All The Abercrombie I Never Had
You call it a hoodie, I call it armor.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
We can skip over my grandmother screaming at salespeople to turn the music down, neither of us need to revisit that trauma today. Where we can focus instead is on a story about 90s teenage fashion. Fitting in seems to be the accepted motivation, succumbing to “peer pressure” and wanting to be like all your friends. That’s where we start the discussion of teens, especially the 90s kind, and I’m fairly sure that’s what marketing teams write on white boards to this day. But for me, a pre-teen and teen in the 90s, I never gave a shit about fitting in, because I was busy trying to avoid being bullied or shamed for existing at all. All I wanted—needed—was just one fresh, fluffy Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie not so that I could “look cool,” but so that I wouldn’t get made fun of that day. Adults didn’t understand or care to notice the difference then, so I’d love it if we could collectively give a shit now.
Wearing what everyone else wore wouldn’t make me popular, that would take an act of god, but it would make me invisible. For a bullied kid, that’s far more valuable. Acceptance, being welcomed into the cool kids as a friend? Sure, great, let’s win the lottery next. I just wanted to shield myself with the right clothing, because the wrong clothing was shredding my nervous system apart. Do you know what it does to you, years of being shamed? Especially when they’re some of your subconscious mind’s formative years? It doesn’t just break you—it shrinks you, until you learn that the right place for you is the smallest place possible. You learn that everyone else is better and more important than you, and you act accordingly.
Would a hoodie have solved all that? Honestly? It would have been worth a fucking try.