Entombed in our attic in several long boxes … like long-distance space travelers cocooned in cryounits & frozen in order to make the long voyage between planets, & more likely between galaxies, intact … are a couple dozen pairs of stirrup pants. Like those space travelers awaiting reanimation when they reach their destination, those stirrup pants have been peacefully & quietly resting, awaiting reanimation at the end of their journey when they re-emerge in a time when stirrup pants have “come back in style.” They are occupying quality attic space because I use to love them & because my mother told me, almost since I popped out of the womb, “if you keep clothes long enough they will come back in style.”
What my mother failed to tell me & maybe even failed to realize herself were two very important rules:
- When those ancient garments DO come back in style, we may be too old to wear them, and
- Even if we’re not too old, the garments may have suffered unexpected “closet shrinkage” & we may not be able to squeeze our unexpectedly acquired bulk INTO them.
Knowing all that, however, didn’t stop me from carefully preserving those much-revered stirrup pants. (My husband calls my attention to them every year at Christmas when he stumbles over the boxes on his annual mission into the attic to retrieve our holiday decorations.)
My mom never had money to spend on a personal wardrobe. As a child of the aftermath of the Depression, she tended to buy a few quality pieces &, year-after-year, built her wardrobe around those several treasured things. When I came along, she had a reason & an excuse to enjoy fashion shopping; not for herself but for her baby girl child. Not realizing she was indulging herself, she dressed me fashionably from the days prior to my first baby steps until her death at age 84 when she STILL enjoyed purchasing & giving me the latest fashions at Christmas & birthdays. When I protested, she would answer, “Let me do this while I can. I may not always be able to.”
So the whole thing with me being highly attuned to fashion & loving clothes actually began when my mother dressed me as a small child, stood back a few steps, clapped her hands & said to me as we both looked in the mirror, “What will THEY say when THEY see you?” It never occurred to my still-forming brain to ask who THEY were. If my mom said THEY would be ecstatic when they saw me all dressed up, then I assumed it must be true. Years later I told my husband this story & occasionally, when we’re dressed to go to an annual cocktail party or special event, he will look at me, smile a sly smile & say, “What will THEY say when they see you?” It always makes me laugh because I know he’s being very funny & complimentary at the same time but also because it reminds me of my mother & brings her closer to me in that moment.
So great was my mom’s fashion influence on me that, at age 5 when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer would always be, “An archeologist or a model.”
With that kind of background & “family history,” one would wonder why I chose a 38 year career as an Operating Room Registered Nurse. For all those years I wore exactly the same thing that all the other OR nurses wore, plus the doctors AND the orderlies. The “scrub fashions” went with the job & I was dedicated to the job, so perhaps I wasn’t too terribly damaged by those early years. One thing I know for sure is that NOBODY greeted any of us at 6:30 a.m. by saying, “What will they say when they see you?”
After my early retirement & during the 6 years that I hosted a local cable television talk show, I did kind of make up for all those scrubs by using the show as an excuse to have a very healthy wardrobe. And there have been difficult times in my life when just going to my favorite store, trying on some special clothes & buying a few pieces made me temporarily forget my difficulties & rediscover myself. While I never felt obsessed with clothing, there have been those times when it gave me joy & shopping was cathartic.
A friend recently commented that I have quite an ability to put outfits together. So I told her the story about my mom & her fashion sense & also that, when I have time, I’m a use-to-be artist. Mixing colors always has come easy to me in my art & in my wardrobe. I always point out that I can’t add 2 and 2, & can’t sing a lick but I do take a bow in the areas where things just come easily for me.
So, like tracking the horse around the barn to get to the barn, here’s where this story is going ….
Way back in the late 80s, above–the-knee boots made an appearance on the fashion scene. They were there so briefly that I’m betting most fashion-conscious individuals were not even aware that they’d been & were gone like a flash in the pan. But I fell in love with them. For 30 years I’ve been thinking (lusting) about those above-the-knee boots. But just like my Mama predicted & told me, in 2017 they made a huge comeback into the fashion world & just about everybody was wearing them. I saw a pair of black ones but wouldn’t let myself try them on. I was remembering Rule #1 & decided my time for above-the-knee boots had sadly passed.
