Would anybody REALLY wear this

latex clothes

Armed with glossy fashion magazines and a deep appreciation of the ridiculous, I wandered the Countryside Mall last week. My mission: to find if anybody "real" would wear these latest spring styles.
 By and by, I picked out a kindly looking woman and showed her the cover of the latest Cosmopolitan. It featured most of a young woman coming out the top of a strange garment called a bustier.  (Merry Widow by Josie Natori, the credits state.)
"What would you do," I asked Mary Mitchell, down from Massachusetts for the winter, "if your daughter turned up in a garment like that?"
"I'd kill her," she said, smiling pleasantly.
I turned the pages to a picture of a grinning woman in a fuchsia jumpsuit. Very tight, very low, with clusters of furry fluff here and there. The credits call this thing a catsuit and accuse somebody named Betsy Gonzalez of designing it.
Mrs. Mitchell studied the picture sadly. "Don't women believe in mystery anymore?" she asked.
We moved along to the ice-skating rink, looking for a person with at least some of the physical requirements to wear these garments.  Margaret Morrison skated by with her 2-year-old daughter. She is a flight attendant from Safety Harbor. The Cosmo cover seemed to amuse her.
"I wouldn't wear it in public," she said, "but I might put it on at home with my husband."
Then she looked closer. "Nope. I haven't got the boobs for it." She shrugged. "I've got an okay body, but this," she gestured to the bustier, "this is ridiculous."
A particularly striking outfit in Vogue did nothing for her. It was a dress with a sort of mop-top, many-colored hat. The mop motif also was carried in a fringe on the bottom of the skirt.
Tacky," said Mrs. Morrison.
Two schoolgirls came by. I showed them the bustier. Bingo
"Sure, I'd wear it," said Heather Rein, 16.
"Wow, I'll say " said Jessicalyn Van Pelt who is 15-going-on-35.
Quickly, expertly, they thumbed through two of the magazines, making quick, sure decisions, never once disagreeing with one another. "Like. Like. Don't like. Yes. Yes. No.  "
They hated Cosmo's catsuit. "Too revealing?" I asked hopefully.
"Oh, no. We don't like all that fluff."
After awhile, we moved into men's fashion as alleged by Details, a youth-oriented GQ wannabe. We showed people a full-page picture of a model wearing a $ 360 Bill Robinson suit.
The model was slouching and scratching his head and didn't have the jacket all the way on. Still, the display was nothing so outlandish as many of those the women's magazines were offering up.
"I guess I could wear one of those," said Chester Farris, a retired electrician from Muskegon, Mich. "The pants are too long see how they bag up at the bottom. And why don't they put a crease in them?
 "And why not a shirt? That boy's wearing a suit coat over his bare chest. And . . . my God, I don't think he has any socks on "
Greg Longo, a young man in wildly patterned trousers, thought the suit was fine. "The only problem is $ 360. And you've got to accessorize. Shoes, belt, and sooner or later you're going to need a shirt."
The magazine devoted several pages to studded, belted leather jacket displays. Longo wouldn't even look at them. "That's not my style," he said.
Later at the Pinellas Square Mall, we encountered two carefully dressed young men. Each had a 2-inch-wide streak of blond in his hair.
"The streaks aren't a trend," said Moses Williams. "The streaks are our personal style."
They hated the motorcycle outfits, liked the suit on the slouchy model. They also liked the women's clothes in Cosmopolitan and thought it would be great to have their girlfriends in the far-out clothes. Not Cosmo's catsuit, however, and not Vogue's mop dress.