You do not choose your parents. In this sentence, which at first sounds like a platitude, there is a meaning that can bother you. The parents determine the place where you have to spend your youth, and they are responsible for the decade in which this youth falls. I realize that my parents thought nothing wrong. Still, I grew up in the northeast of Hamburg in the early eighties.
It was here that the Popper movement flourished: teens dressed in waist-high carrot pants, their forehead hair falling in a long madness in the face and constantly wondering what they looked like. I belonged to it. Or rather, I struggled to belong. Page-length magazine articles dealt with the phenomenon, journalists marveled at how adapted and consumptive this generation of students was, that they smoked with their fingers spread and considered their own moped as the highest goal.
Unfortunately I can not say, the Schnöselige and Unsympathische to the "youth movement" - which has a Wikipedia entry today! - to have seen through then. "Seeing and being seen is Poppers luck on earth," was the motto, and he was followed by us completely irony. So one stood on Saturday night at eleven o'clock in front of the threshing floor (a nightclub in the Hamburg district Alsterdorf) and tried - the pullover with V-neck stuck in the pants, on the feet of a pair of Loafers - to look like the child of rich parents , That was the code that had to be fulfilled.
Dress code: child of rich parents
The doorman's blessing blessed the successful look, the disco was open for the evening. On Mondays in the school one was one of those who had been there. A terribly tight world. Even then, I remember, I was amazed at why what was fashionable in our suburb suddenly became fashionable everywhere. From billboards, models looked around the world who looked like the boys in my high school.
From today's perspective, Popper's true break with style was not her boring dress taste, but her refusal to rebel against the generation of her parents. Until then, it was common for teens to respond to their home, at least eye-rolling, if not contemptuously. Whether hippies or punks, they were all in agreement.
Not so the Popper. They imitated the lives of well-off forty-year-olds. Maybe that's why Mum and Dad paid so willingly for the expensive clothes of the children - no generation of parents in the FRG had got off so well. If something of the poppers stayed, I thought in the past years sometimes, then it is this stupid imitation will. Mothers and teen daughters often walk around like clones, in the same jeans, the same sneakers, the hair open and the same length.
The generations have established themselves in a TV-serial cooperation. In addition, the clothes of the Popper appear again. It started a year or two ago that Gucci Loafers offered as if from the eighties. Since then, I have seen everywhere: waist-high trousers, polo shirts with a high collar, down coats, V-neck sweatshirts. I'm waiting for pearl necklaces, silk scarves.
For the first time, I have the experience of how well you get when something comes into fashion that you have already worn so similar. Of course, I envy the young women in their eighties looks too, everything is still ahead of them. However, this will also include that they later look at photos of today and recognize: I was young - but how old did I look nice, please?