Old Is Gold

To all you old fogeys in your 30s out there, when you flip through your old photo albums, have you ever wondered how you ever survived your childhood, teenage years, college and 20s?

If you’re lucky enough, some of the horrible ensemble you wore back in those days are making a comeback just about now and you’ll be thinking to yourself “Hah! Been there done that. You young ‘uns are lucky that back in my day we thought of that first”

But 99% of the time, your “rad”ensemble rarely made the comeback list and you sigh a prayer of relief that social media was not invented at that time. Because what dwells in those dusty photo albums should never, ever see the light of day, ever.

As Malaysia is always uniquely defining themselves at every corner of every fashion revolution that comes to our shores, here are some significant fashion faux pas that we never want to ever be reminded of, again :

1.  Fluorescent shorts. Whether you’re at the beach, playing tennis, or queuing up at the nasi lemak stall. You were green, orange, yellow. And so was everybody else.

2. Shoulder pads. Your girlfriend dances to Rick Astley and shoulder pops from side to side. You get turned on because she looks like a hot female commander from the Death Star

3. Hypercolor T-shirts. Changes color via thermal fibre technology. And everyone knows your man boobs sweat something fierce. You end up looking like someone spilled Clorox over you.

4. The Chicano look. Buttoned all the way up to the collar in a checked shirt, wandering around Lot 10 and Sungei Wang. You were a gangbanger on the mean streets of Kuala Lumpur. But still had to take the pink bas mini home. 

5. The GQ look. Baggy, print shirts. Slacks in horrible shades of brown, purple and maroon. Buckled belts. Shiny leather shoes. Middle parting hair. Just describing it makes me cringe.

6. Mom Jeans. It’s hard to imagine that back in the day, our babes used to rock mommy jeans, where the waist was actually at the waist. And, the t shirts were tucked in.

7. Denim dungarees. Bad enough there were mom jeans around, on special occasions, our fair maidens were also new jack swinging to denim dungarees.

8.  Snowcaps. To complete our ghetto ensemble. But in this weather, complete with rambut bau hapak and soaked with your peluh and dandruff. Nice.

9. Boy London caps. Why, oh why, did we have to have a steel plat embedded on our caps, on our heads. And who the hell was Boy London???

10. Windbreakers. Mind you, it was hard getting cool Nike or Reeboks in Malaysia. So we had to settle for Forest, Antioni or Schwarzenbach. But we still felt like Tupac. Straight out of Compton. Which in KL speak was actually Salem Power Station in Lot 10.

So will these ever make a comeback? I highly doubt it. But if they do, at least it justifies our age group finally getting to show off and acknowledge our past with pride. But so far, the fashion cycle has crept up to recycle as far as the 60s and 70s fashion trends with skinny jeans and slim cuts. Hopefully by the time we’re in our 50s the cycle will finally reach the dreaded 80s and 90s. And by that time, the bragging rights will rightfully be ours, my friends.

And when that time comes, I hope it will never be a combination of fluorescent mommy jeans. God save us all.