Awkward Situations For Girls Blog

Awkward Situations For Girls: Getting Old

For many years I have taken people to task for using the word ‘trendy’.
   “Look at your trendy new haircut!”
   “Just bought some trendy Gok Wan
   designer specs!”
No. Unless you are my mother, her mother, her sister, their great-aunt, or at the very least old enough to call Dame Vera your compadre and recall VE Day first hand, I don’t want to hear it. ‘Trendy’ is a maledictum. (BAD WORD.) It is not acceptable for young finger-on-the-pulse people to label things ‘trendy’: it smells faintly of inherent old fogeyness; a whiff of jumping on a bandwagon rather than wanting to express something because you like it.

Now I’ve laid my cards so plainly on the table, I want to tell you something of moderate distress.

I’ve noticed a recent influx of young people entering my daily orbit. A baby boom of younglings who are - dare I say it? A little bit trendy. Trending trendsters. I’m surrounded by twenty-somethings so much more hip than me that I have started to refer to them as ‘trendy’. Paging Vera Lynn! 

You know the types: the receptionists who spend every penny of their £18k salary in Topshop recreating car boot grunge, presumably bashing their clothes to buggery in the tumble-dryer to look ‘distressed’ before ironing their hair into a pillow case. Or the sartorialists who don purple lacy tights in Shoreditch on a Saturday night - when they’re male; perhaps the PR girls who manage to apply false eyelashes every weekday without creating what everyone else begrudgingly calls Lady Drunk Spider Face. 

I am metaphorically (and probably imminently in reality) standing outside a party to which I am no longer invited, peering through the window at its occupants dancing around with strange haircuts in “jeggings”. 
   “Have you heard the new PLACENTA/WRECKER tune?” - That’s the kind of thing kids are talking about right now, aren’t they; bands we haven’t heard of. - “It’s a tune. Love that shit. PLACENTA/WRECKER are ACE.”

Look, I’ve started saying ‘we’: I want you to tell me that you too feel as old as the hills and similarly haven’t got a clue which electro duo with extraneous punctuation are headlining the new derelicte festival held in an oversized teacup just outside of Brighton. I want to hear that you are increasingly drawn to the music of your past and have begun to attend 90s/00s nights that can only be described as “knowingly-ironic”. Bon Jovi? Destiny’s Child? God forbid, a comfy Green Day?

As a certified old person (30), I’ve additionally found fear in a word I can’t help but associate with that sort-of awkward, youthful self-consciousness: ‘Blogger’. I’ve struggled with blogging recently, and taken a little hiatus for different reasons - some were good, and some were grey matter bad. But increasingly I feel disconnected from young people, and I’m desperate for this not to sound facetious or insincere: the UK riots drove me away from an understanding of one social group of young people; the perpetual fame of WAGs and TOWIE another. I can’t keep up so tirelessly with what’s cool, and I can’t wear crop tops that show my left tit. I’ve found it harder to talk openly here about my opinions and silly feelings in the way that I used to, when deep down I know they’re probably not representative of the zeitgeist. 

The thing is (with a hat-tip to my 90-year-old granddad here, who I sound just like), people younger than me seem to care more than ever about what they look like and how every small thing they do is perceived. Everything has got a little too self-conscious, too affected, and perhaps a little too skin deep. Discomfited ‘trendy’ people blog with their end reader’s opinion in mind, fill Tumblr with images that look right, or share songs they’re listening to across social media platforms knowing their peers will see them. (Why does nobody share that they’re listening to Britney?) It must be so exhausting. I’m exhausted. Wasn’t it great when we all had bad Rachel haircuts and didn’t have to Instagram photos of them for instant feedback (or judgement)? 

Over the past year, three individual hairdressers have suggested it would be easier to ‘fix’ the furrow in my forehead - with botox, one would presume, rather than a lobotomy - instead of cutting a fringe to hide it. Whaaaa? Have I missed a trend, are people really judging me for my furrowed brow? Is it not just a sign of wizened character?

Am I old?

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On being a gadget maverick

I have a secret: I don’t use a case for my iPhone. Or my Kindle. 

Every day, as I cram into the London Underground carriage and look around at the hordes guarding their gadgets protectively in a leather or plastic wallet, hands pushing the case irritatedly out the way while they read, swipe or listen, I feel like… a maverick.

“You don’t need it,” I want to whisper. “Jobs did a good enough job. Trust Jobs! Trust the casing it was built with…”

But I guess it’s human nature to protect your babies.

I tend to pull out my Kindle self-consciously - like a self-conscious superhero, I suspect - eyes darting around to see if anyone has spotted that I’m using my gadget naked. Un gadget au naturel. 

