Where Are You Going With that Skirt?

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

My 10-year-old granddaughter Amelia is what you might call a fashion maverick.

One morning when she was about three, she came downstairs wearing her polka dot underwear on her head. Her mother asked her why she was wearing panties on her head. “This is my ‘at,” she replied, dropping the H. 

Amelia was ahead of the trend when she wore odd socks. She was at her toddler contrarian best when she wore her shirts on backwards and her party dresses to kindergarten. And she channelled Henry Ford that time she agreed to wear anything at all as long as it was blue.

Her mother tolerates—even encourages—her daughter’s fashion eccentricity. Her father is less sanguine. He becomes exasperated when she refuses to wear a winter coat in minus-30-degree weather, demanding her black hoodie instead. Or when she insists on snow boots in summer. He can see these minor contests of will becoming all-out war when she hits her teens. A war he knows he’ll probably lose. 

Were my own father still living, he would likely commiserate with his grandson. I was my Dad’s teenage daughter in the swinging 1960s, a decade Amelia would have revelled in. It was a golden age for fashion. The post-war counterculture unified and expanded clothing tastes and trends. There were few rules. Young people wore ponchos, moccasins, love beads, peace signs, medallion necklaces, and chain belts. Men and women both wore frayed bell-bottomed jeans, tie-dyed shirts, Jesus sandals, and headbands.

My own sartorial statements included maxi skirts that trailed over boots, the look pulled together with a black pea coat that I’d found in a second-hand clothing shop called “Vintage Threads.” I also wore mini-skirts and white faux leather boots that stretched just above my knees, tightly hugging my calves. This last outfit really drove my Dad up the wall. Where are you going with only half a skirt, he would demand to know as I tried to sneak out of the house on a Saturday night. He should have been grateful that I was never a fan of hot pants. If I had ever dared to show up in these, he would have needed triple bypass heart surgery.

My hair was another source of Pater’s annoyance. I wore it long, with a fringe that almost covered my eyes, causing me to bump into things. My hair tended to be curly, which was not the look I wanted, so I would get out the iron and the ironing board and contort myself at a dangerous angle over the board to drag sections of my hair between sheets of brown paper. I would then run the iron along the paper to straighten my tangled locks. On more than one occasion, that beauty trick almost caused me to set fire to myself.

Dad would sniff the scorching hair, track me down in the kitchen, and then snorting with irritation, would ask if I had finally lost my mind. But the thing that could really put him over the edge was the white lipstick and the Kohl black eyeliner. The latter made me look like an extra in that over-the-top Elizabeth Taylor movie, Cleopatra.

I believed the make-up made me beautiful. Dad didn’t agree. You look like a floozie (Google it) he would hiss as I passed him in the front hall on a Friday night, on my way out the door where my boyfriend was waiting with his Harley Davison—another trigger for paternal rage. Boyfriend would be tricked out in an oversized army jacket and oil-stained jeans, set off by a peace sign hanging around his neck on a toilet chain. But that’s a story for another time.

In the meantime, my advice to Amelia’s Dad? Hang in there, this too shall pass.