Staying One Step Behind

Always wanting to be in step with the latest fashion, it came as a shock to find out that I now need to learn how to knit. Yes, knit, as in two-long-pointy-things-and-a-ball-of-yarn, which, if nothing else, should have people who know me worried, given the damage I've managed with just a pair of toenail clippers.

I could put my eye out!

But to knit is in, for men and women alike. Yes, where once you would head down to the bar and drink yourself blind, or get hopped up on enough ecstasy to make even your grandmother look sexy, now the only way to hang out with anyone in style is to knit like her. Nightclubs have cropped up all over the city to meet this sudden addiction to wool; I've had to buy a half-dozen Guernsey sweaters just to get past the doorman.

Apparently knitting is the bell-bottoms of the new century.

But what is even more disturbing is not so much that it's now "in" to make like Aunt Jemima on a Saturday night and knit yourself up some argyles over tea, but what might come next.

First it was taking another turn with disco, which should have convinced people then and there that all things retro should stay that way, assuming the shock-induced blindness caused by hot pants and sideburns got their attention. But then someone caught on to the idea that Frank, Sammy, and Dino seemed to be having a really great time in all those old film clips, so we had to endure three years of martinis, Italian cut suits and Barcaloungers, forgetting the fact that Frank was a depressive and Dino had a liver more porous than cheesecloth.

And not to suggest that you should never have to pay a price to stay hip, but pretty soon we're all going to need a history degree just to get dressed in the morning.

For if one were to plot the last ten years of retro mania on a graph, connect the dots and predict the next craze, there is an eighty per cent chance that all things twenties will be de rigueur by next week, replete with flappers, fedoras, and silent movies, which might actually not be a bad thing for anyone who had to sit through last summer's season of blockbusters and marvel at the ability of well-paid writers to butcher the English Language (and before you say it, no one pays me, so I can butcher to my heart's content).

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm going to have a very hard time looking cool and casual in pinstripes and spats with a Tommy Gun in my hand.

And if there is one common thread throughout history, it's that fashion has never flattered the wearer, nor has how people spent their time ever been particularly healthy. My legs are far too thick and stubby to look like anything but a pair of pork sausages if I were forced to wear Elizabethan tights. And while it might seem fun to reenact the King's Court and toss your ham bones on the floor, someone has to eventually clean them up, and that person most likely will be you.

I don't really need to tell you about the Black Plague, do I?

So before we regress so far that it starts becoming trendy to club your date over the head and drag her home by the hair (though I hear it's already too late for that in New Jersey), it's time to finally heed those famous words and learn from history; not to find a neat new way to amaze your friends, slick yourself up, or see if the toga is still as sexy as it ever was, but to not repeat it.

Grandma knitted for a reason: her feet were cold and she needed socks. We can buy them now, people. It's called progress, and it is good.