One thing I had accepted as fact once I approached my late 20s was that it was OK to “not get” what the younger kids were doing.  That’s the whole point of being young – it’s not supposed to make sense to the older generations.  They’re carving out their own identity and there is a need to be unique from their elders.  While part of that equation is the reality that a lot of things kids do or songs they listen to are rehashes from previous eras, it’s still different to them based on what they know.  For this conversation’s purpose, let’s keep it to fashion styles (and music) and not the more alarming trend of younger kids’ sexual activity.

While I think kids wearing baggy pants and shorts and wearing their hats sideways is utterly retarded looking, is it really more stupid than what my generation wore in the 1980s?  Are baggy shorts worse than the ball-huggers we, and any basketball team back then (AKA John Stockton shorts), wore?  Those shorts were so short that if you lay down on the grass to bask in the sun there was a good chance your nether regions would get sunburned around the edges.

Let’s analyze some other “cool” fashions from southeastern Michigan (fashions may vary from region to region) from the late 1980’s.

Tennis shoes were worn with the tongue sticking straight up.  This was accomplished by forcing it through the first part of your shoelace where they begin to crisscross.  Somehow that made perfect fashion sense at the time but it was a drag on your overall body aerodynamics, not to mention common decency.

Pants were typically rolled up at the bottom.  You didn’t wear floods; rather you bought ones a few inches too long and then rolled it up accordingly, making sure to tuck it in so it was a tight fit around your ankle.  I think this was a direct response to the bell bottoms from the 1970s and was an attempt to go as far away from that style as possible.  Or we could have been high.

Baseball hats, unlike the 1990s, were tilted way up high on your head.  They were usually so precariously high that any movement above .005 mph usually would generate enough wind to knock it off your head.  This presented a problem in baseball, where our coaches were insistent on having us wear them the proper way.  We would lift them as high as we could get away with it although the coach would sometimes push our hats down on our heads.

Ties were of two varieties.  One was the skinny leather/pleather leash, tapered to a point at the bottom, which looked like it was taken straight from the pet store.  These were very popular in music videos at the time from New Wave bands.  The other style was cotton, flat at the bottom, that had a bumpy texture to it.  This was the more preppy of the two styles and while a preppie could only wear the latter, anyone else could wear both kinds.

Stonewashed jeans.  Do I really need to expand on this one?  We all make mistakes, and EVERY ONE OF US made the same one.

The Preppies usually had two distinct clothing characteristics.  One was that their collars were always flipped up.  This was non-negotiable in the preppie world.  The other required wearing was penny loafers that had to have an actual penny in the front of them.  If you didn’t have both, you simply were a pretender.

Girls had two prominent hair features – the Mall Poof and the Eligible For A Whitesnake Video hair volume setting.  The Mall Poof was the sole reason companies that manufactured hair spray in the 1980s had their stock go through the roof, much like the resulting aerosol punched right through our ozone.  The Eligible For A Whitesnake Video hair (or any hair metal band at the time) meant the normal circumference around your head doubled or tripled, to the point where it was difficult to get in your boyfriend’s bitchin’ Camaro without messing up the top (also applied to Mall Poof girls).  Sometimes Mall Poof girls could also use the trusty banana clip for their hair.

As for music, we won’t get into our beloved catalog from those days, but if any kids nowadays do any kind of research, all they have to do, upon us making fun of their music, is to utter buzzwords like “Kajagoogoo” or “The Safety Dance”.   We will have to slink back to our corners with no valid rebuttal.  You simply can’t defend songs that had videos of midgets dancing in medieval times.