OK, so I know nothing about fashion. I don’t remember much about the clothes I wore as a little kid, but I do remember going shopping for school clothes. We would make the pilgrimage to the Sears, Roebuck, and Company store on Ponce De Leon Avenue in Atlanta. It seems like there should have been somewhere closer to buy clothes, but that’s where we went. There was no I-75 in those days, so it took a little time to get there. I thought the place was gigantic. The one constant purchase was blue jeans. Somewhere along the way, Sears introduced a unique store brand called Toughskins. They were almost indestructible, with reinforced knees so thick that it was hard to bend your knees when they were new. But, the one thing you did not see was kids wearing pants with holes in them. No self-respecting parent would allow that in my neighborhood. If you managed to get through the knees in a pair of pants, they would be cut off and turned into shorts. Today, you’ll pay extra for pants with holes.
Once I got a little older, the last thing I wanted to wear was those Toughskins. I had to have Levi’s jeans, and they had to be paired with a cool t-shirt. My all-time favorite was an Aerosmith t-shirt that started out black but eventually turned into a light gray before it was retired. A blue-jean jacket would round out the outfit if it was cold outside. The shoes we wore were some type of sneaker, probably something like the running shoes that Jenny gave Forrest Gump. Those shoes cost about $20, which doesn’t sound like much. But, you must remember you could fill up your gas tank for $10 in those days.
Fashion took an ugly turn in the late 70s during the disco era. We all had at least one of those hideous leisure suits. I don’t think we need to talk about that.
When I started working at Delta, they had a strict dress code. We had to wear dress shoes, dress pants, a dress shirt, and a tie. They were very strict with the tie. If you forgot it, you had to find one somewhere. One fellow had a collection of outrageous ties that you could borrow, but everybody knew what had happened if you were wearing one of those. I liked to keep a spare tie in the car just in case. The funny thing is the shoes didn’t have to match. We had one fellow who accidentally came in one day with one black shoe and one brown. The next day, the entire office did the same thing. It did not catch on, though. I guess nobody looks to a bunch of computer nerds as fashion influencers. I guess I can live with that.