re: retro

I was recently shopping (yes, again! Don't judge me!) in one of my favorite local boutiques, in preparation for an upcoming vacation. Scattered intermittently around the shop were groupings of on-trend items, marked by collages of photos clipped from fashion magazines, demonstrating how all the celebrities are tying their scarves this fall, or wide belts are going to be HUGE! or whatever. One such vignette featured skinny tapered pants, with oversized tops, belted, with piles of jewelry, trumpeting the slogan: Think 80's!

Oh, please, Lord, no.

I knew this day was coming when I started seeing flat lace-up oxfords being shown in women's shoe stores. Dear God! Jazz shoes! Those weren't cute in 1985, and they're not cute now. Or when Vogue and Bazaar started featuring silhouettes with massive shoulder pads. Paging Alexis Carrington! Then I started seeing young girls wearing black hoodies festooned with neon-bright graffiti motifs. Optic orange manicures. Skinny, tapered jeans. Fedoras. Chucks.

To my great chagrin, it appears that everyone is thinking 80s! So as Your Stylist, I offer this caveat, which applies to retro looks of any period. It is the Cardinal Rule of Retro: If you wore a decade's style during its original decade, you don't get another crack at it now. Step away from the shoulder pads. Now.

Consider this: when a young girl on the beach is wearing beads and crochet and faded torn jeans and other hippie attire, she's cute! A free spirit! A New Bohemian! But when someone who came of age in the sixties wears it, whether male or female, the effect is the same: he or she looks like an old hippie. Tired. Played. Period. In your heart, you know I'm right about this.

There are NO exceptions to this rule. Sorry. I don't care HOW cute the members of Duran Duran still are. If you are old enough to remember Madonna before she was Jewish, if you secretly believed that the senior BMOC dating the prom queen might actually be deep and may harbor a crush on a no-name sophomore because it happened in a John Hughes movie, you don't get to wear ANY of this stuff again. Pick another decade.

That is all.