Trends scare me. As soon as I have found my very own groove, some magazine comes along and declares the thing I love is now for public consumption. Ugh.
It can be exhausting keeping ahead of trends. Another way to play the game is to follow so far behind them that you're out of the loop. Easy for me to say, I wear mostly vintage, but now and again, the trains stops at my station and who gets on but a surfeit of MEs, all wearing glasses that no attractive girl deemed wearable only one short month ago. A passle of hipsters wearing men's shoes carrying no handbag with purple eyeshadow and vintage Trifari bracelets. A shaol of mothers in sweaters sporting asymmetric hems. I paid good money when those Ricks Owens knits first came out and now you can get cheap rip-offs at H&M?! Double ugh.
So for a brief moment, I seem current, despite all sartorial protestations from yours truly that I now fit into a tidy category where I once stood out like a sore thumb. I liked sore thumb status, but I'm absorbed again by the mainstream, and I must come up with a combination of clothing and accessories that is unusual. Round and round and round she goes... I don't buy trendy pieces because they don't last. I take my tried-and-true collection of Martin Margiela pieces and combine them with tiny things that make them different all the time. But what happens when my trend that was never meant to be trendy dies? Where does that leave me? I'm a dork because I wear glasses when the glasses trend goes away? How will I see? Why wear glasses if you don't need them? Help me out here, I'm confused. I'm outre when Elle declares we've moved away from wearing flat shoes? How can I take my son to the zoo in Yves Saint Laurent platforms?
I hate losing a good discovery to the masses because it means I have to run with the pack and will soon be left behind by that very same pack. You go ahead, girls. I am always walking the tightrope between extremely fashion-forward and passe. And then I will be contriving more strange ways to not be one of everyone else. Look more homeless, more dirty, more French, more Bohemian, less colorful, less mall-esque, and still look like me.
In the three decades since I was 15 and had found my style, for all the running I've done to escape being swallowed alive by fashion, here I am, wearing men's pants that I've cut and hemmed myself with combat boots. So maybe the pants are made in Italy and the combat boots are more expensive than I care to share. I am not really running at all—I'm on a hamster's treadmill, exercising myself in endless circles. Yeah. That sounds fine to me but I may lay off the Ricks Owens sweaters for a while until they're completely out of fashion.
Madeline Meyerowitz is the owner of enokiworld.com, a website specializing in vintage designer clothing.
