Dress Code: Fashion Forward

[this is not an excerpt from Hairdresser on Fire, but an expansion. Francis is the name of the main character in the book. Enjoy.]


When I got my job at the Beauty Cult, that first day, I was told by the Director of Education that I had to wear different clothes, that I had to dress it up a little.

"Oh....there's  a Dress Code?" I asked, unsurprised. Of course there was a Dress Code; there's always a Dress Code is in this business. Everything on the surface must be expressed to the liking of the Institution you are working in, and that always means Dress Code.

"Errrr, no no noooooooo, not a dress code," she said. "We don't believe in a dress code here! We want everybody to feel free! And you, too, we want you to feel free to express yourself inside of our culture, silly!"

Silly, she called me, as if I should have come prepared to decipher every bit of jargon thrown at me inside of the school, a challenge I would never overcome during my three month stint.

"So, whadda ya mean? If I can't wear what I have on..." My shoes were scraping themselves together, telling me to run. Shushing my shoes, I planned an eye to eye plea for understanding.
I looked into her eyes and was smacked hard by the mirrored contact lenses she wore. My own confusion was being thrown back at me from the space where her irises were supposed to be. In the reflection, I looked like an ape.

(Worse than mirrored sunglasses, these mirrored contact lenses really hit the heghts of shade and perversion. When I looked at her all I saw was my own stupid face glaring back. I looked sad. A sad ape. Her mirrors were so shiny, so rigid- looking, that I couldn't imagine them being just contacts, but entire eyball replacements. Like she popped out the sneaky predator eyes before bed, sleeping with empty sockets while her mirrorballs floated in a glass next to her bed, like dentures.)

"...and that's why you can't wear those shoes," she said, finishing the sentence I didn't hear, her direct order pulling me out of my parenthetical loop of dentures and eyeballs.

"But these are fancy shoes..." I pointed at them. "See? They're like modified wingtips! And they were wicked expensive!" To me, they were fancy despite their age, and despite the side to side shaking of the giant pink synthetic extensions pulling at the Director's scalp. "They're Canadian, my shoes!" I said, as if that would win me any points. It never does.

She couldn't have cared less about my imported shoes and looked at them for a long time, trying to figure out how to X them out of her life forever. She was running deep hate circles around my shoes, antipathy fogging her lenses.

"I don't think soooo...they're not realy wingtips...they look too sneaker-y." she said, using a press-on nail to scrape the remaining repugnance from the corners of her lids. "And: If ya can run in 'em, you can't wear 'em. That's the rule!"

"The rule? You mean the dress code?"

"Neeeewp, it's not a dress code! Just a rule!"

"But, you said I had to..."

"I didn't say what you had to wear! I just said You Can't Wear That!"

"Well, ok, I...uh... hmmm.... So what should I wear tomorrow?"

"Not what you wore today, that's for sure!" she said, her face a Limburger Cheese scowl. "But...the good news... you can choose from three different 'looks"! You choose the look you fit best in! That's why it's not a Dress Code!"

"I can pick?"

"Yep! You pick! And I bet I know exactly which one you'll pick, Mister Fancypants!" She mustn't have seen my pants when she scanned me bottom to top, or she wouldn't have called me Mr Fancypants. Maybe my shoes horrified her so much she had to stop at my ankle to avoid a fashion panic attack.

"Three looks?" 

"Yep! Three! Not too bad, huh?"
The first choice is the Classic look, which I don't really see you in... then there's Edgy, The Edgy Look, which may be a little too 'young' for you..." I hate when people use language this way. Instead of saying I was too old, she said the "look" was too young. The Cult filled itself with such semantics.
"And the last one- the one I think you'd look great in- is the Fashion Forward Look....you're a total Fashion Forward. Yup," she said, "definetely a fashion forward..."

Now I wanted to cry. I knew this Fashion Forward business would set me up for another brutal battle at Ross Dress For Less- the store I always end up at when my daily uniform is challenged and enforced.

Roaming the aisles in my smelly pants and burnhole sweater, I make secret Ross wishes as I tapped the racks:

I wish they had pants in my size.
I wish their Husky Boys section had better selection. 
I wish they would separate their pants by "pleats" or "no pleats" so I'd know which section to avoid (pleats).