The Year of the...

In some countries they celebrate the year of the dragon or the year of the spider or even the year of the roach or the snake.

In this country, fashion decides what year it is. Sorry about that dragons and roaches but we’re interested in good looks and spiders and snakes don’t do that so well.

Sometime in the middle of the 1950’s it was the year of the waist. You weren’t guaranteed a seat in heaven if you didn’t own a closet full of cinch belts. If you waist was more than 24 inches you could never get into the right social circles which meant you’d never land a decent husband. It your waist stretched up towards 30 inches, the ladies down at the church started planning a baby shower. Cinch belts were not made with 30 inch waists in mind. Matronly women—those who wore black crepe dresses—did not wear cinch belts and none of us wanted that M word attached to our names. So we dieted, we exercised regularly, we sucked in our tummies until we couldn’t breathe and we owned at least two really good girdles.

The 60’s gave us the year of the legs. I remember well when the fashion industry birthed the mini-skirt. Every man in the world thought he’d died and gone straight to heaven. He didn’t care if the woman wearing the mini skirt even owned a cinch belt. The legs year taught us to sit with our knees together. We learned new exercises to keep all those cheesy little fat cells off her thighs.

Then there was the year of the hips when we discovered Richard Simmon’s “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” and all his other tapes. It was the year that bathing suits were cut so high on the sides that we considered sewing a flap on our old cinch belts and wearing them for bathing suit bottoms. Not one horizontal stripe went on our hips and heaven forbid if a stretch mark showed up during the year of the hips. That might get us banned from even buying one of Simmon’s eight track tapes to do our workouts.

I was shopping a couple of weeks ago for an upcoming trip and noticed a few short skirts but not short enough to call this next year the year of the legs. I chased through the bathing suit aisle and there were a lot of styles but nothing that would warrant calling this the year of the hips. I did see lots of elastic waistbands but no cinch belts so it couldn’t be the year of the waist.

However, it has to be something! How else will we know what to work on all year so that we are in style? Could it be the new dawning of a year of the hair when we all start wearing bouffant styles, ratted up to six inches below the clouds? No, that won’t work. I gave away all my oversized brush rollers years ago.

Let’s take a vote and make it the year of the eyes. Brush on some mascara, flip in some colored contacts and throw a touch of shadow on the lids and away we go…in style and since it is the year of the eyes, no one is allowed to comment on anything else. No exercising, no worry about cinch belts, keeping that short tailed skirt down or wearing a bathing suit cut all the way up to our waist line. Our men folks will stare into our beautiful eyes and not even remember those mini-skirts, bikinis or 24 inch waistlines.