A Humiliating Lesson in Fashion

I was in the sixth grade, the awkward stage between full child and preteen, and I knew nothing of fashion. At all. I hadn’t even the vaguest of notions. So, because of this handicap, I wasn’t the flashiest of dressers.

I had a jacket in the sixth grade, a very old and decrepit one belonging to my mother. I do not understand was possessed me to wear it, but I wore it still. It was ragged and fell to about my skinny knees. The outside was an obnoxious teal (85 percent polyester, 15 percent cotton), the interior a different, tacky purple nylon (100 percent). There was a large hole in the collar. Needless to say, it was completely abhorrent.

The occasion was reading class, fourth period. We were learning about prefixes and suffixes, and to better learn them our teacher forced us to volunteer to act out specific prefixed-words in front of the class. The class would then guess what the prefix was, and after a correct guess we would smile, clap, and cheer. And, I assume, if we guessed incorrectly, we would be deeply saddened, begin to cry, get burped, and then lay down for a nap, being in the sixth grade and all.

The word to be acted out had the prefix “poly” (meaning multiple, much, or many, if you weren’t aware). The person who volunteered to act it out was a guy named Wayne, who I still share classes with. Before going in front of the class, he stopped by my desk and asked if he could wear my jacket because it was multicolored, and would be a good example. “Sure,” I said.

So Wayne put on my jacket and proceeded to strut to whiteboard, like a model on the catwalk of some fashion show gone terribly, terribly awry. He was grinning and showing the inside of the jacket to the class, so they would be sure to notice the multiple colors.

Then a child, opposite of the room to me, probably having not seen Wayne get the jacket from me, shouted loudly: “Poly-UGLY?”

The class erupted with laughter. I shrunk to a smaller size, if that was even possible. I can’t recall the rest of the acting out or if we even guessed the answer, but I do remember that Wayne had to return my UGLY jacket to me at the end of the skit, and I had to wear it for the rest of the day, which was tremendously humiliating.

It was there, in that classroom, that I learned the definition of fashion. It was a quite important lesson to learn, and has helped me out immensely in life and in dressing. If it hadn’t occurred, maybe I would still be wearing my poly-UGLY jacket around campus.