It's a
pretty standard awards show photograph. The stars of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, and Alexis
Bledel, stand arm in arm at the Nicklelodeon Kids' Choice Awards in the
spring of 2005 and smile into the camera. They’re all dressed in some version
of one of the dominant fashion items of the time: lowcut, flared jeans. Blake
has a pink belt around her hips that ignores the loops at the waist of her cuffed, distressed denim. It's paired with a tank layered under a cropped,
sheer, and sequined t-shirt. Amber is the most ornate of the bunch with her
gold buttoned, sailor-style jeans, many long necklaces, bejeweled top,
bejeweled earrings, and bejeweled belt, which sits high above her waist. America
wears a lacy top and a metallic brocade blazer that tries and fails to
challenge Amber's look for ornate dominance. Alexis, the most casual of the
four, is wearing a floral print halter in a hue that fits in with the pink
theme they all seem to have settled on.
None of these looks would have struck
me as anything but normal at the time. Every piece was certainly more expensive
than anything living in my closet at that moment but otherwise they were
similar in almost every way. In fact, somewhere in my dorm room that same
spring was a floral print halter in black, white, and yellow that had returned
to campus with me after my semester abroad.
I was on the
cusp of 22 that spring and while I vividly remember other awards shows from
that era, I was long past the age of caring about or paying attention to this
one. The event came and went and rated barely a mention as I prepared for my
final handful of weeks as an undergraduate. I would go and see the movie when
it premiered in theaters a little over two months later, but this awards show
appearance had nothing to do with that decision. I’ve always liked movies about
female friendships that endure in the face of life’s trials and tribulations. I
figured this latest installment would be worth my time. It didn’t disappoint,
leaving me feeling happy and light and a bit teary. So when the sequel arrived
three years later, I didn’t hesitate to once again make my way to the theater.
While my movie watching habits had changed little in the interim, by 2008 my
personal style had moved on in ways both big and small. The floral print halter
top that I had only seen fit to wear once was buried and forgotten. In the
middle of 2006, I bought my first pair of skinny jeans and was forever lost to
anything with a wide leg. I stopped wearing heels. Those were the big, tectonic style shifts.
But more important were the changes that were simply an effect of the passage
of time. You wear through things. Colors fade. Your wardrobe turns over slowly
until one day you look up and almost all of the old is gone.
That awards
show picture didn’t reenter my life until the spring of 2015 when I came across
it in a retrospective of early and mid-2000s red carpet looks. This time it
stuck. Murmurs about the return of trends from that era, like bucket hats and
the Juicy Couture track suit, had begun to enter my daily fashion reading and
for that reason my brain couldn't shake the picture loose. Because the fashion
industry can't help but examine its past and mine it for treasure, in the past
decade, we've had the 1980s, 1990s, 1970s, and 1990s (again) all make their way
back, in that order, to relevance and sales floors. And so for the past two
years I have been unable to stop thinking about when, not if, the clothing and
shoes that defined my collegiate life, platform flips flips and handkerchief
hems that fell to some no man's land near my mid-calf, would have a true
renaissance. When would this photo begin appearing on Tumblr or Pinterest as
inspiration for someone’s spring aesthetic? Would I be prepared for that
return?
When I
entered college in the fall of 2001, I was free for the first time from the
types of picture taking moments that define a childhood, first days of school
and dances and portraits featuring loose ribbons and laser backgrounds. My
response to that freedom was to rarely let others take pictures of me. I've
always been mildly awkward in photographs, unsure how to stand or where to put
my arms or how much to smile. But suddenly I had the chance to duck out of
them, and I savored it. In that in between space before the arrival of the
many, mostly unavoidable, ways in which we now capture and share images, there
is a something resembling a Samantha-sized blank spot. The pictures that do
exist are mostly of the physical sort, stuffed in their original envelopes from
CVS and Walgreens instead of tucked safely into albums like those from my
childhood. They live somewhere in my mother’s house where I left them when I
moved across the country to Los Angeles in the spring of 2014. I assumed that
those items, the items full of sentiment and memory instead of utility, would
follow once I had settled in. But after nearly three years, I find myself
surrounded by the new memories I have made here and few of the old.
When the
1980s and 1990s made their fashion returns, I was either living in my hometown
of Boston or not far off in Brooklyn. Photographic evidence of what I wore the
first time round either surrounded me, in albums or on walls in my childhood
home, or could be easily seen with the purchase of a $15 bus ticket carrying me
north. I could look at pictures of denim vests worn over long floral dresses or
an old pair of neon platforms from The Wild Pair that inexplicably still took
up space in my old bedroom and chuckle. Why was I doing that? would
eventually lead to Do you remember when you were 13 and sneakily wore a crop
top to camp only to have your ruse discovered by your mother who promptly
grounded you for what would be the first and last time? And that was it.
Suddenly I would be lost to reverie.
My memory has always been good. It holds on to things that I want it to as well as those
I would rather not remember. But as I’ve gotten older, prompts have become more
necessary for those trips into the past. Without the photographs, the few I
allowed to be taken and the many that I wormed my way out of, I look at this
awards show picture with its lack of belts worn either at all or as belts are
generally meant to be worn, and remember that I never wore belts with my
(almost definitely) bootcut jeans in the early 2000s. I can't do that anymore.
Leaving without a belt situated firmly in the loops of my (almost definitely)
skinny jeans leaves me unsettled now. But among the abandoned pictures is one
of me taken soon after midnight on my 21st birthday on the dance floor of a
London club. I am wearing a crisp cotton tube top from Topshop. It was white
with diagonal pinstripes in a rainbow array and a side tie detail at the waist.
I hadn’t learned how to effectively wear boxy items and was years away from
realizing that strapless tops were not my friend and so I looked a little out
of proportion. I am smiling and there is tinsel in my hair from a cracker that
my roommates had snuck into the place. And my bootcut jeans are worn without a
belt and the wide smile and the hand jauntily placed on one hip would make it
appear that I could not care less. My only thoughts are about which colorful
drink I would have next and where the chocolate confection my roommates had
stuck a candle in had gone off to. There was no fear that I might look back one
day and find myself ridiculous. There was no knowledge that looking at this
past self would lead me down some rabbit hole about time and life and things
old and new.
Because
accessories and denim and birthdays aren't the only reasons I keep coming back
to that image of four young women with questions rushing through my head. It’s
the short amount of time that has elapsed between now and then. Trends seem to
be returning at a faster rate, the fashion cycle shortening, and that
quickening merry-go-round makes time appear to race forward in a flash. But
then maybe it's not the clothes' fault, this odd nausea that comes and makes me
want to scream "it's too soon!" Maybe I am simply getting older and time
is becoming a far more slippery thing. Maybe things are moving at the same rate
they always have and I am moving slower.
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