Fashion Beat: 2

In the beginning, there was fashion.

The beginning seems a logical, if not terribly original, place to start a story about covering style in the hinterlands.

Once upon a time, back in the last millennium, my boyfriend and I were on the road zigzagging across the USA looking for a place to settle. (From where we moved is a long, complicated, different story.) Jonathan and I intended only to visit a friend in Portland, Oregon who we knew when we were all working in Nepal. But then our friend picked up a hitchhiker who was looking for someone to sublet her houseboat for the summer.

Clearly, the universe was telling us to move to Portland.

So we settled on a rickety houseboat on the Willamette River. I enrolled at the community college with dreams of being a writer. I didn't know exactly what that meant or how that would happen, but I bought an old, used, green, metal, inked-ribbon typewriter and a ream of paper.

I took lots of English lit and comp classes and wrote mostly clunky fiction then, to be practical, added some journalism classes. I wrote a few feature articles on interesting students for the community college newspaper. The student editor heard of the paper learned about a new publication looking for writers. He would do it himself but he was swamped as student editor.

"They can't pay," he said, "but you'd get a byline."

This was a rare opportunity. Unlike now where thousands of people throw up sites and expect people to write for them for free. Because of starting costs of producing a print newspaper, it was less common. It was an "alternative" magazine which, essentially, meant a pre-zine zine. I wrote down the name and phone number but was absolutely terrified to contact them. I'd never written for the wider public, only a student newspaper. What I realize in retrospect is that the community college newspaper likely had a far bigger circulation and a much wider range of diverse readers. I told my boyfriend about the opportunity.

Suddenly he decided he wanted to be a zine writer. And he had far more confidence than I.

Yeah, it kind of made me mad. But once he met with the editor, Jonathan encouraged me to write for the publication, too. He said the pragmatic editor was looking for someone to write a fashion story so they could sell advertising to retailers. Naturally, they needed a "girl" to write about fashion. The world really was that sexist back in 1979. I think it has improved.

The truth was, I knew nothing about fashion. Maybe something less than nothing. Once, an editor was working on a different story and asked me how to spell Oscar de la Renta. I not only didn't have a clue how to spell the designer's name, I didn't know he was a designer.

In my defense, I grew up the fourth of six kids and wore a school uniform for eight years, then wore hand-me-downs to public school. Once each year I was allowed to order a back-to-school outfit from the Sears catalog. For my first year of public school in ninth grade, I ordered brown hip-hugger bell bottoms, coordinated brown turtleneck and chunky shoes with a cool pilgrim-buckle. I wore it with a colorful pot-holder vest crocheted by my mother.

Honestly, I could comfortably wear that look again.

When I saved up enough money through babysitting neighbor kids and, later, working at a boutique in the mall, I bought cheap trendy items from a big store that also sold groceries, car parts and sport equipment. A manager at the boutique politely told me I couldn't wear my dad's sailor pants to work despite how cute the button front style looked. In high school, I discovered Minneapolis Ragstock, which at the time sold clothes by the pound. I piled treasures on the scale; beaded evening sweaters and little black dresses with shoulder pads from the 1940s, a short, silk embroidered reversible baseball jacket from the Korean war, and a pure wool white pullover sweater with the colorful crests from Austria made such an impression, I remember them still. I didn't know what I was buying, but I recognized quality and style.

In short, the thrift store was a treasure trove. And dirt cheap.

I confessed to the editor looking for a fashion writer that I would have absolutely no idea what to write about because I only shopped at second-hand stores.

Bingo!

I had my first assignment.

P.S. More about the photo above. This is a rare picture when the BF was in all new clothes but I scored that pale pink vintage sweater for a pittance because someone had washed and shrunk it to child-size. I cut off the "long" sleeves and hemmed them (badly.) I liked that it had tiny pink pearlized buttons and fit close to the body and left an inch of belly skin exposed. Also of note, I cut my own hair. Literally, stood in front of the bathroom mirror with the kitchen scissors. A few months later, I hacked it way too short trying to get the top to stand up straight like David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Suffice to say, it wasn't my best look.