Fashion Fuck Ups

I made so many fashion fuck-ups growing up that I think it’s permanently altered the part of my brain that sees reality; the part that’s called judgement and makes you team up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that do go together and discard the long wrap-around skirt, chunky trainers, ratty old T-Shirt and winter cardigan (in the middle of summer no less) that don’t. Truly, the instances of getting it seriously wrong were so numerous that any ‘fashion sense’ potential was muddied until buried somewhere deep and dark, never to surface again. They say that if you do a thing 35 times or more, it becomes a habit. Well, I’m a habitual fashion f-up and I blame my teenage years.


But then, I did grow up in the Eighties, so the blame can’t be entirely mine. Anyone escaping the 80s with fashion sense unscathed is a rare and special thing and should be on display in a museum.


So, yes, back to the fashion disasters. There was the whole wearing Dad’s diamond-pattern-Sunday-afternoon-in-the-pub cardigan with jeans and black patent shoes, then the animal print two pieces (not leopard print or zebra print or anything like that but little dogs or cats in a zany pattern with bows on their heads and on their tails). But the biggest, boldest and sustained for the longest fashion f-up was cycling shorts with everything. Didn’t matter what the occasion was, or the weather, me and my sister would be wearing cycling shorts and trainers with thick white ankle socks. Teamed with either a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt or a unisex jumper.


My cycling shorts were black and had a black and white checked panel down the outside of each leg. My sister had orange detailing on her cycling shorts. We used to colour co-ordinate as much as possible, so she was always looking for something black or orange to wear with them. I liked to match mine with something red. Black, white and red; me and the Nazis very fond of that colour combo. I had one particular T-shirt that I used to wear all the time with my cycling shorts, even in the freezing cold. What can I say? I was daft back then.


Anyhow, wearing cycling shorts and a T-shirt in February meant that my nipples were permanently hard, earning me the nickname of bullet nipples.