Silly pants and Spanish Soldiers

Standard

The best thing about being rich and important is the fact that you can make people dress up in ridiculous clothing.  Just look at these guys in Spain.  They’re saying “Look at me in my silly pants.  Don’t I look stupid?”

Image

 

I actually kind of like those pants.  But I bet you those guys have friends at home that laugh at them and make fun of them.  Unless they’re rich.  When you’re rich, you can wear anything you like and get away with it.  The camera men will take your picture and call it fashion no matter how stupid you look, because you’re rich and famous.

 

Look at this rich and famous guy.  He’s getting paid to look silly

Image

You can only get away with an outfit like this if you are in an elite social class.  When I was 16, I did not know this. 

I had a fashion sense of my own, and I just don’t think the people of Denison,  TX  were ready for high fashion such as mine. 

This one time, My sister Clementine was going to Deep Ellum with her boyfriend, Mikey.  Since I was paying for the gasoline, they were going to let me tag along. 

Before it was taken over by Yuppies and totally ruined, Deep Ellum was this artsy Punk Rock Downtown area of Dallas.  They had cool shops, and these outside vendors that sold the coolest jewelry in the world.  We weren’t actually old enough to get into the clubs, but it was still loads of fun. 

If you went there, though, you had to look as punk rock as possible so that you wouldn’t be considered a trendy. 

Trendy: A yuppie prep conservative who is just wearing new waver clothing to follow a fashion trend.

Clementine wore her ripped fishnet panty hose with some thuggish looking outfit.  Mikey wore a mohawk, a Fugazi T-Shirt, shorts, and bright yellow Doc Martens boots that went halfway up his shins. 

Somehow, they were cool and I was not.  What I wore that day, went down into their hysterical deed recollection bin and the “Clotilda Fashion Story” was told over and over again at parties and other social events.  They did not think it was a punk rock outfit, they just thought it was absolutely hysterical. 

I wore a 1950s bathing suit that I got out of my grandmother’s closet.  She wore it one time, was scared to death of the water, fish and snakes, and never went swimming again. 

The bathing suit looked like this one:

Image

 

It was made from thick black rayon.  I wore it with black and white striped tights, like the wicked witch of the west

Image

 

and a pearl necklace that went down to my knees and a pair of mary janes.  Image

I thought I looked punk rock.  If I had been Paris Hilton instead of Clotilda Spampacker back then I might have just got my picture put in Vogue magazine.  Instead, I was the laughing stock of Denison, TX.  They almost didn’t take me to Deep Ellum in that outfit.  They let me tag along, but they made fun of me all night long.  Then they told everyone all about my silly outfit, like it was some sort of a joke. 

It’s just not fair.  Look at these ladies, they are just walking around town in their 1950s bathing suits.  Nobody’s laughing at them.  They even got their picture in the Wall Street Journal.

Image

They can get away with it too because they’re rich.

I wonder if they really are rich, or if they just look rich because of their silly clothes. 

 

About these ads

About clotildajamcracker

oddball fiction writer and suburban food forest gardener. I'm into debt free living and tightwadding. I have lots of money saving tips and recipes, gardening advice and interesting stories on my website www.clotildajamcracker.com I am saving up to plant a huge food forest ecosystem using permaculture and other sustainablity methods that will save the earth from the evil minions who want to cover it with shopping centers, parking lots and factories. http://clotildajamcracker.wordpress.com/ My children's books are currently available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=clotilda+jamcracker Some of my art is available at www.redbubble.com http://www.redbubble.com/explore/clotilda+jamcracker

98 Responses »

  1. Haha. The amount of times I stop myself from dressing in something because I realise I would only be able to get away with it if I was rich and famous kills me!

  2. Punk is all about individuality and making do with what you’ve got, so that outfit sounds totally punk to me! Of course, I used to purposely wear mismatched socks, jeans shorts covered in safety pins and t-shirts that I cut “bullet holes” in and painted to look bloody, and I got lots of odd stares and snickers, so maybe I’m not one to talk. ;)

    • I wear mismatched socks because I can never find a match and I’ve got better things to do than go find a pair that look exactly the same. I usually have safety pins on my clothes, those things come in handy for when my clothes rip or the buckle on my shoe breaks, or when my bra strap busts. You know how it is. Then my clothes get all bloody because I use the safety pins to attack people who give me dirty looks and then they shoot me with BB and pellet guns. Life is so stressful when you’re weird.

