denim shirts

One of the benefits of fashion’s lack of new ideas is the comforting knowledge that any article of clothing, no matter how horribly demode it seems now, will become insanely stylish again within fifteen years, and if you just keep wearing the least fashionable clothes you own, you will eventually be revered as a trendsetter. No, wait, I take it back. This is the worst thing about fashion. The fashion industry has this really good thing going where they convince us certain things are out of style. Then, after they are sure that every last person on Earth has donated their uncool clothes to Goodwill, they convince us that those same clothes are back in style so that they can sell them to us again.

I sound like a crazy person, but like all crazy people, I know I’m right. My proof? The denim shirt.

this is unflattering on the model. imagine how you would look.

I remember begging my parents to buy me a denim shirt fifteen years ago. Mine was long, medium blue, with a Nehru collar, wooden buttons, and a curved hem. I wore it over leggings with brown lipstick that matched the buttons. I thought I looked pretty hot. I didn’t, because I was twelve, and because I was painfully gawky, and because the lipstick just drew attention to my giant, brace-filled mouth.

I got my second denim shirt a few years later. This one was a lighter chambray color, with short sleeves, pearl snaps, and a bit of stretch. I wore it with combat boots, a plaid skirt, and too much eyeliner. I thought I looked even hotter, because this shirt magically made me look like I had breasts, even though I didn’t until I was about 21.

Sometime between 1998 and now, these shirts became disgusting to me. In my late teens, I would see them in a drawer while digging for a silver miniskirt or a David Bowie tee and be ashamed of how uncool I used to be.

NERDS

Now, denim shirts, along with many other styles I wore during my awkwardest years, are back.

I am told that these folks are celebrities

I refuse to buy another one, and I urge my loved ones to stay away as well. Here’s why: you see photos like this one below, and you are fooled into thinking that this is an accurate representation of what a person in a denim shirt looks like.

you will not look like this.

THIS is what a person in a denim shirt looks like:

this woman is so ashamed of her horrible shirt that she is attempting to leave the frame

I realize that Althea will probably show up looking amazing in a denim shirt right after I post this, just like she did with clogs, but she is the eternal exception to every fashion rule. She has superhuman powers to wear anything at all and be the most stylish person in the room. This doesn’t make it okay for the rest of us to wear denim shirts. Maybe I’m just pissed that I let myself be convinced that denim shirts were lame, only to have them reappear as something considered a classic. But I brought those once-cherished shirts to Goodwill a decade ago, and I refuse to regret it.

see how sad she looks? it's because she's wearing an ugly shirt