Children shouldn’t be fashion victims

When I was 11, we had our school pictures taken against a cheesy faux fence backdrop — complete with incongruous palm tree — where you had to rest one hand on a fake wooden post.

My hair was neatly brushed and I was smiling. For that momentous occasion I wore a favourite polyester blouse with a matching T-shirt insert.

It looked like two pieces but was actually one, in a pattern of yellows and purples and browns.

There was only one problem. Another girl in my class wore the exact same shirt that day.

So, the pictures got developed and distributed and here was the pair of us with the same fake fence and the same Sears catalogue top.

Humiliation. Mortification. Maybe even a few tears. Flash forward.

Now I’m in university but out of town for the weekend, meeting friends at a bar. My hair is carefully mussed and moussed and I’m smiling. I am pleased as can be with my latest Le Château acquisitions, courtesy of my student loan: loose black cotton/ linen pants and a matching shirt with a white stylized cross-like pattern that I affectionately called “Starry, Starry Night.” One black lace glove with sequins. Heavy black eyeliner. One earring longer than the other.

(It was the ’80s — don’t judge.) I thought I was one cool customer with the clothes to match.

There was only one problem. My friends did not agree.

In fact, they were so appalled at my new avant-garde tastes that they told me they didn’t want me sitting at their table — I was too embarrassing.

Shrug. Indifference. C’est la vie.

The difference in these two scenarios was about eight years.

And in that time I had gone from worrying that my friends might think I had copied someone else’s clothing choices to having a devil-may-care attitude and a desire to express myself with the fashions of the time without caring what other people thought.

No doubt many young people go through the same thing. Luckily for me, I didn’t have fashion peer pressure just a click away in the form of a cellphone or laptop, and I wasn’t constantly being bombarded with air-brushed images of celebrities and other influencers or — gasp! — having to deal with too few likes or outright dissing of my social media profile pic.

Talking to my daughter the other day about churches that are progressive, I commented that no one wants to go to a religious service anymore to have a message hammered home about how inadequate they are as a person.

“We don’t need God for that,” she said. “We have the internet.”

Each year, as students head back to school, I am struck by how often anxiety and coping skills are part of the conversation in ways those topics never were when I was a student.

A news release from the provincial departments of Health and Education last week was headlined “Parents Encouraged to Help their Children Build Effective Coping Skills for a Successful School Year.”

It may be that we’re just talking about it and acknowledging it more, but it may also be a result of the way technologies have infiltrated and influenced our lives and eroded our children’s self-esteem.

School can bring many stresses — studying, exams, relationships and conflicts — and, unfortunately, the pressure to wear the “right” thing.

It’s refreshing in today’s society to see so much more diversity in terms of fashion and other forms of self-expression than I knew growing up: bold beards, man buns, rainbow hair colours, piercings, dramatic tattoos, vintage clothes, T-shirts paired with tutus, deliberately tattered jeans.

But it’s disheartening to think that kids headed back to school in 2019 — anxiety and coping strategies be damned — might still feel that age-old pressure to conform to someone else’s sense of style or to mask or submerge their true selves.

If there’s a message kids need from their parents it’s this one, and it’s pretty simple: it’s OK to be yourself.

“Be yourself no matter what they say.” — Sting, “Englishman in New York,” 1987.