Heart and Mind

Seventh Grade Styles, Seventh Grade Stupidity

I've never been fashionable and I've never really followed style trends. Now, before I go further, let me just clarify that statement. I'm not implying that if you were to look at a picture of me from, say, 1988 that you'd be completely clueless that I was living in the late eighties. I'm sure you could tell because I think very few people are completely immune to the general, global sort of stylistic trends. There are elements of style that come and go over time that affect everybody, regardless of whether one seeks to be fashionable or not. For example, even 50-year-old men—hardly the typical demographic of youthful coolness—tend to look different from decade to decade because of these larger, global trends. It's in part due to the fact that the clothing industry dictates how you'll present yourself by what they sell. You couldn't, for example, buy a really gaudy, wide neck tie in the late 80s like you most certainly could in the mid 70s. So whether you care to or not, you're partially in style because of what's available to you, by how a barber or hairdresser typically performs a basic hair cut, etc.

So, when I say I never really have taken part in the trendy styles of the day, I'm not talking about the general trends. I'm really talking about more extreme examples. Most specifically to this blog entry, I'm going to focus on those kinds of extreme styles that kids take part in that adults look at and find just absolutely ridiculous. When I Iook back over the last ten or fifteen years, a few come to mind, like wearing baggy pants half-way down your ass with your boxers showing, or sticking pieces of metal through your tongue. Now, I was too old for that kind of crap when those examples were fashionable, anyway, but I wasn't a participant in the equivalent things in my generation either. EXCEPT in seventh grade.

Now we're getting into the meat of the subject here.

To be completely truthful, I should rework that opening line to say, " I've never been fashionable and I've never really followed style trends, except for when I was in seventh grade."

Let me talk about seventh grade for a couple of minutes here. I started seventh grade in 1983. 1983-84 was the school year. Seventh grade was a magical time, I thought. It was probably the best year I had had at the time. I went to a pretty snobby elementary school and I don't think I fully realized how much my elementary school years were kind of crappy until I got involved in a bigger, slightly more (albeit probably not much more) diverse community like the kind in my junior high. Oh, must I mention? It was the first year of junior high. I'm an old school kind of guy—literally, in this case—and we had none of that "middle school" bullshit.

I think from a sociological standpoint, seventh grade makes for a fascinating case study. I think two particular, diametrically opposed concepts are more appropriate for seventh grade than any other year:

1. In seventh grade you're usually at a point where you are becoming that typical teenager, and you're concerned about being cool and listening to cool music and being contemporary and hip and on the ball, knowing what bands are out there, keeping up with everything... And..

2. In seventh grade, you're still young enough to be completely naive and stupid and to not look at anything bigger than the little world that is your existence.

When you put those two concepts together, it means you get a typical seventh grader who is extremely obsessed with the age that he's living in and yet too myopic to recognize—and too unconcerned to even care—that he's nothing more than a statistic, the same as every other little seventh grade twerp, being marketed to by a mass media and wave of popular, non-free-thinking culture.

It's actually pretty funny. It's as funny as it is pathetic.

So let's talk about those styles again.

I think I was always pretty sharp for my age, but in seventh grade, I was so naive that I actually believed that the way things were right then in 1983 was the way they were going to be forever.

You see, I had seen all the old stuff from the past. Whenever I saw old 60s footage, like music clips from the Beatles circa 1965, I thought it seemed so quaint, so trite, and so inherently uncool. The black and white video? The supposed "long" hair that was clearly not? The fact that a rock band—the universal definition of cool—wore matching suits on stage? My teachers wore suits!

And, of course, whenever I saw stuff from the most recent decade—let's say, the early to mid 1970s stuff—it looked so ridiculous and gaudy. It looked as funny as the 1960s stuff, but in a different way. Frankly, it looked goofy.

But yet, when I looked around in 1983, it looked totally normal to me. It looked even better than normal—it looked "right." It didn't look funny. In my mind, I really believed that people, places, and things in the days gone by were just strange and laughable. I may have known deep down, from an intellectual standpoint, that "it was just the style back then," but I didn't get it from a practical standpoint. It just seemed to me that the world had been weird for the last several decades and it finally got it right, here, in 1983.

And going forward, I figured that things would never change again, now that they were "normal" and everyone figured it out. I mean, there would be no more Danny Partridge mops of hair, but, rather, from now on—and that included not only 1983, but 1987, 1997, and 2007 and so on and so forth—guys would simply wear their hair the "normal" way: parted in the middle, mid-legnth, feathered, half-way on the ears, and slightly longer in the back. We had arrived.

Now when I spell it out that way, it sounds really stupid, and it was. But it really points to one thing and when I explain it this way, it seems more understandable as to how a seventh grader could be so stupid: Simply put, as a seventh grader I lacked the ability to realize that I was simply living in a transient moment in time and that eventually my seventh grade yearbook would look dated. Just like the yearbooks from 1968 when all the dudes where wearing those horned-rim glasses. I was not alone. This is how all generations of kids are, to some degree, throughout all their school years, and, in my opinion, it's never more pronounced than in seventh grade.

Of course, not even 10 years later, I started realizing how fleeting everything was and that's probably when I started becoming this thymenage freak and appreciating not only how quaint my own generation was becoming, but about how the differences across all eras is what lends to the charm of it all.

So, before we wrap this up, let's just talk about those "extreme-trendy"/"extreme-stupid" styles I took part in. In my history, despite some mullets and the Iron Maiden t-shirts and other things that I did during my formative years, there are only two things I can recall that completely fit into the category at hand on the basis that they were a) kind of only things that dumb kids did and b) they were so not "me" or my personality at the time, but merely me being part of dumb trends:

1. I wore parachute pants. How incredibly1983/84! I have to admit, though: I really dug 'em. They had lots of pockets and the 1980s were the era of tight fitting pants for boys—unlike the 1990s, which were the opposite—and nothing was tighter than those parachute pants. They were really un-insulated and sitting on a cold chair was like sitting on it Donald Duck style: no pants at all! And you could slide all over the place in the parachute pants, because they were really slippery. Which made sense because they were straight out of the breakdancing trend, which I also kind of dug. I aspired to be a breakdancer, even though I despised rap music, which was what people breakdanced (brokedanced?) to. Go figure. Actually, I mostly just wanted to be able to do a windmill, because I thought they looked so cool. So I actually had a lot of cardboard in my basement back then.

2. The second extremely funny fashion I took part in was also borne out of the rap music culture that I strongly disliked, but I did it anyway: sneakers with the laces undone! Sometimes I'd tuck them in, sometimes they'd flop around, and it was all pretty stupid and we were fortunate we didn't kill ourselves!

So, there you have it: seventh grade. I know I must have been doing some of this kind of stuff in eighth grade, too, but seventh grade is the one that always sort of jumps out at me.

I think what defines the older kid-years, like high school, for many of us is that we still took part in trends, but they were more specialized trends for sub-groups and cliques. All the burnouts, for example, looked the same, but they didn't look the same as the other cliques. It was a more "diversified homogeny," to use an oxymoron. But in seventh grade, the homogeny was greater than any other year.

posted by Steve @ 11:20 PM