80s Fashions That Were Better Off Dead

I smiled when I saw that leggings were back in style. I sighed the first time I saw a girl at my high school wearing a big, long shirt with a belt over it. I even contemplated buying a vest once I began seeing them again in trendier stores. But this, I tell you, I will not stand for.

Zip-legged jeans are back.

I should have known this was coming this winter when I saw a model in the J. Crew catalog wearing her otherwise-baggy jeans pegged. I guess I was in denial. This too, I thought, shall pass. It won't be long until everyone realizes that jeans that strangle your ankles don't even look good on size-2 models. But I was wrong.

At least according to the folks at Anthropogie. (Or, as it's known around my house, That Store You'll Never Be Able to Afford a Complete Outfit From.) (Yes, I just ended that sentence in a preposition. Deal.) I was browsing their spring catalog when I saw them. The cute little model with the pixie haircut is sitting in a cafe with one leg elegantly extended, showing her skinny little jeans with a zipper at the ankle. It's pretty smart of the Anthropologie people to show these pants on a seated model so we don't see the unavoidably saggy knees that result from actually being foolish enough to try to change positions in a pair of tightly tapered jeans.

I remember, as a child of the 80s, the Bell Bottom Rebellion. We were so disgusted by those polyester atrocities that our parents wore and that we saw on all the kids in our outdated health textbooks that we took pants to the opposite extreme. Woe to the person misguided enough to actually wear a pair of normal straight-leg jeans to school--you were ridiculed for wearing your "bells" all day. Our goal was to have our jeans fit as tightly around our ankles as possible. This meant pegging the legs if necessary. Heaven forbid your jeans actually cover the tops of your shoes. Oh, the horror!

I remember wearing the zip-legged jeans. In fact, I remember having a pair that was a teensy bit too long and that flaired out about a millimeter over the tops of my Converse high-tops so I pegged those, too. I probably still have the zipper lines permanently imbedded on the outsides of my ankles.

Even though I remember wearing them, I do not remember this fondly. I was a scrawny little thing in middle- and high-school, and had long, bony legs that embarrassed me at the time but that I would sell my soul to have back. But even at 5'5" and 110 pounds, I didn't look good in skinny jeans. This is probably because, no matter how thin my legs may get, I am still going to have the "cankle." It's a gift from some long-ago ancestor that has kept on giving to every female in my family. My calf and ankle are melted into one entity that goes straight down into my shoes. There's no elegant tapering there. I've tried to look on the bright side of this trait as it at least means my ankles are relatively strong and didn't get all wobbly during the rollerblading phase I went through. But it also means I can never find a big-enough souvenir shell ankle bracelet when I go to Florida.

So if your ankles don't taper, but your jeans do, it looks bad. I warmly welcomed bootcut and flared pants into my wardrobe and haven't looked back. My fashion past is ugly. Why would I want to go back there?

So if the skinny jean trend really is back, and every department store in America stocks this style and only this style, I guess I will have no choice but to...keep wearing my flares until they're so worn I have to keep 'em together with duct tape. I will become one of those teachers we saw in the 80s, who hung on to their polyester bell bottoms and wore them to school every day oblivious of how uncool they looked and how easy they were making it for the artistically-gifted to draw comic representations of them during World Civ.

I am optimistic, though, because Oprah is still doing makeover shows where she pulls people out of Target in their "mom jeans" and puts them into a flattering pair of low-rise, wide-leg trousers and changes their lives forever. Maybe I can sneak past this skinny-jean trend with my dignity intact.

Because the day you take away my bootleg Calvins is the day you pry them off my cold, dead cankles.