Beyond Boston Chic

For most of my childhood, I fought being over dressed.  For example, for the school dance in the 7^th grade, my mother wanted me to wear a satin Pepto Bismo colored monstrosity that I wore as a flower girl to a wedding the summer before.  I wanted to wear jeans and a t-shirt.

“Why would you want to wear jeans and a t-shirt? Wear that pretty dress so all the girls can be jealous,” she said.

I knew the girls would not be jealous.  They would laugh.  The boys would laugh.  The teachers would look down on me with pity.  Back then, my family never quite seemed to know how to dress here.  They got their cues from soap operas.  If Erica Kane and Krystle Carrington dressed well every day, why couldn’t we?  From what I observed, fancy clothes was not the norm for my American friends.  Jeans and a t-shirt, or jeans and a sweater was the way to go.

Class picture day or school field trips to the state house for example, were particularly painful.  In those early days, we were teased quite a bit.  At that time, I wanted to dress like my American counterparts, now, I have no compulsion to do so, I want to be and dress exactly as I want.  But of course, dressing well or dressing as you would like can get you in trouble.

Tyler here, has quite a scar on his right cheek.  You can’t see the scar in this picture, but the story goes, he was dressed, not unlike in the above picture when another young man threw a beer bottle at him.

I was aghast. “That’s crazy! Why did he throw a beer bottle at you?”

“He thought I was gay,” Tyler reply.

My face registered twin emotions of surprise and horror.  Apparently there are still places where you can still be attacked for being too different.  Even in our lovely Beantown.    Tyler had a good response to this.  “I’ve been dressing like this since high school, I’m not going to stop now.”  I’m glad. I’m digging his ascot.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 6:03 am and is filed under Boston. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.