What would you know? You're wearing a dress!

I was around 9 years old when those words were spat at me by another girl roughly my age. We were waiting for "Children's Church" to begin. For those of you not familiar with the phenomenon, it was a program that ran during the Sunday evening service for kids from 1st Grade to 5th Grade or so. Chairs would be arranged in rows like "big church" and typically there would be singing, bible verse memorization quizzes and awards and some sort of kitschy bit sketches and a puppet show portion.

Now back in the day, when you went to church, you wore a dress or skirt/blouse. Pants were NOT acceptable as a general rule. Especially in more conservative churches like the Assemblies of God. Everyone wore some sort of tights or pantyhose. I swear I wore more pantyhose as a kid than I have in my entire grown life.

"Get to the point!" you must be thinking. I'm getting there, I promise. As we were waiting for the service to begin, the girl immediately behind me was having issues with her sunglass cords.

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The little metal thingy that slides down the loop had fallen off and she was having "issues" getting it back on so she could put her Wayfarers (imitations?) back on. Her sunglass cord was neon colored (of course!).

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It was the height of "fashion" back then to wear them. Even at night. What can I say? But apparently my choice (or lack thereof) of sartorial splendor somehow negated my intellect or my ability to trouble-shoot a small problem. I will keep my opinion of her hairstyle to myself. It was the 80s. It was a bad hair decade. Especially in the early days.

It wasn't as if wearing anything bifurcated on my bottom half was even an option. It wasn't. Not at our house. There was an unspoken air of "wearing pants to church is disrespectful". Or something. Nowadays, I wear whatever is clean. And if that's jeans and a tshirt, so be it.

But it's really funny how things can be seared into your mind. I will never forget that incident. I can see it as if it happened 30 seconds ago instead of 30 years ago. I can't say that it changed anything about the way I dressed. It hurt and it made me mad. But it didn't inspire me to dress or act a certain way. Maybe that's because there was no option of dressing a different way?

Have you ever had a fashion incident that struck you in such a way that you'll never forget it? Did it influence you one way or the other? Did it change your opinion of who you are? Is there a type of clothing that screams [insert thing here] to you? Have you ever thought one thing about a certain style of dressing and then  been dead wrong?