Practicalities fade into fashionable accessories
Posted on May 01, 2008
Ahh yes, it’s getting to be that time. The time where girls will allow glasses to eat their faces and pull on shorts that should really be called cheeks.
Manicures and pedicures are at the top of lists and classes fall between tanning sessions. Most girls will actually have to shave their legs more than once a week. Some guys will work harder on their six packs and some will work harder on drinking them.
There’s this urgency for summer—an urgency that is an art to protect oneself or to sell oneself and it’s done through the fine lines of practicality, accessories and status symbols.
Let’s take the baseball cap for example. The baseball cap was designed for baseball players to keep the sun out of their eyes. It was also an easy way to identify a team.
Today, the baseball cap has many more reasons for being such a powerful accessory.
Aside from the obvious stated above, baseball caps are used to keep long hair out of faces, advertise company logos, protect bald men from the sun, show rank in various armed forces, cover unwashed hair, allow poker players to think they’re sly, amp up luck through the rally cap and let hung-over students sleep in class.
A lot of guys now will be thinking about those big ol’ fashionable sunglasses girls wear.
Sunglasses were created to do basically the same thing baseball caps do: keep that dang ultraviolet radiation from sensitive eyes. But, much like baseball caps, sunglasses have many other uses.
They keep drivers from hitting pedestrians when heading west on cloudless evenings, prevent cancers and diseases from forming and keep lack of eye contact a secret.
Big sunglasses (the kind that eat faces off of females) come with these benefits and then some: they hide dark under-eye circles, allow celebrities to hide their identity and act as dual-purpose safety and sunglasses.
Other accessories define status, like rings. The quality of gem on a ring can indicate how much money one has or what kind of relationship status an individual is involved in.
Automobiles can be purchased for practical purposes or to function as status symbols. And of course, there are some automobiles can do both.
Some fashions I don’t quite understand, like holes in jeans. I definitely like the look of them, but I wonder why people will pay $200 plus for a pair of holey jeans.
My sister had a pair of old jeans that she took a cheese grater to and made her own status symbol for the price of elbow grease.
I remember one time when I visited my grandmother in a pair of holey jeans and she asked me if I wanted them patched.
But what about personal items that are practical and do good? If society values straight teeth, why aren’t braces popular?
Glasses were once looked at as geeky, but now people with 20/20 vision will purchase frames with plastic lenses because they like the look. In the next ten years will there be pseudo-retainers?
Think about it: if people want to give off the impression that they’ve got money and are striving to become better, I think pseudo retainers would be a hit. Or is that what grills are for?
Abby attributes the highly accurate Wikipedia for empowering her with baseball cap and sunglass knowledge. Without Wikipedia, college students would be lost.