What is this obsession with buying a beautiful piece of kit and immediately covering it with a garish rubber fetish suit? 

I saw a girl on the way to work with an iPhone 4S dressed in a bunny suit today. A BUNNY SUIT. (The iPhone 4S, not the girl on the way to work.) It had these alert little bunny ears sticking perkily off the top, like some sort of clitoral stimulant. 

The rise of geek chic

It’s always a little strange when the Vogue crowd adopts a look which, a few years back, was deeply uncool. Way back when, me and my orchestra-playing friends - yeah, we were that crew - wore specs and brogues, played Mozart and Nintendo, and felt a little plonky. (You know! Plonk, plonk, the sound of sturdy soles on pavements, the onomatopeia of an unladylike gait. It’s probably where the term ‘plonker’ comes from.) In 2011, it’s now a case of spotting which girls in Topshop aren’t wearing tan brogues, and laughing when you spot an actual sad case like yourself wearing the sensible ones from Clarks.

But why do the fashionable lot want to look like we all did a few years ago? What’s with this eponymous “Geek Chic”? Case in point: EVERY-BLOODY-ONE.Why? Let’s start in the cinema. In an interview with the Guardian, Simon Pegg charted a movement in film which, I think, can also be applied more widely to fashion:

“I have a theory about the rise of the loser,” Pegg says. “The genesis of it was the death of the 80s superman; you know, the death of the Terminator, which was the ultimate expression of masculinity at that time in action movies. The man had become so ridiculously masculine that he was metal. Then came John McClane, with Bruce Willis, an action hero who was a little bit flawed, who allowed us to see masculinity as imperfect, and that ultimately led to me and Nick [Frost] being the lead in films. Or Seth Rogen.”

So they are the new anti-action heroes? “No,” says Pegg, “but men don’t have to be inhuman testosterone…Michael Cera, Steve Carell, classic examples. You can chart the social, sexual growth of masculinity in films to the point where, like in reality TV, the ordinary person has taken over. It’s loving the nerds.”

What’s interesting about the fashpack takeover of boyish brogues / NHS glasses / band or computer game t-shirts / farmer jackets is that this trend is one of the first times women have embraced the geek. In Hollywood, the ideal leading lady is still, in essence, pouty aloofness and womanly curves on a stick. Against our better judgement, it’s Megan Fox or Angelina Jolie. The move towards geek chic in fashion has directly correlated with the rise in popularity of part-time kooky actresses such as Zooey Deschanel and Chloe Sevigny, and the graduation of full-blown nerdy leading ladies like Ellen Page, and to some extent Tina Fey. 

Tiny Fey is a relevant tangent, for while Fey is not a ‘loser’ or ‘geek’, she is funny. And the sudden splurge of ‘funny women’ in films links directly back to this relegation of traditional beauty. We’ve learnt to dress like the school nerd and embrace geeky actresses, and now we’re learning to love funny leads. ‘At last! Bridesmaids proves that women can be funny’, read the headlines. (‘!?&@!’, went Twitter.) Kristen Wiig seemed to explode onto our screens in a breakthrough role, welcomed heartily by the mainstream; in reality, Wiig has been slogging away on tiny, unknown titles - ahem - such as Saturday Night Live, Whip It, Knocked Up and Paul. 

What’s next, then? Where will fashion and film take us next? I for one predict the end of the Makeover Turning Point on screen, as Ugly Betty will be allowed by producers to stay [relatively] ugly; Tai in Clueless will declare the other bimbos, err, clueless; and girly coming-of-age dramas will be called She’s All That [In Her Glasses And Dungarees And Angry Arty Stuff Like At The Beginning Of The Sodding Movie]. Likewise, fashion will move to the even-darker depths of nerd: it’s only a matter of time before train-track teeth braces, shell suits and those weird palladium shoes with rubber toes adorn the pages of Vogue.

So what else are the super-pwnsome g33k kids currently wearing on the streets of that London?

A cut-out-and-keep fashion digest

The essentials

What, still? Yes, still. Differentiate yourself from the 14-year old girls wearing shiny new H&M band t-shirts by dousing your 1989 Fleetwood Mac tour tee (which you slept in through uni) in 22-year old beer. Extra brownie points for vintage vomit.

Nirvana t-shirt, £7.99, H&M 

See top. Get the ugly ones from Clarks for actual “I-had-those-before-they-were” hipster authenticity.

Yesterday I tried on a padded Barbour jacket. I looked like a farmer’s fat mum.

Quilted coat, £230, Barbour

Me: visions of glamorous French spy.
My mum: “you look like an overgrown evacuee.” 
Geek chic achieved! 

Snaffle hat, £18, M&S

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