Editor's note
Published on Thu., November 20th, 2008
As titillating as Britney Spears made the school uniform look seem, after wearing a plaid skirt and a white polo to school every day for the entirety of my pre-college education, I can testify that school uniforms are nothing worth dancing in a hallway about.
Dictated duds did have their perks, though. I didn’t have to anguish every morning over what to wear, or worry that my outfit wasn’t as cool as what the girl with the locker next to mine was wearing.
But in the sea of sameness that was my high school, I ached to stand out from my fellow plaid-clad counterparts. To do so, I found myself buying obnoxious hot pink jewelry, gaudy headbands in every color and neon Nikes.
I thought coming to the University would at last provide sweet liberation from the monotony of school uniforms.But college only presented a new problem: I had no idea how to dress.
It was a strange feeling, waking up at 18 and realizing you don’t know how to put yourself together.
Not only did I now face the daunting task of having my clothes up to my discretion seven days a week, but I had no money to spend on upgrading my wardrobe from its hot-pink-jewelry-and -neon-Nike state.
I pined for a North Face jacket, pastel Lacoste polos, a Dooney & Bourke handbag, a “Vote For Pedro” shirt—all the hot fashions I spotted freshman year while nomming on noodle salad in Oliver dining hall.
But having no money to spend on new clothes taught me to be resourceful. I found a treasure trove of vintage shirts in my basement that had belonged to my mom. I also realized that every store has a clearance rack and, if perused at the right moment, a clearance rack can provide all the clothes your inner fashion maven desires.
Check out Nina’s story on page 4 about how to keep yourself fashionable on a budget, and how being a “recessionista” is becoming a new trend in itself.
My tentative triumph over my once-barren closet showed me that being fashionable doesn’t have to mean spending lots of dough, or being a cookie-cutter replica of everyone else.
Case in point: A few weeks ago, I decided to resurrect that plaid skirt from my school uniform days. Britney couldn’t have been completely wrong.
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