The black sheep will be queen!

I was crossing Park Ave. today on 22nd street and I saw me at age 14. She was tall (the only difference) and wearing awkwardly tight (and unflattering) jeans that cut into her babyfat waist with a too-short but not skanky t-shirt (the kind you're always yanking down because you just realized it shrank that morning and nothing else was clean or you unwisely thought it would be fine and it would only ride up when you were standing, and who stands nowadays?) with a mouth full of braces and long, lank, flatly curly hair with frizzy bangs. I don't think I ever looked like that, but I felt like that every day. I felt a visceral pang of recognition and I wanted to swoop over her like a clucking mother hen and protect her from mockery and the waves of low self-esteem. But instead of being gangling and friendless, she was walking with a bunch of other kids who looked like her and looked like they liked her. Brand new world, what?

It's too bad the American Apparel dude didn't try harder to tap into this awkward-is-hot because normal-is-hot ethos. I suppose the the urge to put a tiny girl into a boring lollipop/kneesock/bubblegum bareass pose must be impossible to resist, so they've done one smart ad and the rest is all boring, softcore dreck.

It's taken me until my 30s to feel comfortable enough to wear whatever I wanted and to really not give a shit what anyone thought (most of my life has been blustering bravado, fashion-wise), so I felt proud when I saw that inelegant girl on the street. Even if she was cutting herself and daydreaming of some blond highschool jock in her bedroom every night, she looked great and embraced her weirdness. Hoorah for the modern woman!