What Goes Around

Fads are funny things. How do they develop? Who decides what's IN and when it's OUT? Some things move from fad to standard practice (like pants on women) and others fade out only to come around again in the next generation as something new.

For example, when I was a teenager we combed our hair over our ears and wore our buns low on our necks. The old ladies at church had their ears exposed and put their buns high on their heads with their coverings perched on top. When my daughter was a teenager she combed her hair like that and I told her it makes her look like an old lady. Now her daughter is a teenager and she combs her hair over her ears and wears her bun low on her neck like I did when I was a teenager. And my daughter tells her it makes her look like an old lady. I predict that by the time my granddaughter has a granddaughter the thing will circle around again.

Colors also come and go. In the 70s green and gold were the popular colors. Appliances even came in avocado green. In the 90s my daughter was a bridesmaid in a wedding. The wedding colors were peach and mint green and her bridesmaid dress was peach. Those were the popular colors at the time. Last fall her son was married and the wedding colors were--guess what?--peach and mint green. As mother of the groom she wore a dress in the same shade of peach as she had worn as a bridesmaid about twenty-six years earlier. 

I tried to think how many fads have I seen come and go and came up with a short list. I'm sure there were a lot more than I can think of at the moment. Younger people probably wouldn't even know what some of them are. And this doesn't even include words and phrases like "groovy" or "in the groove" that have come and gone.

Fads I have seen come and go:
black and white saddle shoes
bobby socks
poodle skirts
pop bead necklaces
fender skirts on cars
shoes with pointy toes
spike heels
tights
mini skirt
paisley shirts for men
boat neckline
straight (tight) skirt
teased (beehive) hair on girls
flat top haircuts on boys
bell bottom pants
plaid pants for men
clunky square high heels on women's shoes
leisure suits
shift dresses
huge eyeglass lenses
pet rocks
8-track players
Beatlemania

Some fads today include scarves, leggings, unnatural colors dyed in hair, tattoos and body piercings. Let me hasten to say that I don't know any self-respecting people in our circles who do the last three on that list and it remains to be seen how long they will last. But I do see scarves and leggings on our people. We have a church rule that men are not to wear neckties so how it is acceptable for women to hang things around their necks? It looks tacky to me, especially when they are big and puffy. One young woman who heard about the tights girls wore years ago said, "Oh! Leggings with feet." Yup. Leggings are nothing new, they just cut the feet off.  Maybe when the little girls who wear leggings today are grandmas someone will come up with a great idea and they'll say, "Those are just leggings with feet." What goes around comes around!

All you have to do is pull out your old pictures and you'll soon be saying "what were we thinking?" or "You can tell that was the 70s (or 80s or 90s)." We do well to consider what we accept before we jump on the bandwagon. It may just be a fad that someday we'll look back, wonder why we did that, and laugh at ourselves.