Adam Carter
MANAGING EDITOR

It’s very disheartening when women in my age bracket start to look like my mother.

Now let me explain: this is not a shot at my mother, in which she is trying to recapture her early to mid-twenties in some desperate bid to seem young and hip. This is decidedly not her style – something that I’m sure both my father and I appreciate profusely.

But in a rather curious case, “high fashion” has swung in a strange and inexplicable way: many twenty-somethings now look like my mother, circa 1992.

I find it incredibly peculiar to walk down the street and see young women who look as if they went back in time to the early ’90s to go shopping at Sears.

Let’s start with the glasses: hordes of women (and men) are wearing oversized, thick-rimmed and lensed glasses. This is suspect for a few reasons.

One: my Mother had them for years. It was not because she thought they were cool, or trendy – it was because her eyesight was awful, and she needed the bloody things to see. Ergo, you remind me of my mom, and this is weird as all hell.

Two: in many cases, these people are not true glasses sufferers – they don’t need them, they’re simply for show. As someone with piss-poor eyesight, I almost take offense to glasses as a fashion statement. If you don’t have to fumble in the dark at night to find a bathroom light switch, squint to read street signs or jab yourself in the eye repeatedly while shoving in a contact lens, then bugger off – glasses are a necessity, not an accessory.

Then there are the jeans. For some bewildering reason, many young women are now wearing “mom jeans”. What are mom jeans, you ask? Usually, they’re sand blasted denim hiked up somewhere towards the bellybutton region, way above the hips. Look at any photo from the early ‘90s, your mother is wearing them. Chances are, if you look at her today, she still is.

You can’t tell me these are comfortable. The jeans, the glasses – combine these with some teased hair and blouses and well, most women look just like a mom.

It’s easy to see why this could be troubling.

No man ever wants to be trapped in some Oedipus-like dementia in which women in his age range remind him of his mother. It is unseemly, strange, and unsettling. Yet hordes of young women seem to be heading this way, in an American Apparel induced haze.

Not to be sexist about it, men seem to have developed similar quirks, from moustaches to oversized sweaters. They often seem to be adapting many “dad-like” qualities – something I’m sure must be at least a little unsettling for some women.

The problem here is that irony has somehow become a fashion statement. So, in essence, what isn’t fashionable is fashionable. In fact, it’s something akin to “look how unfashionable we are – we’re now so hip that we want to look like our parents.”

This is just weird. The very concept seems contrary to years of conditioning in which children and teens try to separate themselves from their parents in every way they can – and these same people still cry foul when people mention similarities, or the fact that they’re “turning into their parents”. So why on earth would you want to dress like them?

I understand that fashion is not my forte. I also understand that it is circular, and many themes often come back. Some 10 years ago it was bell-bottoms, then ‘80s neon, and now this. It’s a facet of the industry – but really only in the last few years, considering “turn of the century school marm” hasn’t exactly permeated runways and store shelves.

Part of history is to learn from our mistakes: and mom jeans and oversized glasses are certainly amongst them. Leave them where they belong, languishing in thrift store bargain bins – not being purchased for overinflated prices in flashy boutiques.