RAINBOW JEANS


No, really.  We wore those in high school.  They were regular, straight-leg denims with a rainbow of embroidery threads starting at the hem on one leg, running up the leg, around the front to the back, and back down to a terminus on the same leg on which they'd started.  You just weren't cool if you didn't have them.  Or, as in my case, you'd never have been cool even if you did have them, but they actually didn't look stupid and weren't hideously expensive, so they made you feel marginally better if you could talk your mom into buying a pair.

They were among the least stupid fashion indulgences of my generation, in fact.   After all, we got the Izod shirt, the Fair Isle sweater, the peasant skirt, and patterned tights.  Wooden-soled clogs, platforms and ankle-strap wedgies, too.   Mullet haircuts were invented by my generation.  Happily, my hair looks not unlike a weaver-bird's nest, so I can honestly say I never wore anything on my head that looked even vaguely like a mullet -- but I'm one of a very few people my age who can.

I also had a bleached denim tie-dye dashiki and bell-bottoms, but I was in, like, fifth grade at that point.   Which is to say, I never was offered any dope until at least 1981, so I still remember stuff like Peter Frampton and boot-cut jeans (the inaugural lap, I mean, when my cousin Robert was wearing them for the first time).  There were some really cool tunes around back then, don't get me wrong -- Allman Brothers, Little Feat, Humble Pie.   But if you think AM radio in Cincinnati was chill enough to play them back then, send me some of what you're smoking because none of the dope we ever got back in the Ohio Valley was ever THAT good.