A Fashion Breakdown Of My Youth

When I was in my last year of high school I went to a school quite a distance from my house. It had a fashion design program and so it was worth it to me to go there instead of the jock filled high school nearby. I used to have to take 2 different city busses to get there and while I was the only passenger on the bus going to my particular school there was another high school along the route and I used to spend many a fun filled minute dissecting the fashion trends of those students. It was most definitely a rocker school and the clothing was mostly tight acid wash jeans with matching cropped jean jackets and Iron Maiden baseball shirts with the black body and white sleeves. Most of the chix (they were metal heads after all) had a feather roach clip attached to their purses at a jaunty angle. They would eye me suspiciously in my punky mod gear and I am sure if it was a yellow school bus opposed to public transit I may have been beaten up on more than one occasion. Best of all was their hair. Even though it was the mid eighties this school was a throwback to the 70’s with seriously tragic feathered hair. I was totally fascinated, almost to the point of slack jawed trance, by this one particular girl whose hair was so buoyantly coiffed that her head was formed to a perfect point. Something like this.

The guys didn’t have cute Sean Cassidy feathered bowl cuts but nasty long feathers like this. They scared me.

On the other hand my high school was a fashion island in the ocean of 1987. You see, my school was almost entirely populated by recent immigrants from China, Vietnam, Honk Kong and Korea with a very um, interesting take on North American fashion.

Our school was the hub of most of the Asian gang activity in the city. I would hear about how some kid had done his gangly duty over the weekend and carved up some poor kid in a gang fight. I would always be surprised to see the villain walking the halls and instead of some huge mean scary gang dude it was some 4’10” kid looking all of 8 years old with MC Hammer crotched pants and his bangs hair sprayed up like a cliff. An extreme version of this.

Basically really funny looking and totally goofy with his Miami Vice jacket and white dress shirt with a girly broach at the throat. Their gang colours so to speak. Not at all looking like the cold hearted killer he actually was. Yes, we had actual murderers in my school and it was not unusual to find cops walking the halls about to make an arrest.

My friend and I who had transferred to the school were two of a total of maybe five white girls in our grade and our lives where threatened and our lockers were broken into on a regular basis until we moved our stuff to the empty lockers right next to the principal’s office. After that we were left alone. Overall it was a very scary year.

This is what I looked like at that time in my favourite buckskin fringed jacket…Exactly like this.

I blame most of my life’s problems on growing up in the eighties.