  3. I’m sure the Swiss Guard looked very fetching in those pants in the 16th century. But, I suppose that’s what you get for not updating the wardrobe more often.

    Reminds me of the time my then 4-year-old middle-son saw the Knights of Columbus in full regalia and rather breathlessly informed me that there were pirates in the church.

    I have to admit, I’m not much of a fashionista and care more *that* I’m clothed than what I’m clothed in… this, I’ve found, is at odds with reality in all sorts of strange ways. Not just in Denison.

    You know that show, What Not to Wear? I’m not sure if it’s still being aired, and don’t really care, either. It’s one long commercial. If you can find the old videos online, count the number of times they show or mention the credit card for the clothes or mention an upscale brand or store logo. It’s just one big manipulation of the women who watch it. Sometimes, for fun, I’ll sit with my kids and play a game with it all. We count the number of commercials in a given TV show, or how often we’re being prompted to eat, or we try to guess what demographic is being targeted by the things they think a viewer will buy or what colors/themes/symbols/etc are being used and what they might be meant to convey.

    We had a game not long ago, where we kept a running tally of the images/advertisements we were exposed to in a day’s time with/without TV. When you quantify it, it’s pretty disturbing the way a culture can hammer away at an individual, trying to shape them into a proper citizen of the given subculture.

    As Eliezer Yudkowsky (AI researcher) remarked, “Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.”

    I always try to wear a clown suit, I suppose, seems the only fitting thing to wear to a circus, afterall. ;)

    • Why is it that all the good stuff gets ruined by commercials? I found You Tube a few years ago and was so proud of myself. We watched all kinds of things like cooking and drawing videos. Now every time I want to make a creme’brulee or draw a strudel, I have to sit back and watch some smurfing commercial about dental floss. Grooveshark is being controlled by commercials too, but at least theirs are just rock videos that are actually good.

      • Yes. I don’t think there’s any way to escape advertising. It’s annoying. So, we just openly mock it for our own amusement. :D

      • Some commercials are better than TV Shows. People will tell us about new ones and we’ll go look them up on You Tube because we don’t have cable. My kids favorite is the one with the Velveeta Cheese and the Rotel Tomatoes. you know the one where they take a bite out of the chip and they go flying backwards.

      • True, some of the advertisers try to make the experience less painful than others :D I don’t think children’s programming advertisers have caught onto that concept, but then again, I tend to think children’s programming is a form of torture in most cases. Ever read Jon Ronson? Don’t go by the Men Who State at Goats movie, the nonfiction book is much better.

      • The psychopath test, strange military operations involving people who genuinely believe they can stare goats to death, Barney music as torture, and just exactly who the “they/them” conspiracy theories references. He’s a Gonzo-style British journalist. Very light reading, and usually he’s pretty funny–hard not to be, I guess, given the subject matter.

      • The psychopath test, strange military operations involving people who genuinely believe they can stare goats to death, Barney music as torture, and just exactly who the “they/them” conspiracy theories references. He’s a Gonzo-style British journalist. Very light reading, and usually he’s pretty funny–hard not to be, I guess, given the subject matter.

        Did you see that movie with George Clooney where they talked about that conspiracy theory?

    • Lol I love the pirate comment. So very cute.

      But I’m curious though, what was the number of images/ads people were exposed to with or without tv? I first thought it would be a huge difference but then I think about billboards, ads on trains, packaging of products,etc. So then advertising is everywhere and we’re constantly influenced.

      • It depends on how much you get out of the house and if you have the radio on during the day. We need to do it again, and take a tally. We sat tallying up 30 minutes worth of tween programming on Nick the other day. There were as many commercials as there were minutes in the show (~24 for ~20 minutes of actual show) and then during the show we counted a variety of antisocial behaviors and prompts to buy or eat. It is *less* but still significant if you go out: apparel with brand names (turning people into ads), cars and buses with advertisements on them, fliers, mailers, billboards, sign-spinners…. you get the idea.

