A while back, I took my mom out looking for a dress for my sister's wedding. We had no luck. That was not the worst part of the trip, though. Seeing what wasn't available wasn't nearly as traumatic as seeing what was available.

I don't tend to dress up much, myself. I used to think this is because dressing up takes more effort. I suppose in a way I was right, because it does take more effort. But zipping up dress pants isn't really that much harder than running the zipper on a pair of jeans. The effort comes long before that: just trying to find something that's wearable.

This is starting to sound like what most guys would probably assume is the stereotypical female rant about shopping and clothes. Or maybe I mean it sounds like what most females assume is the males' stereotype of female shopping and clothes. The good news is that it isn't. My complaint is that nearly all clothes now on sale are hideous.

How many of you cringed when you saw the graphic at the top of this page? Those colours, come on, face it, they are not friends with each other. They're not on speaking terms. Or they're on shouting-and-throwing-things terms. They don't get on. They don't belong in the same room. But if you will take a stroll through your friendly neighbourhood mall, you will find them buttock-by-jowl with one another on the racks. Sometimes in the same garment. I think this is cruel. I felt so guilty putting those colours together that I didn't dare put another colour on this page, other than those necessary to show links. (For example, if you'd like to respond to my opening question from this paragraph, use the "Mail me" link at the bottom of this page.)

Orange, bright green, and cyanic blue seem to be the choices lately. Preferably in terry cloth, lycra, or cheap nylon satin. These are of course the Summer Colours. Other colours just generally In these days are variations on Dirt. Muddy yellows, faded denim, dirty rose (a hybrid offspring of the colour formerly known as Dusty Rose), grey, black, and various "natural" colours including off-white, bone, ecru, beige, tan, light brown, cream, natural, and ivory-- these are all In too. They don't show the dirt, you see, because they come pre-stained. How nice. If you really want an education, find someone who was alive during the 1930s and '40s and take the person shopping with you. Preferably a woman. The patterns of prints are rather reminiscent of what was around in the '30s and '40s, at least among those who were affected by the depression. Those colours were around then because they hadn't bought any new clothes for a long time and that's what happened to clothes when they faded, when the original colours ran and bled, when the yellow flowers picked up the black dye from the background, the pinks picked up the blues, and so forth. Denim is also In, getting itself made into dresses, vests or waistcoats, t-shirts, skirts of all lengths, even sneakers. I ask you. Personally I look at these things and think they look like they were made from great-granddad's old work clothes, or at least the bits that hadn't had holes worn through them. But the lovely hip ladies wearing them sew on some sequins, a bit of lace, paint a goose here and a bunny there, use rhinestone buttons, and "wallah" (I'm sure), they have something Trendy. Usually worn with big hunks of wood on strings and long dangly earrings, a spatula's worth of make-up, and an earnest expression. And it's supposed to be my fault if I laugh at them at that point. Talk about living life three feet past the edge.

Of course, most of the hip fashions are bought by an age group a bit younger than these Crafty Ladies. They're bought by the kids who spend $120 to look like they shopped at a Salvation Army's '60s Revival sale. I have no idea why. I wasn't alive during the '60s myself, and I've always been grateful for that. I had a hard enough time fighting off people who wanted me to wear my collar up in the '80s-- if anyone's noticed my aversion to anything with a collar on it, now you know why. But the '60s, now, they had bell bottoms, I hear. They found a cure for that, until people began overdosing on it and safety-pinned their ankles into their jeans. The '60s also had some of the most hideous colours and patterns ever spawned, and while I'd like to think the current revival is morbid fascination, even I am not that gullible. They have added "grunge" to the flower children this time around, though. This I think is why you can wear a lime-green t-shirt tie-dyed in fuschia, fluorescent orange, and cyan under a brown-and-rust flannel shirt, a wooly hat to keep your long straight purple hair out of your face, a nose stud (not a ring, since you have that on your eyebrow), a pair of those clown pants with the crotch down around the knees, the waist settled low on your hips to show your white-with-blue-stars boxer shorts and the back pockets of your jeans clinging to the back of your knees, quite often with a long steel chain for a bike padlock draped from somewhere in front of your hip to somewhere behind your hip-- the pockets are at knee level so I don't understand the mechanics of this either-- finished off with two mismatched bumper-toed green plaid sneakers and not be arrested for criminal stupidity. It used to mean something when you said someone was too stupid to dress himself in the morning. Someone took that as a challenge. Probably a buyer for Macy's. This kind of ensemble goes walking down the street completely free of gender and passes the Crafty Lady and her chums, and some female with her bangs shellacked to a height of eight inches, the sides starched to double the width of her head, blue eyeliner and mascara, her eyebrows removed and drawn in an inch heigher, and all I can do is look around for the Clown Car and try not to hum anything very circusy. They might form a spontaneous pyramid and launch cream pies at me.

