posted by kiku on Sep 1
There was a time in the deep, dark past full of horror and madness. It was known as… The Seventies. Among the uncountable misbegotten fashion horrors of the time was one particular item which traumatized me terribly. This was basically what amounted to an evening gown of disreputable cut, always of some synthetic material of particularly tragic colour-scheme. It had a roman-type halter front, a bare upper back and hung to the floor and was usually worn with sandals. And it was worn IN PUBLIC! IN THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY! It was generlly eschewed by the younger set and attached itself to its victim around age 39 or so with No. Upper. Limit. And all that that implies. :erk: The complete picture generally included a faux-snakeskin cigarette case with lit Virginia Slim in one hand and a highball in the other. Constantly. Costume jewelry, pink lipstick and powder-blue eyeshadow as needed. And hairspray. LOTS of hairspray.
Now that I’ve churned the stomach painting this sordid memory, I should add that I had thankfully managed to repress the horror of this memory….. until now.
So I was out running some few errands this past weekend. I try to avoid malls, shopping centers and the like where the general rabble go on weekends, but I needed something to carry all my gear to my job. I park a kilometer away, carry my shoes, lunch, computer, fluids, etc and much as I despise the trendy-ness of a backpack, practicality won out. So I went to a local well-known asian import place that specializes in luggage, purses, etc. It was in a northern suburb called Frisco where the middle class has most recenly decided to build their hideous ersatz McMansions and it was there, THERE that horror befell me.
I was walking around the store and toward me walked an image from the long-ago – the definitive ’70s matron in all her glory. My shock was short-lived though, as suddenly a whole…flock, for lack of a better word, of them came rushing past as I tried to avoid slipping into a fear-coma. And at that point my last drop of Nepenthe’s waters must have worn off, as I saw at that store, the next two I visited, and even on the streets of my favourite little area to go shopping in a completely different place more and more of these horrors from the past.
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My first draft of this was ranted further and was far more Lovecraftian and contained worlds such as “vermiform”, “charnel” and “necrophagous”. The point is that there is no reason that that fashion item should ever have been dredged from the slime of the past. It was trashy then, it’s trashier now. I truly hope this is merely a localized, and/or temporary whim of the clueless middle-class, and not some harbinger of a new cliff over which American culture is going to run, lemming-like into the great sea of banality.
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