That 90s’ Trend

WARNING: There are chances you may come across too many exclamation points in this piece. And there are chances some anti-exclamation mark pressure groups might send the Editor an excruciatingly long petition against the unnecessary use of this punctuation mark by this weekly and ask if we have run out of ideas on how to gracefully use other punctuations! But let me assure you, the subject matter demands that almost every sentence in this article ends with an exclamation point. Also please don’t expect the subject matter to be dealt in a chronological order. I’m just too mentally traumatised to recount the fashion trends of the 90s as well as its major flubs, some of which I myself have committed!

1990s sure was a strange time, with strange fashion trends and equally strange fashion flubs. And I shamefacedly admit to having committed quite a number of them myself, including strutting around town wearing a pair of spandex tights, known during those days as ‘cycling shorts’! What was I thinking! That I was Axl Rose minus the stubble, bandana, and Jack Daniels? Jeez!

Those were the dark ages when sporting a Tibetan terrier hairdo was considered cool. Ah, those not-so-glorious days of side-parting, straight long fringes completely covering one eye, painfully tilted necks [to keep that fringe hanging over that particular side of the face] and the resulting stiff neck at the end of the day! After my pet Apso saw that hairdo on me, the bitch insisted on getting a crew cut. How mean is that!

Topping the list of other popular hairstyles that had once swept Gangtok was Crew cut, a hairdo sported by delusional guys who, after an overdose of Vietnam War movies, believed they were in the US Army. After the release of Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore starrer Ghost, getting the short Demi Moore crop was a must for every ‘cool’ school girl while every other guy wanted an Aashiqui cut a la Rahul Roy. Sales of shampoo, as well as lice killer potions, shot up like crazy that season, I’ve been told.

A denim jacket worn over anything, even formal pants [!], was another fashion statement back in the 90s. My few attempts to make such a statement in school got too loud for my teachers’ liking, resulting in a couple of quick detentions and the eventual confiscation of my prized denim jacket on charges of repeated offence. Soon, it became cool to wear torn jeans, jackets and bags started sporting ‘patches’ and our fashionable people became walking billboards for anything from the US Postal Service to some obscure oil company in the UAE!

But the determination of fashion-conscious peeps hell-bent on wearing a tight pair of denims during those Lycra-less days was amazing. If getting into those awfully tight pair of ‘Jeans pants’ was an ordeal, getting out of them was a mission almost impossible. Groans, grunts and frantic looks thrown around to see if there’s anyone to lend you a hand, or two, to get you out of that contraption. And all that pain for what purpose? To make yourself look like a ridiculous replica of Big Ethel, with the denim covering your knees protruding as if your knees were on Viagra! The results were more disastrous on a pair of bow legs.

Other horror-inducing fashion rages of the time were baggy pants and shirts with bat wing-like sleeves [I plead guilty to having worn these absurdities], puffed sleeves, Iron Maiden t-shirts, jabar-jasti ko denim bell-bottoms [regular denim pants cut open at the seams and a V-shaped piece of cloth, known as ‘rockets’, sewn in between to make the ‘flares’], fluorescent clothes that made everyone go blind [thanks to MTV], platform sneakers that elevated you to new heights with layers of rubber soles, and fake Doc Martins that threatened to weigh you down by their sheer weight besides giving you corns. And then there were the days when people walked the streets of Gangtok wearing combat pants and boots when the nearest war going on at that time was in the Arabian Gulf! Thank God, PVC clothing failed to find a market here.

Missing an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 and Fauji starring a young Shah Rukh Khan was a cardinal sin, so was addressing your friends by their full name. Those were the days when geniuses like us were too mentally preoccupied to spell out all the syllables in a name. So Mahesh became Max, Savitri became Savvy, and Thupden became Thups! If names were a race, we’d be looking back at those times as an era marred by genocide.

Then somewhere around mid-90s we saw a late emergence of the grunge fashion [seems like it took the trend some time to reach here from Seattle]. This was the age of the ‘anti-fashion’ fashion when we proudly went around looking like we just rolled out of bed in oversized plaid flannel shirts [in summer!] worn over t-shirts endorsing heavy metal bands. The look was not complete unless the flannel shirts were accompanied by dirty denim pants, a wallet chain [optional], a pair of dirty canvas shoes and a thatch of equally greasy hair. This trend continued until the time hip-hop street fashion took over in the fag end of the 90s.

At least the good thing about those days of horrible fashion trends was that they lasted for quite some time before they became ‘oh so last season’. These days, the fashion changes so rapidly that in a couple of months’ time, someone might be writing a somewhat similar piece on ‘the unthinkable fashion trends we followed last season’ here and demanding a barf bag at the uncomfortable thought of his/her fashion flubs of last season! Baarrfff!

Midweek, 27 Sept – 03 Oct, 2006