I didn’t ever do a lot of traditional “back to school” shopping.
(Partially because we didn’t allocate a whole lot of cash for the activity every year, and partially because, inevitably, the millisecond I bought new clothes, I’d shoot up about three inches. My exasperated parents were sure I did it on purpose.)
However, at the start of every school year, we did go get the basics: a couple pairs of jeans, some shirts that didn’t look like they’d lived through a tomboy-ish summer, new socks, new squeaky shoes for gym class.
So instead of doing an entry about the kinds of things I’d buy for back-to-school, I went a little bit of a different route.
I cut out five or six representational outfits that I can remember (or ones that were close to the stuff I had, at least), glued them down to heavy cardstock, and wrote about each of them on the back. Here’s a couple of them, for example:
(Now that the 80′s are all retro-chic, it was fairly easy to find pictures in catalogs. Does this mean I’m vintage now?)
On the left side, I just taped down one side of the short-page flap to make a kind of band to hold all the not-quite-paper-dolls in place. It holds about five before getting a little to tight to fit more inside, but I think if I did multiple “bands” going across, I could fit a few more in each band.
Today, think about your back-to-school closet.
Were you a shopper? Are there any years/items that stood out for you? Or do a fantasy autumn wardrobe, if you’d rather skip the memory lane stuff altogether.
It’s all up to you.
