Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Combat boots complete a fashion ensemble

By Mary Ann Cook

If you take a close look at female attire over the past 50 years, you can see it's the difference between black and white--the white of virginity versus the black of grunge. Today all you need is jeans, a T-shirt and a man's flannel shirt to dress for school. The wearers all look alike, no change for gender or status. Looks like we are becoming unisex, at least in high school hallways. But on the brighter side, what's the dominant fashion message here? Ease. Easy on the budget, easy on the body. Today's fashion statement is a leveling one, admits no hierarchy--it's very sameness says it's working class, homogeneous, insistently lower-case democratic.

Jeans are the only common denominator of the half-century, the rear-guard action that covers three generations. Ours were rolled to flood heights and baggy. We wore them only in proscribed situations, like cleaning out the attic, where no one who mattered could see you. No elastic in the wearing those days. T-shirts were for old men like fathers, who could have been as old as 37.

Today's teen wears the same thing no matter what the occasion. How codified and uptight the '40s look in contrast. We had different costumes for different destinations. Many things compulsory then are artifacts now. Gloves, for one: white gloves, puh-lease. You didn't take on the larger world without them. You didn't put on sheer hosiery without 'em. Silk stockings and all their accouterments constituted a whole panoply of gadgetry: girdles, garter belts and seams that needed continual adjustment. Today's replacement for all that reposits in one word: pantyhose. And crinolines were omnipresent, stiff underpinnings to keep dresses crisp, with inclinations of their own. They're still around for formals, but we wore them all the time come summer, looking like a teenaged Jackie Kennedy before there was a Jackie Kennedy.

How did we ever sit down in crinolines? How was there room for anyone beside you? You couldn't get close to each other. At least not without a tell-tale crunching sound. As though someone, a younger brother, perhaps, were eating cereal directly underfoot. Wearing a crinoline was like having a chaperone without the extra body. No wonder that era is thought to have been less promiscuous than succeeding ones. Crinolines were our equivalent to The Pill.

And consider hats. Today's hats are one-stop-fits all, worn anywhere, anytime. Cocky, rakish things with a flower smack in the middle of the front. Those are fun. Our hats were a serious affair: a necessity for being dressed up. Finding the right hat for each season, each outing, each outfit, called for some serious trekking, serious decision making. Those hats were work.

Did I fail to mention dickeys? Dickeys were detachable collars, faux underblouses. You were forbidden to wear a pullover sweater without a dicky underneath. To go forth undickied was so gross it was akin to going naked.

It may have been a federal offense. Dickies had to be white, with rounded corners. They couldn't be pointed. Only girls who were good at math, or hopelessly out of step in some other way wore pointed dickeys. Colored? Good grief, no. Have you no fashion sense at all, despite my guidelines? The very vision of a colored dickey makes my flesh crawl, even today.

Then there was the delicate matter of starch. Dickeys couldn't be starched too much or they would scratch and make their own decisions about how to encircle your neck. Or too little and they wouldn't respond at all to the ultimate goal of perky. Perky was the unspoken code of the day. The only difference in dickies you were allowed to embrace (by your own stiff dickey standards) was lace. Yes, if you were brave enough to cross the rigid dickey line, you could admit the froth of lace. Its wearing signaled that you were going some place significant after school and was not to be taken lightly.

The structure is appalling, all those unwritten rules that governed dress, and by extension, behavior. When something as insignificant as a collar is that codified, it's a wonder that any social change gets accomplished anytime--that women ever got to vote, for instance. They must have been wearing the right dickey that day.

Still, not wearing the right dickey wasn't the most gauche thing you could do. The worst, most hideous combination imaginable was ankle socks with high heels. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could compete in horror with that vile vision. Well, what comes down the Parisian runways these days? Of course, lacy anklets with high-heeled shoes. All you have to do to see your worst fashion nightmare catapulted to a dream is to live long enough.

Then, the most insulting thing to say to anyone was, "Your mother wears combat boots." Now, combat boots are de rigueur on high school and college campuses, sought after, for heaven's sake. They may be called hiking boots, but the net effect is the same.

Today, delicate-looking young women wear delicate-looking rayon dresses with small prints, evocative of the '30s, called baby-doll dresses. So far, so feminine. But make your way down the baby doll herself and you find that this ultra-femme look has been completed with the guerrilla look of clunky clodhoppers.

How not-of-a-piece can you get? No wonder life for a teen is so complex and contradictory. Just look at the costuming.