Fashion Faux Pas

There’s always that one person around who owns their actions, mistakes, failures, and successes gracefully. They never seem to blush, and always have their head held high. Sometimes they pass things off with a shrug, maybe a joke, or best yet – they aren’t even aware of what had happened.

How enviable, to be so oblivious – so deeply lost in thought, a book, a game, a song, a show, or in nothing at all that you don’t notice yourself fart in public, aren’t at all self-conscious that your make-up looks like a child did it or that there’s spinach between your teeth. To be able to keep walking when you trip over your own feet.

Most of us are full of self-doubt, anxiety, humility, and self-consciousness that brings red to our cheeks when we stutter, make a mistake, trip, or something else. This is supposed to get better as we grow into adults, either because we’ve learnt how to be more graceful, or make less mistakes. More likely – a little of both.

I confess to you an embarrassing moment of my own. I am not embarrassed to receive praise although my naturally rosy complexion combined with humility does cause me to blush. At 28, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. Despite the recent fashion trend to be relatively skin baring – ranked high in my most embarrassing moments is the time during my graduate degree that my pants split at the crotch during my ethics seminar.

I was about 20 at the time, wearing a pair of jeans that was relatively new. Not sure how exactly my crotch was splitting – it’s not like I was dry humping anyone that day – but in any case I did hold my bag over my crotch the whole time. Being spring, I didn’t have a jacket to cover it up. While sitting in the ethics seminar hiding the gaping hole through which anyone could have seen my underwear was relatively easy, it was not that easy making the quarter mile walk to my car.

To this day, I’m not sure if anyone saw – if they did, they didn’t say anything. It was 2013, and the world has changed a lot since. Now we have young women giving seminars in their underwear to make a statement to archaic professors making inappropriate comments about women’s clothing. Now we have swimwear that is more revealing than underwear.

Despite these evolutions, the scientific world does lag behind. My workplace is very anti-tattoo, and conservative, yet lazy about dress, and pay. I’m not sure how my wardrobe will be received when I go elsewhere, or if I’ll find myself branching out more. Maybe I’ll open some minds.

Those pants immediately ended up in the trash when I got home at the time. I was relatively relieved to find that while I was hiding the front of my crotch where I knew there was a hole – the hold hadn’t split to the back. To this day, I still have a second iteration of those jeans that hasn’t really been worn and as such is 100% intact. The fear of them splitting at the crotch to show my knickers to the world is still alive and well. I never really learnt to carry an extra change of clothes, despite the few occasions where having clothes in a gym bag in my car has been extraordinarily useful. The second pair does still fit, and is in fact too loose.

I hope to handle any future fashion faux pas more gracefully – or to avoid them altogether. In the 8 years since that incident, I’ve been able to afford clothes that are higher quality and fit better. I have no plans of to reveal my panties to the world outside of my own will.