Fashion Victim: My Lifelong Love Affair with Clothes (And Their Revenge)
I have always loved fashion with an intensity that borders on the ridiculous. I love how one piece of clothing, an accessory, a new lipstick, can transform not just an entire outfit but my whole outlook on the day. The perfect ensemble gives me confidence that radiates from within; but if my outfit is off, it feels like the universe itself has tilted slightly off its axis.
This dangerous love affair—and I do mean dangerous—started at a very young age.
The Dress That Wouldn’t Fit (But Would Be Worn Anyway)
I can remember being 5 years old, laying out my adored pink dress the night before a special day. This wasn’t just any dress—it had a delicate peter pan collar that made me feel like a proper young lady, and a tea-length skirt with silky accordion pleats that swished magnificently when I twirled. The tiny white polka dots scattered across the fabric looked like stars in a pink sky. In my five-year-old estimation, it was the height of sophistication.
When my mother passed by my room and saw the dress laid out with such reverence, she warned me: the dress didn’t fit me anymore. I refused to accept this fashion blasphemy. The next morning, I engaged in what would become the first of many battles with an uncooperative garment.
I squeezed, I wriggled, I contorted my little body in ways that would impress a yoga master. When I finally managed to get it on, I could barely breathe—but victory was mine. I proudly paraded to my mother, chest puffed out (as much as the fabric would allow), only to have her dissolve into laughter. The buttons in the back, she pointed out, were a full six inches apart, exposing the skin of my back like a racing stripe down the middle.
I wore it anyway. Fashion demands sacrifice.
The Debbie Gibson Incident (a DIY Disaster)
The 80s and 90s were a glorious time to develop a fashion obsession. My style icons weren’t curated Instagram influencers but pop stars whose images I devoured in magazines like Tiger Beat. When I was 10, I spotted Debbie Gibson in a black miniskirt, crisp white button-down, and black pork pie hat—the epitome of cool. I had to have this look, despite having none of the required elements.
Undeterred by such trivial obstacles, I embarked on my first DIY fashion project. I raided my brother’s dresser and discovered a pair of black pajama pants. After careful assessment, I determined that if I wiggled enough, I could fit my entire torso into one of the pant legs. Perfect raw material! With the decisiveness of a fashion surgeon, I snipped off the unneeded limb and a length of fabric from the bottom.
The result, of course, was a gaping hole where my hip should have been covered. No matter! I tucked what was left of the severed leg into the hole and declared it fashion-forward. I completed the ensemble with one of my stepdad’s white office shirts (so oversized it was practically a dress itself) and a dusty old fedora excavated from our coat closet.
Voilà! My parents were conveniently out of town, so no adult was present to prevent me from leaving the house with half my thigh and ass exposed. From the front, I was convinced I was Debbie Gibson’s doppelgänger.
Reality struck when I arrived at school. What had seemed like a minor structural issue at home became increasingly problematic as the day progressed. My teacher’s curious glances evolved from confusion to concern, while my friends abandoned all pretense of politeness and openly mocked my creation. The “skirt” rotated throughout the day, creating a window to different parts of my anatomy at random intervals.
But true fashion devotees aren’t easily discouraged by public humiliation.
The Peg Pants Incident (Wherein Fashion Claims Its Revenge)
A year or so after the indecent exposure incident, peg pants became the rage among the fashionable set. For those who missed this particular trend (you lucky souls), allow me to explain: The denim industry was still experiencing an identity crisis in the aftermath of bell bottoms and disco. In small-town America, you couldn’t simply buy any style of jeans you wanted—you took what local stores offered and modified them to match whatever you’d seen on MTV.
We wanted our jeans to hug our calves and ankles with python-like constriction, emulating our favorite celebrities. Regular tapered jeans? Insufficient. We needed our thighs normal but the bottom half of our legs to resemble toothpicks. The solution was “pegging” our pants: folding the bottoms over vertically first and then horizontally, rolling them as tight as humanly possible until we achieved the desired silhouette. And when I say tight, I mean circulation-threatening tight.
In fifth grade gym class, we faced the dual torment of changing clothes before class and showering after—a special kind of hell for pubescent girls. One fateful day (a Tuesday, as I would later have cause to remember), I found myself struggling with my meticulously pegged pants. I’d rolled them so tightly that they had become leg shackles, refusing to slip over my ankles. Somehow, I’d managed to get them completely inside out with my feet still trapped inside.
Sitting on the locker room bench, I enlisted a friend’s help. She gripped the denim and yanked with the force of someone trying to start an ancient lawnmower. The physics worked perfectly—except instead of the pants coming off, my entire body was pulled forward. My butt disconnected from the bench, and I landed with a spectacular thud on the cold, hard tile floor, the impact knocking the wind from my lungs. I lay there, momentarily paralyzed, my inside-out pants extending from my legs like denim tentacles and my ass, once again, on display for my classmates.
Someone fetched the gym teacher, who summoned the principal. The male principal. I gazed up at him from my supine position, realizing that this moment was equally mortifying for both of us—him seeing me with my pants around my ankles, my days-of-the-week underwear announcing it was “Tuesday” to anyone unfortunate enough to be present.
My mother eventually arrived, and between her and the principal, they managed to restore my pants to their proper position. They carried me to my mother’s Grand Am (would later become my first car), where the principal laid me gingerly across the backseat. My mother, convinced I was being dramatic, drove with her usual abandon, sending me rolling onto the floor during the short journey home.
Her skepticism evaporated a few days later when a spectacular purple bruise bloomed across my tailbone. The doctor’s diagnosis: a bruised coccyx, with peg pants listed as the official culprit.
The Price of Passion
Three decades later, I still bear the scars—both physical and psychological—of my fashion devotion. Yet my enthusiasm remains undimmed. I’ve graduated from DIY disasters to a more sophisticated appreciation of design, texture, and style. My closet is carefully curated, my fashion risks calculated rather than calamitous.
As a writer who loves to cover fashion and beauty, these early misadventures gave me something invaluable: perspective. I understand the transformative power of clothing, how the right outfit can make you feel invincible, and how the wrong one can quite literally bring you down.
I’ve learned that fashion should be fun but perhaps not taken too seriously. After all, no trend is worth a bruised tailbone.
But I still occasionally catch myself eyeing a too-small dress or impossibly high heels with longing, thinking, “I could make that work.”
Because fashion may be dangerous, folks—but some loves are worth the risk.