinking about our acceptance of what others tell us is trendy. Some unknown entity tells us what is hot in hairstyles, fashion and home décor and we follow their lead.
Trends are usually short lived but often come back again and again. If you live long enough you can go through many incarnations of the same style. Minis, maxis, capris, leggings, pencil skirts, military, boho and many other styles have been seen in some form or another several times in my lifetime. Many of us remember wearing pants with legs so tight we could hardly get our feet through them but back then there wasn’t any stretch in them and we didn’t call them skinny jeans.
But there always used to be rules in fashion and home decor. Today there are no tenets of style. It’s an anything-goes format. Today it’s OK to put beige and grey together, navy or brown with black. You can wear white all year long and pink goes with orange. And patterns, well, everything goes together these days.
Back in the Victorian era lots of floral and stripes were fashionable and if you see a room decorated in this style it looks lovely. But to live in it would be difficult I would think. Nothing too calming or comforting with that many floral patterns all together in one room. Just because someone says it’s stylish doesn’t make it livable. To mix animal prints with a zigzag carpet and geometric wallpaper is way too jarring on the eyes and nerves. I couldn’t imagine putting a grey marble counter top with a beige and brown granite back splash on cherry wood cabinets, even though TV and magazine designers say it’s good. But then I don’t like stainless appliances, either, so I guess I am not up on my style trends.
Stylists tell us it’s chic to pair stripes with polka dots and floral. It’s hip to put weird colours together. Come on now, you know a blue flowered top doesn’t go with a red, green and yellow striped pant but how often, if fashion dictates, do we wear it anyway?
Well, some of us are right in the latest fashion from head to toe. Morgan, being a teenage boy, has whole-heartedly embraced the camo trend. He was wearing a camo hat, camo sweatshirt, camo coat and camo pants. To him it all matched because it was all camo even though each piece had a decidedly different pattern and colour from the others. If he wasn’t standing beside me I couldn’t have found him.
I guess there is something to be said for the I-don’t-care-I-like-it attitude.
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