I've also noticed there are two shape choices for women: too much, or too little. You can show exactly everything you've got through spandex and lycra, low necks, high hems, and spaghetti straps, or you can pretend you have nothing to show with the waistless cotton dress down to your ankles with a one-button-at-the-top sweater. For formal wear, you have the nylon satin night gown from the 1950s or spandex and sequins. Or you can go straight to the bridesmaid dress style with the huge bows to hide the back and front and an overall attitude of "if we can't do it in shape, we'll do it in colour" leading to irridescent orange-and-blue taffeta or pink-and-teal taffeta, or the Christmas version in black velvet and white, green, and red plaid taffeta. The first two choices come in a three-sizes-fit-all range. Because of course any woman 5'9 has these measurements, while anyone 5'4 has these and anyone over six feet doesn't exist. If she did, anyway, she'd like miniskirts. Really. Your third option up there will be found in two sizes, once again taking into consideration the fact that there really are only two combinations of bust-waist-hips measurements, and they are both the same height. If you're looking for something that isn't found in every store in the mall, I'm sorry, but we don't serve freaks of nature like that. You will wear one of these styles and you will like it. And you will have your hair varnished up into the current bouquet of ribbon-flat curves at the top of your head with two strands of "I'm still trying to grow my bangs out" fangs hanging beside your face. You have to. They won't let you into the high school prom or college formal without it. It says so right on the tickets.

My favourite fashion point to hate is still something else entirely. The Spice Girls get most of the blame somehow. I can't claim to hate them for their music, because I've never listened to enough of it to form a real opinion. (Although a song with words like "tell me what you want-- what you really, really want" is so useful for jokes that anyone who doesn't like it for itself should at least be grateful for the punchlines generated by it.) But I do hate them for what they've done to shoes. I think of them with hatred and loathing every time I see a shoe with a sole more than an inch think. When I see a square-toed, patent-leather brown pump with a square buckle for decoration and a three-inch sole and four-inch heel, I want to grab the nearest clerk and staple one shoe to each lip. I do not lower my voice when I wail, "what kind of moron looked at this and said `yes, people will wear this in public!'?" And I don't feel bad. I honestly believe any female who buys them hasn't even thought about it. I think it's time they did.

Dress-up shoes used to be spiky heels. You could slide the cap of a ballpoint pen onto the heel of a shoe. I was in college when the Thick Heels started coming out, and I heard my friends say, "oh, thank goodness! Now we won't have to work so hard to balance on those tiny spike heels, now the heels won't sink into the lawn, now they won't slip through and get wedged in grates!" But I was still doubtful about these new heels. I reasoned this way: if you're wearing something other than a flat shoe, it's for looks. It isn't because you need to reach something off the top shelf. There's no function involved. Heels, spiky or otherwise, are purely for looks. So why do you counter this one reason to wear them by then making them ugly? The thick heels look heavy, whether they are or not. They are chunky. Stolid, sturdy, functional, all the things you associate with the old maid school marm, not known for her graceful sense of style. Yes, you could walk on any surface with those chunky heels, but why would you want to? You won't sink your heels into someone's lawn, but how many old maid school marms go to picnic parties? It's not the first thing I thought of. And even before that, how stupid would you have to be to wear heels to the family reunion at the lake cottage in the first place?

Beyond the ugly heels, as I said, there are the new platform soles on every damn kind of shoe on the rack. Dress-up heels for formal occasions, with fine black suede, a single rhinestone on the strap around the front of the open heel, and then a thick two-inch sole underneath. This is architecture on your foot. If you want to look like you stepped in a couple of buildings earlier in the evening and can't shake them off, you go right ahead. I reserve my right to point and laugh and try to guess which buildings they are. They put the same thickness of sole on tennis shoes or sneakers, which I will never begin to understand. Casual flats are also of a certain height. Are we all suddenly having height-related inferiority complexes? If so, why aren't the guys getting theirs? Are women really that much more stupid than men?

