Fashion Disasters

I am an engineer so I reserve the right to dress poorly at any given time. I shouldn’t be the first person to have an opinion on what is fashionable nor should my opinion carry any weight. Once when I was very little, I donned a safari suit for one of our family pictures. I rocked that little suit but it’s hard to argue that a safari suit was ever fashionable. I also never followed trends, in Cape Town I never owned a pair of Grasshoppers and in Joburg I have yet to own a pair of Chuck Taylor’s (Man those are a pair of uncomfortable sneakers, I think flip-flops have more ankle support than those do). So as you can see I am highly qualified to give style tips. 

There comes a time, however, when I see crises in personal style that make my teeth hurt. Now for something to be that bogus that it makes my anti-style teeth hurt; it has to be a monumental error of judgement on the part of the person I happen to see.  

On Sunday, we went to my grandmother’s birthday somewhere in Florida. Now Florida isn’t really a hotspot for fashion but I wasn’t expecting to see such a high level of disastrousness. My first hint that things were going awry was when Sarah and I were waiting for Naomi and my mom at the garage. Four teenage looking guys pull up next to me in an old school BMW 3-series convertible. The first thing I notice is that all of them have peroxided their hair “emoticon yellow”, not just one, all of them. The next thing that strikes me is that they’re also wearing almost identical apparel. And we all know the benefits of wearing black t-shirts when it’s about 32 degrees outside. But it didn’t end there; they were bedecked in layers of cheap jewellery that would’ve looked better on the branches of a Christmas tree than on their necks and fingers. Add to that a few gold teeth and you’ve got yourself and you’ve got a reading of 5 on the bogus-Richter scale. 

That was a pretty heavy start to the Florida expedition of style and class but we pushed onwards to my aunt’s place. It was a cool family party, the people were relaxed; everyone was happy to see each other; there were those awkward silences when you see people that are in your family but you have no idea who they are. Good times. Then Sarah noticed one of our apparent nephews and whispered to me “Fashion disaster!” Curious to see if this kid could beat the previous reading I thought I’d have a look at what he was wearing.

I’ll start with the shoes, Buckster (I can’t remember his name and this sounds quite appropriate) was wearing stylish Superga moccasins, which are cool shoes to wear, if you own a yacht and are about to sail it off the Italian coast. But then he was wearing them with white anklet socks, which I shouldn’t be seeing because no-one wears moccasins with shorts. He wasn’t wearing shorts, in an effort to look cool; he had hiked up his tracksuit to just under calf height and tightened it there. This is quite silly but unfortunately not that uncommon, I’ve seen way too many guys hike up one leg of their tracksuit and leave the other leg down. I am not sure if it aids in mobility but it appears so. To match his 100% nylon tracksuit pants, Buckster donned a shiny red golf shirt complete with the gold chain on the outside. Nice touch Buckster. To match his gold chain he was sporting a silver earring in the shape of the Puma logo. Classy. Buckster seemed to think that God didn’t do a good job of making his hair brown, as he much preferred that lovely eye-piercing yellow that we’ve all come to know and love at the end of our emails. The clincher in the deal though, was that Buckster thought that a sideways beanie was the most appropriate headgear for a sunny 32 degree summer’s day. And there you have it, a well deserved 7 on the bogus-Richter scale.

I honestly wanted to grab Buckster and ask him “What were you thinking when you looked in the mirror this morning?!”