It has been a while since I’ve delved into the fickle whims of the fashion winds. Seems we’ve quickly gone from maillots and accompanying heels or flip-flops, to muffs to mukluks, and all this includes Macy’s style designer shoes, “decreed and degreed” by varieties in the hundreds. But in this season, it’s seldom longer such numbers in terms of temps, God help us and our gift-giving.
No word (yet) on mullet or mohawk inclusion. That is a much more hairy situation, as far as (today’s) economy, if you think as the newest hairdresser in town you’ve got game to fix it. But though, maybe Musk and his millions-times-millions can help, by providing money for startups, even if they prove to be non-starters — fantasy football and Shark Tank aside. If we can whether that bell like Designing Women …
Anyway, in less than a couple of months, give or take a weak week, as temps tussled with the gusto of wind gusts with each other’s bid for dominance, the rise before the fall, we’ve seen on the scene the transformation from the open-toed-somewhat-strappy shoes spotlighting painted nails — and not with tops of toes purple from the cold and replacing pink skin tones — then coming all the way around to mukluks. With bunny slippers, as the rabbit has it, and tennies in-between. No laces, either or also through thick and thin, needed to add to warmth just yet.
Timeliness has crapped out like an ill-forecast snowstorm concerning our weather, and what I’ve witnessed up here in western Wisconsin while writing within the warm climes of my apartment, going back only a couple of months to when seeing women finding it balmy enough to — forget lip balm — sport bare legs. Not even necessarily with hosiery.
— (Odd bedfellows? Do Kwik Trip and Macy’s, low-brow convenience and upscale department stores, respectively, go together at all? A model-tall black woman in a headshot wearing stylish shades in one of their ads, Macy’s not Kwik Trip, looked just like someone I saw pumping gas and then buying a slurpy. A better fitting model motif, stylewise, was one woman at Dick’s a couple of nights later. And anything is a good combo when considering a longtime spy-type friend, who got all around the local scene, then bolted for a top-secret-and-I-can’t-even-tell-you-just-yet CIA job, followed by a for-a-while popular radio show with another Hudsonite, although based in Madison, on modern relationships. My newly exotic friend I just noticed around the holidays happens to resemble, with the face and hairstyle especially, the perfume model featured in ad inserts wearing — what else? — string bikini and whom is just totally tanned. To seduce James Bond?) —
It was when coming out of County Market during my search for lower-price Halloween candy, it seemed like the vast majority of the dozens of such shoppers I spotted were wearing skirts short enough to show off their open-toed, clunky-heeled-but-otherwise-a-bit-strappy shoes, which thus revealed almost always carefully painted nails. Not just the smile, with eyes and ears and nose and throat, drawn on a pumpkin. No frostbite gaining a foothold on either toes or that token squash or two, like the number of feet you have if not one of those rotten bots. (My uncarved pumpkin, from a mold standpoint, is still fully intact, even though kept inside.)
It also, was only about a week ago, that I saw that harbinger of what’s usually quelled in October, a man outside with flip-flops. That small smidgen of plastic must have been cold, since this was the most frigid day next to these last two, but at least it was not steel-toed-boot-type. He had on a thin T-shirt, too, and short-pants to boot. (I gotta at least say pants somewhere in there.) It turns out he was en route back to his car, parked a few spaces (just?) up the way, and in his response to a comment about his bravery/stupidity, he noted that he had winter clothing in the backseat.
So why not just put it on first, in the first place.
I too often have worn shorts into the first week of December, but not when the conditions are like what we’ve seen in much of this month’s go-round. In the last 48 hours we have seen temps way below zero, and only hovering back around that range come mid-day, with wind chills even worse, especially when those gusts picked up. Boo be it to you, if one of those hit when you were at a crosswalk, with no backup to the blowing from buildings. And I’m still seeing T-shirts, especially among drivers, and sub-specially those with heated steering wheels, so they don’t necessarily need gloves either, except when getting out the wheelchair for a disabled client. (One of those who is always, and not with regard to temperature, sure to be wearing driving gloves, with holes for fingers and do we see a theme here, explained that it’s all actually for a medical condition, he being a medical driver. Apropo?)
Like trends in TV-Land, there is always The Middle. And not as in finger. In this case later in fall. This was marked by the noticeable appearance of bunny slippers, but still sans ankle fabric, for a couple of weeks, then trending back toward tennies, and then returning just days ago to boots. This late week saw the manifestation of mukluk. And of course, if you don’t have it currently you can buy it, and these are the tenets. A local store has Eskimo gear, broadly, such as winter camping tents, at $30 off. At first I thought that was $30 on. As in what it takes from your wallet. Better look and check your list, twice.