You Are Here

An Ode To The Tracksuit

The defunct wardrobe staple ends up meaning an entire world to me

Dystopian movies always make it look like after the apocalypse happens everyone will be wearing leather pads and spiked collars with skulls around their necks. The problem I’ve always had with such a prediction is that it fails to take into account how much stuff will be just left over and floating around from a century or so of mindless mass-production. Fast fashion, factory generated jackets, polyester slacks. Flip Flops. Braided belts. Sperry Topsiders. I propose, instead, that once society crumbles fashion will collapse. There will be no trend at all much less a trend of nuclear war rompers. There will only be wearing whatever you liked that fell into your hands from whatever era you thought was cool. Whatever makes you happy. Hoop skirts, Baby Phat joggers, Z Cavaricci Acid Washed Jackets with diagonal stitching and puffy sleeves.

This is a thought that came to me when I opened one of my Christmas presents from my kids. 2020 was the year my daughter discovered thrifting and then took it upon herself to indoctrinate her older brother into the dark arts of rifling through piles at the local Goodwill. God bless them, I could not be prouder. Come Christmas in a pandemic year in which their mother lost her job, thrifting for gifts became the family activity. It is in this way that I came to be presented with a brown and gold LRG Tracksuit circa 2001 with about a mile of unnecessary…