So It Turns Out I’m a Bit of a Tart
The day before New Year’s Eve, I dashed around the mall in Madison searching for a suitable (read: cheap and sparkly!) outfit to wear to the following evening’s festivities. After Forever 21 shamefully let me down, I moved on to the old mall standby Express. The masses may have moved on to cheaper, gaudier, flashier stores like XXI and Charlotte Russe, but Express started the ‘I can wear this top once and throw it away and it will have been a worthwhile purchase’ trend, and I knew I could count on it.
So I popped in and bought a pair of thick gray tights that would go with the black leather, one-shoulder Jimmy Choo for h&m dress I bought at Beacon’s Closet a few months ago. (For $40, by the by! Can you imagine? What a steal!)
The tights had a striped pattern stitched into them that ran up the leg but stopped, from as best as I could tell, about halfway up the thigh.
“Excuse me,” I said to the girl smiling blankly behind the counter. “Will this stripe extend under what I’m wearing? Or will you be able to see where it ends?”
“It goes up pretty high,” she assured me. “I mean, if it shows under what you’re wearing….” She trailed off, not wanting to insult me by finishing her thought.
“…If it shows, I should probably not be wearing what I’m wearing?”
She nodded and smiled again, that lovely blank smile perfected by mall workers full of Cinnabon and oxygen-infused stale air.
Ultimately, I went in a different direction with my New Year’s Eve outfit (shiny leggings!), and am still waiting for the right opportunity to bust out that leather Jimmy Choo. But I did wear the tights today, and apparently, well, how do I put this?
I’m a ho.
Because the skirt I’m wearing ends a full two inches – I measured! – above where the striped pattern begins, and double that when I’m sitting down.
I thought the point of tights was that they allow you to get away with something that would otherwise be too short to wear without them! And to stay warm, of course, but I mean, c’mon. I’m telling myself that $9 tights on sale at Express mean you’re most likely sacrificing quality somewhere – in this case, that seems to be in the length of pattern the little Thai children have time to stitch in.