After slightly over a month I went back to the store & tried on the boots & I was in love. I bought the black over-the-knee boots, telling myself they were tasteful & that life is too short & too unpredictable NOT to have a pair of black suede over-the-knee boots, even if I WAS older.
So comfortable & warm were those black boots that I decided I’d like to have a pair of burgundy ones. My husband suggested I look on Amazon.com because they usually have some of everything AND our club would receive a portion of the sale if I found something I liked through the AmazonSmile program.
I found the perfect burgundy boots & placed my order in mid-November. Arrival was to be December 29, which seemed like quite a while. As I was able to track the boots I realized they were coming from Shanghai. I should have checked earlier because I prefer buying ‘Made in America’ products but the order had been placed, the picture of the boots showed them as beautiful burgundy & our club WAS receiving a portion of the sale, so what could go wrong, huh? Well ….
A month & a half later, after Christmas, my boots arrived from Shanghai in a slightly misshapen box. It’s a long way to Shanghai & they obviously had taken a slow boat from China. I tore into the box.
Opening the lid I was startled … & shocked … to find that the perfect burgundy boots were a shocking shade of red … later to be named “Hootchie Red” by me because that’s what they looked like … more on my feet / legs than simply folded in the box… & the fact that my husband laughed & offered me $20 to cook dinner in them.
I wrote the company telling them the boots, while extremely comfortable & stylish were NOT the burgundy they were advertised as being but were, instead, shockingly the brightest red ever known to man. They responded immediately, telling me they had “experienced that complaint before.” They offered to refund me half the price of the boots & said I could keep them because, “returning them to China was troublesome” (remember that slow boat???)
So I slept on the offer … & the boots, kinda. The first thing I did when I got up was to look at the boots. Unbelievably, they seemed even BRIGHTER red in natural daylight than they had the evening before in house light. I wrote back to the company. I thanked them for their generous offer but declined, asking for my money back & telling them I would return the boots. Although, with just regular calculating it occurred to me that I could cook dinner in those “Hootchie Red Boots” for Willy just 3 times & make back almost the full price of those “on sale” boots. But I thought better of it. I’d still have the boots that would remind me of China & hootchies on the corner & sometimes I might be asked to cook dinner in them when I’d only planned to fix hot dogs. It all just seemed like too much.
The company wrote back telling me they would refund my money in full but since returning the boots to China remained, “troublesome,” I could keep the boots in exchange for a good evaluation with Amazon.com for service, if not for product. I agreed but told the company that I still had no use for the blaze red boots & would donate them to our club’s annual charity auction where whatever money they made would go towards funding our local charities. It seemed like a win-win solution & the company agreed.
Although those bright red boots were very stylish & extremely comfortable, they are back in the box & have been added to the 2 auction donations we already have for our August 2018 Charity Auction. Someone younger will love those boots & be able to get away with the bright red color, where the more mature me could never pull it off so well.
I’m not sure even my fashion-forward mother would have stored those hootchie red boots away waiting for them to become stylish. And even though I still have them, I am certain they will sell at the auction.
In the meantime, with apologies to my mama, I have given away all my size 12 clothes that I loved, to a friend who has lost a full clothing size on a diet. And if anything good has come out of my losing a clothes size myself this past year while I struggled with an illness, it’s been that … with THANKS to my mama … I’ve had a wonderful time replacing my wardrobe with a smaller size. My cholesterol is squatting at “normal,” & I certainly have enjoyed shopping.
Meanwhile, those stirrup pants are still in cryosleep in the attic, where they will probably remain for another 30 years. I DID buy a lovely pair of burgundy, over-the-knee boots that are easy to add to a tasteful outfit & I doubt they will ever find themselves in cryosleep in the attic. ….
And so in the attic, 2 dozen pairs of stirrup pants are awaiting reanimation in the year 2048.
Tags: Amazon.com, AmazonSmile, Boots from China, cathartic shopping, closet shrinkage, fashion, fashion forward, Made in America, over-the-knee boots, saving clothes until back in style, shopping addict, stirrup pants, style
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