Living life: Fashion Misdemeanors

Apparently, if you have a normal fashion sense, you should know that there is something fundamentally wrong with wearing a bright red trouser and a sunflower yellow shirt. One of the reasons is because humans and Christmas trees are not one and the same things. It has something to do with one’s fashion sense. So in a Kampala government office, which attracts crowds of people, I watched a spectacle of sorts. A woman, a little bit shorter and plumper than your average woman, turned up. The problem was not her size or her height but her clothes. My dear lady had found it fit to put together an outfit which included a brown see-through dress attached to an inner garment that barely covered “the basics.” It would not have been very gross if she had not been naturally endowed with a brown colour, meaning that whenever she walked her hugging outfit was clearly leaving nothing for your imagination. The gentlemen kept their lingering disgrace in their mouths but for the ladies, who just could not stand the embarrassment, openly began to lambaste her in loud gossip. One infuriated old woman was so angry that she decided to confront the lady who, according to her peers, did not even have the right figure to flaunt. As luck would have it, as the old woman prepared to launch her missiles, amidst suppressed laughter in the crowd one other daughter of eve wearing a flowery skirt had the wind blow it away and above her waist for seconds, to complete the shock! And brown lady there joins the chorus against the second lady unaware that she had been the subject of a similar discussion before long enough until old woman let out her verbal arsenal against brown lady’s own fashion misdemeanors. The self declared Fashion Police went wild with allegations of misdemeanors among Ugandan women with their sense of dress and how “these days, people wore the same thing to the office or the disco.” And there we were the men musing over women and how harsh they would be in judging their fellow sex, not clearly being able to pin down a whiff of “sour grapes” though it appeared somewhere. Also some of the men seemed not to mind a free show of optical nutrition judging from their causal amusement of the whole incident. The two ladies went through their actions for the next hour or so when due to the obligations that they had to do meant that they still had to bravely pace up and down in front of the ashamed crowd, until the agony was over. Like the rest of the men, we clearly did not learn why it was a crime to combine red and yellow in the same outfit. Look, they are just clothes, but the moral of the story for me was - keep away from agitated crowds of women, unless you want to laugh yourself sick, of course. Have a fashion conscious day. kelviod@yahoo.com