FashBlog.com

I recently accompanied one of my cousins to her college campus and was surprised at some of the clothing styles I saw. At 31 years old, I felt incredibly out of touch with today's younger generation, especially in terms of the jeans people were wearing. I had never heard of some of the brands that I saw, but my cousin was right there to assure me that not only were those brands popular, many of the denim styles I was looking at cost well over $150. I was in shock at first, then I realized that my generation went through the same thing. In fact, it's kind of interesting to remember how denim brands faded in and out of popularity.

For instance, when I was in junior high, back in the late 1980's, the most popular brand of jeans at my school was Guess. It seemed that I couldn't walk the halls without seeing three-fourths of the student body in jeans with the upside-down triangle logo on the back pocket. Even back then, Guess jeans cost close to $50, so of course I didn't have a pair. Instead, I tried to stick to jeans that had no discernible logo on the outside so that the other kids wouldn't immediately know how cheap they were.

The Guess craze lasted just a couple of years. By the time I moved on to high school, those jeans were already out. One distinguishing feature about the most popular denim brands in high school was that there seemed to be a different "hot" label every single year. In my freshman year, all the cool guys and girls wore Calvin Klein jeans. Now, instead of the logo being on the back pocket, the big CK was on a patch near the belt loops. This in itself led to another trend: that of tucking in shirts. After all, who would be able to see that you were indeed wearing Calvin Klein jeans if your shirt was hanging down to cover the label?

When my sophomore year rolled around, the hottest jeans were Girbaud. These were first popular among the guys, then girls slowly started warming to them. Girbaud jeans cost almost $75 at the time, if I remember correctly, and were way out of budgetary reach for a lot of the student body, so it was really a status thing to be able to wear these jeans. Another thing that set Girbaud apart from the rest of the denim out there was that the logo appeared on a tiny rectangular patch across the fly area.

Girbaud gave way to Tommy Hilfiger jeans in my junior year. The Tommy trend actually lasted a bit longer and overlapped with the hottest clothing brand of my senior year, which was Abercrombie & Fitch. Just as I was leaving high school, A&F was taking off in popularity. In fact, I would have to say that Abercrombie was the single most popular brand during all of my college years, as well.

Anyway, I guess my point here is that I shouldn't feel bad about not being able to keep up with denim trends these days. Looking back, it would have been hard for an adult to follow my own generation's preferences, too!