Poodle Skirt Barbie

Poodle Skirt Barbie

Connie Willis's excellent book Bellwether features a protagonist, Dr. Sandra Foster, a social scientist exploring the origins of fads.  Her discovery is that people are like a herd of  sheep led by a bellwether  who is "indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little hungrier, [a] little ahead of the flock."

Dr. Foster's research includes such fads as hair bobbing, Davy Crockett and hula hoops.  Clothing fashions are often faddish too.  Witness bell bottom pants, panier skirts, and poke bonnets, to name but three.  Barbie is by no means immune to fads. In fact, I'd say she is a bellwether.

A certain percentage of my wardrobe when I was young was comprised of hand-me-downs from my cousins.  There were some really nice clothes but no poodle skirt.  My parents didn't buy me one either but I did have a pair of very snazzy saddle shoes.  When I was 14, I bought go-go boots. 

My poor father had to take me to an eye doctor's appointment one rainy afternoon and I insisted on wearing them.  The smooth plastic soles were as slippery as Teflon, and Dad had to hold me up on every surface, wet leaves, sidewalk concrete, asphalt parking lot and linoleum floor.  He kept muttering something about teen-aged idiots. 

I wore my them in my class photo that year but since I'm standing in the second row with the other tall girls, my very stylish boots cannot be seen.  But doubt not, I looked great in them.