mom jeans
I think it started with the mom jeans.
About a year ago, my mom was going through her closet and she had this giant pile of clothes next to the door that she was giving away. As I sifted through the seemingly endless supply of old sweaters and tank tops from another decade, I found these Tommy Hilfiger jeans. I grabbed them, along with a few tshirts I shamelessly took from her, and went upstairs to put them on. They fit gloriously. Now come on folks, girls specifically, how often do you find a pair of jeans that just fit in all the right places? Yeah like never.
Those jeans are my baby, which is ironic because they're mom jeans.
ANYWAYS, where I was going with this was basically the beginning of my downfall into dressing like a middle aged mother would for the rest of my life.
Think i'm kidding?
Local mom spotted in San Marcos checking out books for her daughter's birthday while sporting a slightly revealing crop top
Last month I went to a party wearing a turtleneck, my mom jeans, and my Birkenstocks. Mhm, you bet I had the guys flocking around me all night.
The majority of my clothes come from one of four sources:
1. Goodwill
2. My grandmother
3. My mother
4. A dead relative (Yes, I am aware of how morbid that is, but I meeeeean are they ever going to wear it again...?)
It's a rare event for me to pay full price for something new, so when I do I take it very seriously. (Like my Matthew Gray Gubler one-of-a-kind shirts that I actually guard like they are my children and are basically sacred)
I like the idea of wearing someone else's clothes (In the least creepy way possible). Like when I buy something from Goodwill I try to imagine who the person was that owned it before me and the kind of person they were. (Example: I bought a long sleeved shirt that has a small burn hole in the sleeve, so I like to think the person who owned it before me was a total badass and thought he would look cool if he put his cigarette out on his shirt ((even though I don't see how that would make you look cool?)) in front of his friends) It's like everything has a story behind it. Did the woman who had this dress before me wear it on a date? Did it go well? Was the guy a douchebag? Are they married now? Did the guy who was wearing this flannel before me go camping in it? Did he go with his family? His friends? Did he get chased by a bear in it? Did his girlfriend take it off of him? The possibilities are truly endless.
Since some of clothes at Goodwill can be dated back to as early as the 80's and 90's, most of my closet is made up of things anywhere from "last season" to "last decade" (Okay, more like 3 decades ago). Turtlenecks are one of my favorite articles of clothing ever to wear and luckily my four clothing sources are never lacking in their supply of chin high neck-ary.
My grandmother shrunk a lot of her clothes by mistake and because of this, she turned a third of her wardrobe into these half crop top looking shirts that look great with high waisted jeans. I stuffed a trash-bag full of them last time I was over at her house.
Me and my lil black sweater. I never feel as good as I do when I am in black from head to toe. (FUN FACT: There is a picture in our front bathroom at home of my mom wearing this sweater and I'm like 5 years old and we're ice skating wow how things change) ((Except some things don't like how I still can't ice skate))
I am constantly sneaking sweaters and various articles of clothing out of my mom's closet. She is well aware of this, so there's no use in lying about it. One of my greatest steals was this oversized black turtleneck sweater that I found in the back of her closet which was insanely soft. Some of my friends know which sweater I'm talking about because I get psyched when the weather gets cold enough to wear it (and because I wear it to almost every formal event in the fall and winter). Sorry mom, you're never getting this one back.
I'm not going to dive too deep into the whole "me wearing clothes of people who are no longer with us" thing because it's kind of weird to talk about on a blog post, right? Basically it's a way of remembering people in a different way. Let their great sense of style (that I guess I apparently only find great according to friends and family) live on past them. It is always pretty awkward when people ask me where I got a certain sweater or jacket from and I look them dead (haha pun not intended) in the eye and tell them that it's from my dead great aunt's closet or something morbid like that. I never really got uncomfortable with the concept of what I was doing until my aunt looked at me one day and was like, "you're going to have so much fun in my closet when I die." I was so taken aback I just looked at her and thought to myself "wow okay so maybe this is actually pretty weird". Not that it made me stop or anything. My roommate also gets a kick out of it and usually just opens up with asking me who died instead of asking me what store I bought something at.
Basically, I'm making memories in other peoples' memories.
Seen above: a few classic looks in mom jeans ft. 3/4 in the same mirror and one Urban Outfitters dressing room
So over the last few years my sense of style has developed into various forms of "mom".
Sometimes I look like the soccer mom, sometimes I look like the PTO mom who doesn't have time for your kid's nonsense, sometimes I look like the mom who really just needs a break, and sometimes I look like the mom who has to go to court to divorce her husband so she dresses up nice as heck to show him what he's missing.
It really all just depends on my mood and what I have in the dirty laundry pile.
