FashBlog.com

I'll be the first to admit that I had zero fashion sense when I was a teenager. Perhaps growing up as the only girl in a single-parent home with my father and three brothers had something to do with it. I had no one to teach me the basics of outfit coordination, how to choose clothes that showed off my figure, or even how to do my hair or apply makeup. Consequently, I was the consummate tomboy and wore nothing but jeans and t-shirt ensembles throughout junior high and the first two years of high school.

That fact in itself doesn't bother me much; plenty of girls go through the same phase. What does bother me, even as I sit here pondering it nearly 20 years later, is that I couldn't even execute the jeans and t-shirt look properly. You see, I only had 5 or 6 t-shirts and 2 pairs of jeans that I would rotate for the entire school year! I pretty much had a Monday shirt, a Tuesday shirt, a Wednesday shirt, and so on. Imagine that scenario taking place week after week from August to June.

It's not that my father couldn't afford to buy me new clothes -- we were planted solidly in the lower-middle class and always seemed to have just enough of everything to get by. It's just that I never thought to ask for new clothes, and my father never thought to offer. So I kept on wearing the same old t-shirts from random places, like the "I left my [big red heart symbol] in San Francisco" or the maroon number from my bowling team, The Whammies.

Surprisingly enough, I was blissfully unaware of what the other kids thought about my "wardrobe." Because I never noticed other people's clothing, I naively thought they didn't notice mine. No nasty jokes or cruel comments ever reached my unsuspecting ears, though I'm sure (now that I think about it) that kind of thing was happening behind my back. Luckily, I turned things around during my junior year in high school when one of my friends went shopping with me and picked all my clothes out. I learned which kinds of clothes flattered me the most and I slowly built up a real wardrobe that consisted of more than just t-shirts.

I know that we all have been through those fashion cycles that make us cringe at ourselves when we look back at old photos. But when I see my pictures from junior high, I can actually feel my face turning red, even when no one else is in the room. I just hope that your teenage fashion follies didn't cover a whole four years like mine did!