Imagine you were able to time travel back to an age you’d like to makeover.  What if you could re-do the misfortunate outfits that have haunted your past?  Whether you didn’t know how to dress your body or were woefully unaware of the frequency that your derrière made public appearances.  (Shout out to Forever 21 mini dresses of the early 2000’s for making that one possible). If you could insert yourself into your own fashion timeline, how far would you go back?

I like to think I’ve had a well honed sense of style for the duration of my lifetime, but old high school photos beg to differ.  Most of these stills only reside in my head (thankfully), but still elicit a shudder when my brain stumbles upon them.  Ironically, all of my high school fashion options have suddenly become readily available as of late.  Thanks to the nostalgia bomb that Gen Z has set off (as a direct result of having no actual sense of style of their own), I am now able to walk into most clothing stores and feel like I have been magically whisked back to the year 1999.  A year we were all afraid that the world was about to come crashing down around us at the end of December.  Imagine the disappointment when absolutely nothing happened and we all were forced to bounce back into our low rise jeans and carry on.

I think a lot of us would pick a pivotal point in our academic careers as a destination. Some may choose to travel back as far as middle school, maybe even earlier.  I seem to recall wanting to dress myself as early as possible, but considering I wasn’t pulling my financial weight, I was limited to options that appeared in my closet.  Lots of lace-bibbed florals, things with rosettes, and an infamous denim mini skirt that I wore to kindergarten, where I was told to sit cross-legged on the floor with the other children, unfortunately resulting in Juan telling me he could see my underwear and bringing this fact to the attention of every little boy in the vicinity.  This traumatizing event consequently ended in tears and nary an absence of shorts/tights under every dress and skirt for the next twenty years.  Thanks a lot, Juan.

They say you learn more from your failures than you do from your success.  In fact, the only way to get better at something is to make mistakes.  The brain re-wires and we we learn how to better adjust to the situation at hand.  So, maybe it is more useful to take our past aberrations and learn from them, rather than locking them away in our respective mind palaces with a “keep out” sign on the door.  Here’s to our mistakes, mat they continue to help us learn the proper skirt length for any situation and may they continue to exist in our minds and out of print.

Cheers!