I’ve already lived through the 80s once; and with all the neon col­ors design­ers are inte­grat­ing into clothes this year, I’m hav­ing flash­backs every time I walk through a mall. It pains me, lit­er­ally, to see a new gen­er­a­tion mak­ing the same fash­ion mis­takes we made in the 80s. Along with Flock of Seag­ull hair­cuts, neon col­ors should have been left in the last cen­tury. I have pic­tures of myself from the 80s and I cringe every­time I even think about my skate-or-die hair­cut with my bangs hang­ing down in front of my eyes and a gawdy neon print t-shirt bright enough to flag down an air­plane if I ever got lost in the wilder­ness.  Now these poor kids are going through it again. They’re gonna regret their fash­ion choices in a few years when they look back  and say, “What the hell was I think­ing?”  Now with the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of face­book, their pic­tures won’t just dis­ap­pear into a box under their bed, they’ll be for­ever imor­tal­ized on the every present world wide web. Now it looks like their gonna make the mis­takes of the 90s as well.

I caught this can­did pic­ture of a col­lege girl at Office Depot in the San Gabriel Val­ley. (Please, no com­ments on me tak­ing can­did pics of young girls in pub­lic places) Any­way, notice the tell­tale red and black lum­ber­jack plaid. Grunge was an anti-fashion move­ment that orig­i­nated in the 90s Seat­tle music scene, that was pop­u­lar­ized by bands like Nir­vana and Pearl Jam, and char­ac­ter­ized by its com­bi­na­tion of plaid but­ton downs with shorts or ripped jeans. Now it looks like this anti-fashion is becom­ing the lat­est trend for the uber-fashionable. Accord­ing to this arti­cle from late last year ‘90s Grunge Is Mak­ing a Come­back.

Despite attempts to be new and orig­i­nal, I think fash­ion is cir­cu­lar because when it gets too avant garde it becomes com­pletely unrec­og­niz­able and then it’s just mis­taken as hav­ing no taste at all. The way I see it, the trend­set­ters try to set them­selves apart from the rest of the masses by wear­ing items that are on the edge of good taste. Then every­body else picks up on this, and want­ing to be trendy but not too dif­fer­ent, adopts items and trends that are rec­og­niz­able with them, like trends from the past.  And every time a fash­ion era is recy­cled, it gets a slight update in some way, like with a more cur­rent cut or get­ting paired with more cur­rent acce­sories like the black tights and over­sized purse of the chick in the pic­ture above. In my com­pletely unfash­ion­able opin­ion, some­times it works and some­times you end up with the eye scorch­ing color palette of the eight­ies. Next thing you know, we’ll be wear­ing Birken­stocks and Doc Martens again.