        We also tried counting view-changes/rapid scene cuts/rapid angle changes during an hour of children’s programming. My sons complained there were too many to tally, and said we needed a clicker like they use to count people in a flowing crowd at events. LOL Then people wonder why attention spans aren’t what they used to be.

      • Omg. That does make sense about the tween programming. I remember watching some teenick shows like Degrassi and the commercials seemed to go on forever!

        I mostly watch tv shows online and I feel like I’ve dodged the bullet on the amount of ads I’m exposed to. Which isn’t true at all since Youtube and Hulu feature ads before and during their shows. But since it’s only 1 1/2 minute at a time it feels less. Maybe that’s trickery since those flashes of ads resemble subliminal messaging.

        And it’s amazing you’ve involved your kids to realize these media influences. It is funny, but a little unnerving how the amount you counted rose so quickly. I wonder what effects we’ll see in how our brain processes information 10 or 20 years from now.

        Btw, I love that artist Candy Chang combats these ads by defacing them with mustaches : http://candychang.com/project-moustache/

      • lol I thought it was more of a referral since the artist is against surplus advertising so if I advertised her project to you it would be going against her wishes. And I’m sure she would be very upset.

      • Well, I mean, I want to know about the latest and greatest products. If I had never seen an ad for draino, I might have called the plumber and paid way more money than necessary to fix the kitchen drain. I guess some commercials are bad. I just don’t want my kids to see commercials for toys, because they can get really annoying if they start wanting every toy they see on TV. Can you imagine?

      • You have a point about finding out about cool products that are helpful and can improve the lives of people.

        Lol Ad after ad, I can see a child going crazy about wanting new toys. I’m not a kid anymore, but advertisers do an amazing job at making every toy exciting and desirable. When there are cars flying in the air and a bunch of people having fun even I believe that a new mini race car track is the thing I need now.

      • I invented the flying car when I was like 8 years old. I drew a picture of it. It looks very much like the New Beetle. I think someone has stolen my idea. Well, partly. I am either going to make my cars fly by expulsing the air flow with seismatic undercurrents or I am going to create a gravitational barrier by deflecting the quarks from the metallic underbarrier of the car.

    • Okay, this Scottish Blogger, unclerave, keeps making up names for me. He made up Spampacker and I thought it was cute. Actually, Mikey and Clementine just made fun of me no matter what I did. It was a hopeless situation. I should have just given up and stayed away from them.

    • Thanks. Sometimes I think of something that’s insanely hilarious, and I’ll just start laughing. But when I try to explain what I’m laughing at, I just get strange looks. Maybe everyone just goes off and laughs at me in the privacy of their own homes.

  4. I think the dress and hairstyles of the 40′s were fabulous, and the best era of Hollywood. Hollywood has been ruined. I bet you looked fab in that suit.

  5. I could turn those blue and yellow pants of the Spanish soldiers, into the best trench coat, day dress, or head scarf and gloves, only thing is I can’t sew, I would take my vision to a killer Seamstress on Fabric Row in Philadelphia, and be so flyyy as a result, thanks for this Clotildajam :D

  6. many of them get paid to wear this :) the spanish pants would actually work…i would never kill a soldier wearing those pants on the battlefield…or they work as camouflage…where were the spaniards fighting….disneyworld?

  7. I am in my 40′s and still wear what I feel like wearing. My Wife says I am always looking at the sky or the ground so don’t notice the looks. All well, at least I will die knowing I was always me. I think what you wore sounded awesome! My Daughter is like that, she just does not care what the lemmings think.

    • Have you ever watched that show Newhart about the guy who ran a ski lodge and everyone in that town was stupid and crazy and he was the only sane one. I think maybe that’s it. I mean, have you seen what is considered acceptable normal fashion. Seriously. I’m not wearing that.

      • I agree whole heatedly, I am still baffled by the wearing my pants so low my boxers are hanging out? Yes I remember that show and good analogy :)

      • I, personally, have never worn my pants so low that my boxers were hanging out, but this one time I almost wore my pajamas to school because I saw it in a rock video. My dad put his foot down on that one.

  8. Call me silly, but I actually like the 50s style bathing suits!! Retro is in right now and it’s great! But I was born in 90 so what do I know? lol

      • Yeah, Katy Perry was wearing one in a magazine awhile back. I do like them better than itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikinis!

