Freshmen Year
This was the first time I tried to use fashion to control the way I was perceived. The only previous notions I had had about the way I should dress had just been vague ideas about how I should probably stop wearing so many purple peace sign shirts (never did). Freshmen year, I thought I was a lot smarter than I actually was, and I wanted everyone to know it. I decided to start wearing blazers (hoodies for high IQs) over t-shirts about Harry Potter, politics, or preferably both.
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| I'm having a hard time coming up with a Harry Potter/Republican politics pun about this random Googled guy's nip. Order of the Pheonips? Win one for 'The Nipper'? House Majority Nip? |
I was super "into" politics in High School and never really have been since. I mean, I vote and stuff. Like, I try to stay informed. Okay, not really. That was a lie just now. When I said "I vote and stuff", I meant just for the president and when I said "I try to stay informed", I meant that I read the Michelle Obama issue of Vogue. I'm what's wrong with America. That is, if there's something wrong with America. It's not like I would know.
Sophomore Year
I was a desperate wannabe and a cyber bully. I wore clothes for children and bows in my hair and sideways studded belts and I bleached my hair into oblivion and took pictures for Myspace where I clutched the cord of the blinds as I pretended to stare longingly out of the window and it was all really, really stupid.
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| Pic for reference |
However, I did go through an interesting phase when I had do-it-yourself fusion extensions. First off, they were hilariously terrible.
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| Another pic for reference |
They were impossible to style and couldn't be pulled back into a ponytail without exposing the bonds (which was important because I was totally fooling everyone). I had a job at a movie theater and therefore needed to find a way to put it up to avoid getting an anonymous Indian woman's hair in people's popcorn. I found that the best solution was to just swirl up my hair like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The style was so tall and ridiculous that I decided to just embrace it. I figured I could channel Marie Antoinette and people would think I was making a statement instead of just having really, really bad hair. I went to a craft store and bought some clip-in birds and a nest complete with plastic eggs. This was what everyone was doing at 16, right?
Years later, I am still having a hard time coming to terms with how bizarre I must have looked. One time, this lady donated a dollar to the children's miracle network, so I asked if she wanted to write her name on one of those paper balloons. She choked back giggles as she told me that I should put my bird's name on the balloon. She and all of her friends then doubled over in laughter as they walked away.
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| She did donate to the Children's Miracle Network, so I guess she wasn't an altogether terrible person. |
Kitty Kane will go through another Marie Antoinette phase in Fashion Past Part 2: Adulthood.
Junior Year
This was the year I finally became aware of my desire to periodically change my persona. It was also the year I started naming my phases in order to make it easier to reference them. I had a lot of ideas, but I won't even bother covering all of them since I had little to no follow-through.
The summer before school started, I found a dirt-encrusted bag for gardening tools in our garage. I decided to theme my new persona around it. This phase was called Secret Garden.
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| The secret was that I didn't really have a garden. |
This new phase of my life would involve me wearing floral dresses every day and carrying that stupid bag around (whatever, fine), but it would also involve me smearing a little bit of dirt on myself before I went to school (crazy). I decided that if anyone asked about the mud on my face, I would tell them that it must have happened while I was working in my imaginary garden.
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| I actually only ended up doing this for a day or two, and no one even asked because I didn't have friends. |
The most important persona for me that year was called Cranberry Dreams. Cranberry Dreams was the natural evolution of an elaborate fantasy I had crafted for my future self in which I was married to a cranberry farmer in Wisconsin. In my fantasy, our farm had been in his family for generations, and we would even have a fun little boat to use on the bog called The Queen Berry. Anyway, the price of cranberries plummets, and I have to work three jobs to keep us afloat while all of our friends and neighbors in our independent cranberry farming community are, one by one, forced to sell their farms to the evil soul-sucking merchant of death, Ocean Spray. We're one of the few farms left when Ocean Spray goes under in a tragic health scandal that claims the lives of 143 people. Our farm then becomes massively successful and single-handedly saves Thanksgiving that year. My beautiful family is then featured in commercials, and I become super famous and an icon.
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| Despite dressing my son in cat costumes, he becomes a really successful hockey player. |
At 17, I decided to start dressing like the first lady of cranberries, like you do. It was essentially dressing like Jackie Kennedy except with necklaces and headbands made out of dried cranberries. I didn't really stick to this one either. It wasn't because I had a problem making and/or wearing craisin accessories, but more because I was bad at dressing classy.
The final phase I am going to discuss from this year didn't make it far enough to get a name back then. For our purposes, we'll just called the Victorian Nightgown Phase. It did not get very far because it was a really, really dumb idea.
Don't wear a Victorian nightgown to high school.
Senior Year
Everything was really stressing me out senior year, so I decided to "streamline my life". Streamlining my life meant sleeping in the clothes I was going to wear the next day, and it apparently also meant that I had to stop wearing bras. I cant even remember the reason, really. I mean, I guess it isn't comfortable to sleep in bras. I think it was also because I didn't want to go bra shopping. I had spent all of high school wearing these really weird sexy '80s bras that I had found in the garage in 8th grade. I made an executive decision that, support wise, it probably wasn't any worse to wear nothing than to wear them. So, yeah. I didn't wear bras during my senior year of high school.
Personal, but excellent question, readers. Three words:
Bulky | Corduroy | Jumpers
To further #streamlinemylife, I went to Goodwill and bought bulky corduroy jumpers which I assigned to different days of the week. Monday's jumper was probably the best looking and certainly the most classic, but Tuesday's jumper was my favorite because it was the most comfortable. I didn't have a jumper assignment on Friday because 1.) There were only four jumpers in anything close to my size at Goodwill, and 2.) YOLO? On Fridays, I would either have to repeat Monday or Tuesday's OOTD, or find something equally as bulky as a corduroy jumper.
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| Or just skip school. |
