3 Fall Fashion Faux-Pas

To be honest, I wouldn’t know “fall fashion” from its other seasonal counterparts, except that when it gets colder, I tend to put more clothes on. That being said, it seems that no matter how much advice is offered on what not to wear these days (i.e. a Google search of “what not to wear” yielded approx. 726,000 results), there seem to be more and more examples of people who either got dressed in the dark or let their pets/pre-adolescent children choose their clothes. I recently had an occasion to be at a grocery store near the middle of the day and it looked like everyone there had gotten dressed out of the “free” box at a garage sale. And trust me, I’m no fashion snob - I think it makes about as much sense to pay $300 for shoes just because they say “Prada” on them as it does to try and retrieve items from a garbage disposal while it’s running. That being said, there is simply no viable excuse for deciding to wear cutoff jeans 3 sizes too small, or a t-shirt that was last washed during the Clinton administration. And so, as a word of a advice to either take or pass on to a friend who desperately needs it, here are 3 things you really need to stop wearing:

1. Sleeves Optional. There is only one group of people who are truly allowed to wear anything sleeveless in public, and those are women whose underarms stop shaking as soon as their arms do. Note, there are no age restrictions here, but if you have enough extra arm hanging where there’s supposed to be a tricep, that there’s an outside chance you might be able to fly, you need to do us all a favor and try to cover some of that up. For the opposite sex, there is simply never a good reason as a grown man to wear something without sleeves. Let’s be honest, there’s an overwhelming probability that you don’t have the guns to pull it off (especially if you ever refer to your arms as “guns”), and even on the off chance that you do, you look like a complete asshat for needing everyone to notice. The only time I can ever recall a man looking correctly dressed in something sleeveless was when Cooter Davenport was doing it amidst fixing the Duke boys’ car and shouting “yee-HAW!” over the CB. So unless you’re a slender young lady, or are fixin’ to help Bo & Luke get away from Roscoe again, find some damned sleeves.

2. Dragons. There was once an innocent time when I thought that crosses and skulls marked the height of screen-printed douchebaggery, and that seeing there was no place to go but up, our latest generations would seek out at least marginally less ridiculous totems. But alas, I was wrong. Amidst a generation obsessed with adolescent wizards and gay vampires, they’ve come up with something even more absurd to plaster all over their clothing: dragons. Seriously, post adolescents haven’t been this obsessed with these oversized lizards since the Middle Ages (which was, at it turns out, the last time it was showing up this frequently on clothing). Dragons are to bad-assery what Shape-Ups are to athletic prowess; you may think that you’re sporting can’t miss indicia of your mad skills, but you’re really just wearing orthopedic shoes. I truthfully can’t imagine taking anyone seriously who was wearing something with a dragon on it. The only thing I should see dragons on in 2010 are my Chinese take-out boxes. If you want to look exotic, try a tan, darker hair and a bigger butt - and leave the dragons to the nerds with the 20-sided dice.

3. Mixing Brands. It’s one thing to have personal taste so bad and a self-worth so pervasively low that you need to display the brand name of the clothing you buy as boldly and loudly as you possibly can. It’s quite another to lack the good sense to avoid doing this with more than one brand at once. Honestly, I’d rather see someone wearing both horizontal and vertical stripes than a Juicy Couture sweatsuit, oversized D&G sunglasses (worn inside, no doubt), Ed Hardy Ugg boots and a Louis Vitton handbag. These personal billboards of desperation make me feel the sort of vicarious embarrassment that I usually reserve for people unsuccessfully auditioning for American Idol. And like those same “Idol” wanna-be’s, the real tragedy of the situation is not their failure, but their utter obliviousness to it. On balance, these fashion brand pimps likely consider themselves to be at the pinnacle of personal apparel, all the while looking like a homeless person who raided the dumpster behind a fashion show. If anyone besides Joan Rivers ever asks you “who you’re wearing”, that’s a fantastic excuse to (a) never speak to them again, or (b) slap them with a shovel. Come to think of it, the same actually holds true for Joan Rivers. Trust me, no one worth caring about really cares.

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It would appear that personal fashion is experiencing a bear market just as dismal as the U.S. economy of late. Despite our most fervent high hopes and the previously cyclical nature of such things, the apparel awareness of the public at large continues to plummet, with no hope of recovery in the foreseeable future. Just when it appears there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon (e.g. trucker’s hats falling out of vogue, everyone starting to pull their pants up, or women realizing that no one looks particularly good in a poncho) another even more absurd, inexplicable or downright foolish fad pops up to take its place (e.g. the faux-hawk on grown men, gladiator sandals, or the widespread acceptance of Crocs as acceptable footwear) and down deeper into the fashion abyss we plummet. One can only hope that this absurdity of style reaches some sort of critical mass, where even amidst our ever-deepening self-absorbed hazes we will all stop, look at our ostentatious screen prints, faux workout gear, gaudy hats and ridiculous footwear, and then collectively ask each other, “what the hell are we wearing?”