Ironic pants
When did the poufy sleeves come back and the little gathers at the waist, the floppy jackets with the frou frou and the belts and buckles, like some romantic domantrix’s version of warmth in the city? I want flat, classic lines and all black. I want inscrutable t-shirts. I want formfitting -- but not second -- skin. I want a little hug near the tummy while I still have what it takes. I want non-ironic pants.
Slowly slowly, between the self-help books and the New Yorker and New York magazine and the New York Times Sunday paper (What I am doing in California? Clearly my literary loyalty lies elsewhere.), I’ve been rereading Martin Amis’s Money. His best book, I think, and quite a contrast to his last, The Pregnant Widow, which I read a couple of months ago. Still, there are parallels: Martin has a thing for women’s pants. Our pants have power, or they can, over the salivating male, the one who is helpless in the face of heavy breasts and a pendulous ass, helpless against the sway of hips. Pants are the thing, with their waist-love and the way they cling to form.
With this return to the 1980s in fashion, or the return I see reflected in the clothes at Crossroads Trading Company, my main source for duds, I wonder if complicated high-waisted pants are the next style to be resurrected. I wore them, yes, I did, those things that crawled up past the belly-button, with complicated clasps and foldovers, waistband compensations for style, an obfuscation of fabric, a militaristic series of pleats and flaps. Everything I’ve put on in the last couple of years has been hiphuggerish, though not hippieish, and I like the unfettered feel of shirt fabric against my belly, the unconstructed nature of pants that cling below the waistline.
I burnish my belly. I wave the kettlebells every other day, I praise the antidepressants that help keep me here, that wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, along with the dreams. I clothe myself in simple shirts made of natural fabrics, am continually in pursuit of the perfect pair of pants, of the right skirt with the right black boots and the soft clingy sweater. I am not going to give up on fashion, to pretend that it no longer matters. I will age gracefully or not at all, never having been one to embrace teenybopper, there in my flat-waisted pants and my too-cool t-shirt.
From the prompt "In fashion."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
And maybe someday I'll write a post about my heavy-on-the-symbolism dreams last night, me with a house ripped from its foundation, pulled on a truck, looking for a new place to call home. In the last version of it, right before I woke up, the house and I were returning to the original site, thinking, "why not back here again?"
Images by Huzzah Vintage and funkomavintage.