Fashion Sense
We have recently lived through another attempt to bring back the styles of the 70's. First American Idol brought back disco, and in this age of rap, disco actually seemed like an improvement, briefly. Then they tried to bring back--shudder--bell bottoms. Generation X has better taste than I thought, because my peers refused to wear the things. Pretty good for a generation so insipid and devoid of direction that no one could come up with a characterization for it.
However, I have noticed that since the '92 Oscars, pretty, young actresses have been parading about at all the celebrity events in huge bell bottoms. Practically every actress on Letterman comes out wearing the things. I guess they don't realize that they would get the same wild applause and hooting if they came out wearing a huge burlap sack, with nothing but a hole cut in it for the head. Anyone else wearing bell bottoms is immediately told by friends, family, even random passers-by, that they look really stupid. In many states , wearing bell bottoms is a felony, with the exception of Navy enlisted men. Sailors seem to have had the misfortune of having their uniforms designed at an inopportune fashion moment and now they are stuck with them.
Looking really stupid seems to have been very popular in the 70's, although everyone has either destroyed or hidden their photos from that decade, so one has to generalize from the few pictures that remain. In them, everyone seems to be wearing lime-green polyester suits with lapels wide enough for gerbils to nest in without the owner being able to tell. Often the nests spread into the person's hair, which may explain why it looked so goofy. Once a gerbil has taken up residence in your hair, the only way to get rid of it is to shave your head. This is why the buzzcut became so popular in the early 80's.
Perhaps one of the reasons we X'ers are immune to the lure of bell bottoms is that we went to school in the 80's. Textbooks are always about ten years out of date in public schools, so we laughed ourselves silly at the pictures of 70's-clad teens demonstrating the use of slide rules. Not only did those guys have no taste in clothes, but also they didn't even know how to work a calculator! What a bunch of rubes.
Despite all this, fashion designers are still desperately trying to push 70's style on us again. From this I have concluded that designers do not want us to look good. They want us to look as goofy as they do, preferably even more so, which is only possible via bell bottoms.
The one good thing about Generation X is that its members all strive desperately to be different, to be their own person. Since trying to acquire an actual personality takes far too much effort, X'ers express their individuality through clothing. Since they are completely incapable of original thought, they look at what other people are wearing and pick up whatever appeals to them. This soon leads to a bona fide trend, and everyone then has to search for a new style. The smart ones, of course, just keep wearing the same thing, calling themselves "trend setters" every time it comes back into style, and "fashion rebels" in the meantime.
The ultimate result is that somewhere someone is wearing any possible combination of styles you can dream up. This frees the world at large to wear whatever we want, just so long as it isn't bell bottoms.
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