      • I want to start my own clothing company. I heard that you can send your design to some people in China and they can make a prototype for you and make them in bulk at a discounted reasonable price. I could start out doing it through a mail order catalog company and eventually open up a shop. This requires a lot of time. It will have to wait until my kids are old enough to help me out without covering themselves with packing tape or covering the merchandise with pancake syrup.

  9. Very good point. It’s a wonder I can dress myself at all today. I received my sense of fashion style in the ’70s – think hot pants, paisley, polyester and plastic.

  10. I can so relate to this. Cool never looked good on me. In the eighties, there was the silly fashion to layer two pairs of socks, then roll the jean up tight at the ankle. Other people could pull this off. Me? I just looked stupid (the worst part was, I thought I pulled off ‘cool’ but really didn’t fool anyone!)

    Now, I just don’t wear socks :)

  11. Actually whilst I agree with you, wearing what you want is not a province of the rich. I wear what I want and er, I bet you do to. But we have to poke fun at these people because they go one step further than good taste normally allows…..

    • Well. This one time I wore this faux fur purple coat to my son’s boy scout awards assembly. I looked posh and ritzy and everyone there was in sweat pants or blue jeans. I felt very stupid.

  12. Hey! Those Swill Guards are wearing the same pants I wear everyday! I think they are cool and I get many admiring glances as I stroll through the mall! Sometimes the pole thing gets awkward.
    LLP,
    SN

    • Hey! Those Swill Guards are wearing the same pants I wear everyday! I think they are cool and I get many admiring glances as I stroll through the mall! Sometimes the pole thing gets awkward.
      LLP,
      SN

      Do you make your own clothes or do you have a specialty shop that you know about?

  13. “Wear your braces round your seat; Doctor Martens on your feet. Keep your barnet very neat, For credibility on street!” –Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend

    • “Wear your braces round your seat; Doctor Martens on your feet. Keep your barnet very neat, For credibility on street!” –Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend

      That’s brilliant. Is that some sort of a British Doc Martens Commercial?

    • I adore those 1950s bathing suits. Now that’s fashion.

      The fabric that the older bathing suits are made from is higher quality. The fabric is thicker and tends to hide the fat rolls in the mid section. Spandex just doesn’t do that.

      • Not to mention the sex appeal of a vintage suit. Someone close to me once told me that it’s sexier to let a man use his imagination, rather than show it all to him and ruin the surprise.

  14. Fabulous observation.
    BTW…been to deep ellum back when it was cool. Been there since too…has good mid century furniture stores now.

    • Do you play the lottery? I read in a magazine that this lady visualized in her mind winning exactly 16 million dollars over a period of several months….and one day she did. I guess if you want something bad enough it will happen. But if the only thing stopping you from wearing the crazy clothes is money, seriously, just put on the neon green prom dress with some combat boots and call it punk rock. I’m right there with you. It looks a heck of a lot better than seat pants. But hey, I’m sitting in a straight jacket typing this blog out with a pencil in my teeth, one key at a time. Gotta go. I hear the warden coming up the stairs.

    • Tsk tsk … the rich and famous really can get away with anything. Such a shame for us normal people, haha!

      Anybody can make their own magazine. So why not make a New Vogue magazine and make up your own fashion.

  15. @clotildajamcracker Yes, it’s loosely based on the Jon Ronson book. Only, the book is infinitely funnier because it talks about the actual people involved. It’s not a conspiracy. Some guy actually thought he could kill a goat with a look and Fort Bragg actually took him up on it. (I can understand the temptation. Goats are kind of evil.)

  16. so I find this to be kinda awesome! and I REALLY liked that you “kinda liked” the spanish pants. I do too. I think it is a perk that when you’re SOOO in control you can have such an OUT of control wardrobe for your..ahem.. employees. Hey I’d work there! oh and Rita Hayworth anything, I’m in.

  17. That outfit was awesome!!! We only laughed because it was so unexpected. When one answers the door, it is usually not for anyone wearing a 1950′s swimsuit with plaid tights and a floor length string of pearls. What did you expect??? So we had to talk about it. Thats what people do when something like that happens. That was good stuff! You shouldve just kept rocking it. :)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s