Tag Archives: childhood

Moms can rock, or why trends don’t actually matter.

By: Serah-Marie McMahon

a couple weeks ago I logged into my facebook account and was met with a barrage of very old and very embarrassing family photos that my mom and my aunts started posting, possibly while drunk. (There were some of me too, but I don’t think I’m ready to share my terrible Sears ad from 1984 just yet.) While the family matriarchs were making fun of 70s flip hair cuts and 80s sweater patterns, I found myself both remembering and defending most of the outfits. I have a very clear recollection of the night from photo above, my mother and her teased, permed, perfumed, and very glamorous friends getting ready for a night out. The kid in the turquoise dress is me – I somehow wrangled myself permission to wear a heavily sequined and shoulder-padded bridesmaid dress for the night. Maybe youth rose-coloured my glasses, but I thought we looked pretty amazing. I still do.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend way back when I was in my late teens and my Spice Girl Shoes Japanese Fashion Magazine phase. He said I was going to be one of those people who looked back at photos from my teen years and laugh. He didn’t mean it as an insult, and I didn’t take it that way because I knew that though that is true for some folks, it wasn’t for me. I knew that I always had an appreciation for fashion outside of trend. Does it look weird because it is weird, or because you’re just not used to it anymore? And really, what’s so wrong with weird?

xoxo,
Serah-Marie

Fereiro Family Fashion

By: Stephanie Fereiro

Looking at my family’s photo albums from the nineties is always a happy hour or two spent each time I visit my parents. So, of course, my Christmas vacation has to start the same way. On one of my first nights home, I curl up with an over-stuffed album, and there’s no turning back.

After seeing dozens of photographs of myself, my parents, my cousins, and my brother, I begin to wonder: Are these trips down Memory Lane a search for nostalgia of a relatively peaceful childhood in a yellow-brick bungalow? Maybe. For memories of events that happened when I was too little to keep track? Perhaps. Or, for my dress phase (which seems to be returning, more than a decade and a half later), the Halloween costumes my mom made for my brother every year, and my multiple multi-coloured-bear-patterned outfits? That sounds more like it.

My fashion choices as a child, or the choices my mother made for me, never cease to amaze me. They fill me with a desire to throw out all that I own now and start fresh, with adult-sized replicas of everything I wore before I hit ten.

Instead, to maintain my bank account and some semblance of sanity, I’ll settle for swooning over these photographs – again, and again, and again…

Here I am, sitting pretty with my grandparents’ stuffed cat on their
“spinny chair,” both of which are still in their house. Look at the dress.
Gorgeous, right? I’m not biased. It’s not me that makes the photo cute…

Here’s me again, on my third birthday, according to the candles on the cake.
Again, I’m wearing a frilly, puffy, little-girl equivalent of a ball gown.

Until recently, I would look at these photos and think nothing of the dresses. Now, I want to know exactly what’s up with the heaps of photos of me in beautiful, fancy dresses. How many formal occasions did I attend at age three? Not many. According to my mom, these designer dresses – handed down by one of her friends’ daughters – were all I would put on for at least a couple years of my life.

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Striped Confessions

By: wornette

I recently flew across the country, paying approximately one arm, one leg, and fifty cents, to visit home. In many ways, I hope that a certain portion of my childhood is preserved in the home in which I grew up, that somehow it remains intact and untouched by change. Driving into my old neighbourhood it’s clear that much has been modified; my old high school is now a strange colour of evergreen rather than the original boring blue, and entirely new streets have been built and named. Even at my parents’ house I notice small things, modern differences, like olive oil hand soap in the bathrooms and shiny new saucepans. These changes are small, but when added together, substantial enough to rattle me.

As a creature of habit, I have a tendency to look through old photographs to restore and affirm the history I have memorized. I find it consoling to return to these small 4X6 records of time, in part because they will never change.

I would love to share with all of you perfect family snapshots and candid moments of picnics and past pets – but alas, I have uncovered some deep and dark secrets about my childhood. The photos I’m about to share with you reveal something so shocking and absurd that all I can do now is shake my head.

Mom, why did you dress us kiddies only in stripes?

Without further ado, the evidence:

Here I am at about 3 years old in my backyard. Sure, I am clearly excited about something (probably the attention of a camera lens), and every piece of my clothing (save for the shoes) is striped. Obviously, I myself have taken the liberty of putting on the hat I’m wearing, hence the asymmetrical hair did. In defense of my mother, I will say that she was trying to teach me my ABC’s through fashion, but this is only the beginning of my case materials.

Same hat, another day, another striped shirt. Sigh. What you see here is the very complicated baby bottle pose where one has to drink the milk with no hands. Not everyone can master this but I was particularly adept. Again, the tee-shirt is actually quite cute, puffed sleeves and all, but what about florals? Or solids? Maybe even an offensive fluorescent? Honourable mentions in this photo go to my bunchy diaper peeking out of my shorts, and the somewhat embarrassing fact that I am much too old to be drinking from a bottle.


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