My last and probably main complaint about the new thick shoes is simply that they look uncomfortable. They look heavy. If they were as heavy as they look, I hope women on the whole would muster the emotional strength to refuse to wear them. But I don't think they would be wearable, much like the famed cement galoshes are known for their intrinsic unwearability. The general look of the new shoe style makes me think of horse hooves. The thick heels alone might have kept me thinking of Kentucky Derby winners, thoroughbreds, maybe a shetland or two. But the soles now as well put me in mind of Clydesdales. There's an unmistakeable clomping quality to walking in these chunks of footwear. Shoe styles are said to run in cycles of about ten years, so I see no reason women who like the current style couldn't go in and get these things nailed to their feet. They're going to be around for a while, so why not make the commitment?

What makes this so much more annoying than it has to be is that it's voluntary. Fashion is voluntary. You chose to buy the Clydesdale shoes, the demure-hooker dress, the eight gallons of hairspray, the three pounds of makeup. You chose to apply them to your body, and then for whatever reason you chose to open the door and step out of your dwelling where other people could lay eyes on you without due warning. You paid money for the privilege. You desired this so much that you gave money to someone so that you could do this to yourself. I've been observing this behaviour in the species for about 15 years now. I know one person who believes that when you look around at what's currently in style and think "My God, that's so ugly and embarrassing," you know you're getting old. I started getting old when I was 12 or 13. If that can count as old, then I don't understand why people worry about getting old. Apparently we can spend the majority of our lives being over the hill, and if it blocks my view of fashion, I say build bigger hills and deeper valleys. I prefer someone else's view-- that anything that was in style will someday be out of style and dated, and therefore following styles is to be avoided. That way, you achieve agelessness. If you had the latest hairstyle, makeup, pose, and props in your high school graduation picture, at your ten year reunion you will look in your yearbook and cringe.

Here's my idea: stop buying this stuff. I can't believe anyone's looking at this stuff in an ad or a catalogue and saying to herself "oh that dress is gorgeous, I simply have to have that." I really can't. I think people are tired of the crap they bought last year, which wasn't interesting in the first place itself but now they've been wearing it for a year besides, and want something new. If it can't be good, at least it'll be new. Something different. A change. Or there's some new colour combination that is in all the stores this year and you don't own anything in that shade of bile, and rather than make it obvious to everyone that you haven't bought a new article of clothing in two years, you buy something. How about instead looking at it, realising it's ugly now and won't improve by a year of hanging in your closet with all your other clothes, and just not buying it? When the bile-and-mud colours don't sell and the bell bottoms and shapeless dresses remain unmoved on the racks, just maybe the buyers for the stores will notice people aren't thrilled with the new styles. They may be forced to go to the designers and say "Look, Charlie, they're not buying it. Maybe try something with good colours or something that has a shape to it without looking painted on." They'll have to try to think, try to do something that looks good rather than something that just hasn't been done before (usually for some very good reason, like orange and lime green not wanting to shake hands). Maybe someday the concepts of "on the rack in the store" and "in style" will not be synonymous anymore, and there might once again be some choice and variety. Possibly not, as it sounds like it might require conscious thought on a regular basis from individuals, which sounds an awful lot like work or effort. Then again, it is a million-to-one chance.

Personally, the few occasions when I've had to wear a formal, they've been homemade. All except one, but that's another story. I have this thing about dressing up being something other than trying to wear what you think everyone else will be wearing-- it's like my thing about voting being something other than saying which guy you expect to win. Up until recently this worked just fine, but the last time required me to buy shoes as well. Fortunately I knew of one last place that sold shoes for something other than horses-- it's a goth shop in Kensington Market, London. I looked everywhere else first, just in case, but of course they were all into shoeing Clydesdales. Even the local goth shop (recently opened), which sold chain mail like the kind I got in England (only at three times the price), has Spice Girl platform-soled clodhoppers. Not a spike heel in site. And they call themselves goths, or even "different." Hah. I say it's broccoli and I say the hell with it.

Mail me. Go home.