We’ve all bought an item of clothing or two that we later regret; some of us just have a few more than others. Whether it is a pair of neon legwarmers or a gaudy clubbing top, we all have a few monstrosities hiding at the bottom of our overstuffed closets that we might like to forget about.
Summer is the best time of year to conduct a ruthless wardrobe overhaul, because 1) nobody cares about fashion during the summertime (proof: jean shorts everywhere) and 2) by the time the crisp September issue of Vogue rolls off the presses, you’ll be hard-pressed to think about anything other than purchasing new staples to add to your wardrobe.
But before you go throwing out some of those ridiculous items that you once held dear (or at least thought looked really good on you), why not revel in their hilarity? Here are four things I found while rooting around in my high school closet, that I should probably part with but can’t bear to because of the memories they hold.
Punk Army Jacket
In high school I was totally punk rock. So punk, in fact, that I was the drummer in a band called Legal Suicide that never actually wrote any songs. Beyond listening to The Clash, Rancid, Bad Religion, and whatever other bands were on those Punk-O-Rama compilation albums, I totally looked the part too. I dabbled in overzipped bondage pants, painted Sex Pistols lyrics on my Converse and most importantly, wore this crusty army punk jacket.
The jacket itself was from discount emporium Giant Tiger, and each band patch was carefully selected from whatever was available at Sam the Record Man, which explains why the bands are so entry-level punk. KMFDM are a German industrial band that the Columbine killers listened to, which is frankly a little odd when paired with melodic pop-punkers Bad Religion and the flamboyant Adam and the Ants. It is sort of beyond hideous, but I guess the most punk rock thing of all was that I didn’t care that this jacket was ugly and I wore it on a regular basis anyways.
Reach for the Top Trivia Shirt
Being smart and wearing glasses in the third grade meant I was relegated to nerd status pretty quickly in the dog-eat-dog social environment of grade school. So once I stopped trying my fight my nerdiness (by acting punk), I decided to embrace it full stop and joined the trivia team. Reach for the Top is a high school trivia competition where teams battle it out based on their knowledge of completely random facts, and is just as overachieving as it sounds. My school’s t-shirts were comedic gold; a clip art picture of a finger hovering atop of a buzzer, encircled by the motto “Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy.” Our team wore these shirts like the Ramones wore their black leather jackets, to intimidate the crap out of everyone else.
Purple Spandex Jumpsuit
This purple spandex jumpsuit is so weird, I’m not even sure where it came from. I think it must have been deposited into my closet from the vortex of an alternate galaxy that could no longer handle the pressure of containing such a ridiculous article of clothing. I used to wear this jumpsuit as neon leggings underneath similarly garish attire: now it is suited only for tight-and-bright themed parties.
Neon Batman T-shirt
I bought this vintage t-shirt during the height of Nu Rave, when Klaxons were the coolest band ever and nobody had yet realized that Mark Hunter of the Cobrasnake is a total creep. While this t-shirt was definitely printed for a kid in the 1980s, to me it screams Misshapes party gear from 2005.
____
Isabel Slone is a Toronto-based fashion blogger and writer. Follow her on Twitter at @isabelslone.
For more, follow us on Twitter at @TorontoStandard, or subscribe to our newsletter.
