Lifetime Top Five Items of Clothing

This one goes out to MomVee.

1. Sweatshirt given to me my senior year by AG. Heavy cotton Grey Champion sweatshirt with Princeton in black lined orange letters across the chest, size extra large. He was (and is) funny, sweet, sarcastic, and hard working electrical engineer. But at his core he was a ferocious street hockey player. He would come to the dining hall at Campus Club after playing hockey and that sweatshirt would be torn in a new place - the waist, the elbow, the cuff. And I would check him over for new scrapes, cuts, and bruises, scolding him to be more careful next time. The question of who got to wear this sweatshirt was an ongoing thing between us and when we graduated after much bargaining I traded him my fleece dinosaur blanket for it. It was riddled with holes all along the arms and the cuffs were ragged.

It had the magical properties of a boyfriend sweatshirt. It was comfy, well-worn and like wearing armor or getting an extended hug. I wore it off and on until my third year of grad school when I gently placed it in a box and retired it.

2. RK's jean's. RK was a girl I knew in high school who had that rare ability to be wholesome, likeable, and cool at the same time. She had bright red hair and is the only person I have ever met who is ticklish on the top of her head. She gave me a pair of old Calvin Klein jeans. They had one really cool rip and they were so comfortable. They survived up until I started dating MC who had a cat named Jonah who ripped his claws into them pants in an apparently harmless way that would ultimately lead to their demise in a drunken fall.

3. My first pair of heels. I bought them from Baker's at the Mall in a buy two get one free deal. 1 inch heels, pale salmon colored "snakeskin." These shoes were ridiculous and tacky tacky tacky. They matched nothing I owned. They matched no article of clothing to be found on the planet. And I loved them more than my life. They were my gateway shoe to a lifetime of shoe lust. I wore them with ridiculous classic 80's outfits like the matching striped denim vest/jean combo with a pink and blue scarf tied around my head. Or the green army pants with the boxy double breasted jacket in a red and white houndstooth pattern I stole from my mother and the chicago art institute many painters' signatures t-shirt and a red bandana on my head.

They were that rarest of shoe a comfy heel. I do not know what fate befell them. I think my mother evicted them from my closet while I was away at college.

4. Blue multicolored sweater from the Limited. I circled this sweater waiting for it to get marked down. It was a cotton blend with a hearty country cable knit pattern, boat necked. It was dark blue with flecks of white, pink, green, and red in it. It was huge. Everytime I wore this sweater I got a compliment from a man. And not in a "Hey Baby, hey baby," kind of way. The boys seemed to geniunely like this sweater. As in they might trade me their fleece spiderman blanket for it if I was willing to negotiate for it. It was nice to get a geniune compliment.

5. Black Summer Suit. Skirt hem and jacket lapel, hem and cuffs are bordered with a ruffle. AT bought me this suit. He is a major clothes horse, he has designer shirts bought off of ebay that would cost more retail than my kidney. I have never met a man so well dressed. Ask me about the seven-fold tie. Nor have I met a man with such a nose for a bargain. He moved to Cambridge started to spend a lot of time in Filene's basement and found the most amazing suits and dress shirts. When I went to visit him we started an outing with the intent to walk the Freedom Trail and somehow he steered me into Filene's Basement where I was instructed to try on every designer thing in the haute coutuer room. Nothing fit right it was all made for pixies and giraffes. We argued about every item in the room. It's not my fault that those ridiculous things made me "look like a villager." The only thing that looked halfway decent was this enormous poofy fawn colored ballgown. It was about closing time and we were exhausted, when on the way out I spied this black ruffled suit by some regular clothier. He complained about the price of the suit (too cheap) and was skeptical about the workmanship but when I put it on we agreed that the jacket and skirt fit nicely and I looked presentable and I made my escape from the bowels of Filene's and got to see the rest of fair Boston.

Two years later I wore this suit at my defense.

I tag BeckyBumbleFuck and Juvenilia.