Be Excellent To Each Other

What things did you once buy, thinking they were super cool, but you now realise made you look like a complete plank?

When a was in my early 20s (in the 70s) I bought a pair of shoes that were really wide and square at the toe end. I thought they were great until one lunch time when I was walking down Chorlton St in Manchester with a few colleagues and passed some navvies working on a big hole in the road. Just after we'd passed them, one of them said to his mates, rather loudly, 'Did you see the state of those fucking shoes?' My colleagues pretended not to have heard, but they must have done.

I once bought a leather coat that I though made me look awesome, like a cyber-goth samurai from the future or something. My now wife ( girlfriend then ) hated it and binned it. In retrospect, it was a cheap nasty bit of crap that made me look like a scruffy oddball in a crap coat.

See, I also had a long leather coat. The difference was, mine was cool.

Ultimate Warrior bicep tassels. I stopped wearing them on Monday.

Not bought exactly, but you should have seen my bleached-blond long hair when I was 17/18. Christ.

Can't be worse than Curio's.

I once had a leather jacket. I thought it suited me when I was a properly fat bastard. I still have it for nostalgia and to remind me that I'm comparitively skinny now.

That's not to say I didn't look cool in it. Rawr.

You have NO idea!

Pics?

I believe we have an appropriate thread, Bobby - perhaps you should get posting?

I can't find a picture of the offending shoes. They were a bit like these, but much wider at the front and not really platforms.

I also used to have a pair of these, but then so did lots of other people. I never saw anyone else wearing the clown shoes.

And I got married in a pair not entirely dissimilar to these.



They nearly fucking killed me.

I don't have any, remember cameras were not as available back then; I think Curio does though...

They were called Spoons, the shoes that is. My older brother had a pair

For a while in my early twenties I took to wearing a tawny brown jacket all the time. Whilst having ample pockets were useful, I look at it now and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

I am tempted to start rifling through my old photos to show you how bad his hair was. Unfortunately it would take ages and then my wife would beat me.

You may well be correct, and that would be a good descriptor for them, but Mr Google has failed to find any pictorial representation of them. I wish I still had them; they'd be a right novelty on the Antiques Roadshow.

I had a second hand leather jacket from the 70s, with a hand painted tiger face on the back. As a 14yr old, I thought it was epic!

I had a flock of seagulls style massive long fringe when I was about 17. It really was cool, though.

I'm OK with that. Go for it.

Can we also get a photo of the beating? Or does Mrs Curio use a bag of oranges so as not to leave a bruise?

Being able to say that I had indeed read James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

Is Curio a trafficked Estonian man-bride?

I, for one, have never seen Curio and a trafficked Estonian man-bride in the room together.

My hair. At any point in time. Christ.

I still have my greebo leather coat. Was never ponce enough to go for The Matrix style things that became fashionable when that turd plopped into cinemas.

I'd agree with that.

I had a purple shirt which I wore quite a lot at university, when I was going through some kind of bizarre "dapper dandy" phase. Looking back, especially when paired with my white chinos, I must have looked screamingly gay. I thought I looked awesome at the time though, but was baffled as to how I had no luck chatting up girls.

Send them here please.

While at Sixth Form and into my first year at Uni I wore a sheriff's badge on my denim jacket as James Hetfield had one. Jesus.

I was in a band when I was about 19 and we decided that denim jackets and jeans were a good look for us...

Then B*Witched came along.

I am, at this very moment, wearing a purple shirt and chinos.

Is your band Iron Maiden?

I'd love to, but the skin's grown over them. Embedded. That's what the doctors told me. They said "Dimrill, your Ultimate Warrior biceps tassels have become embedded."

Or Bryan Adams?

Looks like it must be a rare affliction...

It's odd, but my arms stopped growing below them. I'm stuck with 8 year old arms below man sized bicep/shoulders. Like a Tyrannosaur.

Please let it be Bryan Adams.

I used to have this awful long, curly hair, like Crystal Tips or Swamp Thing or something.

Oh, wait, I've still got that. Bollocks.

Well, for one thing I bet you wore Wranglers or Levis (i.e. cool), whereas they seems to have been wearing Woolworth's Own Brand or something equally dire. With turn ups, FFS.

Erm... Yeah... (ahem) We were cool! Honest!

I grew my hair long once. That's about it. Nothing much has really changed that much in my appearance otherwise since I was about 16.

I had long hair.
I had a beard.
Both seemed good at the time. Neither were.

I had a white "going out" shirt that had a...

Look, it had a dragon on it, okay?

I had long hair at one point in my youth. Well, I say 'long'; it turns out that my hair is the type which only grows so far downwards before it gets bored of that and sort of starts growing out the way in a wavy, wirey mess. I wasn't willing to give upon it though because long hair was so obviously cool so I spent a lot of my younger years with a sort of terrible afro. Someone in uni persuaded me to get a number two all over and it was amazing to be freed of it.

Long 'curtains' haircut, with an undercut too. I was aiming to be able to put it up kind of like a topknot.

It wasn't a good look, really. I also used to shave my facial hair into one of those pencil-line thin beards.

I wonder if I still have it somewhere...

Wearing one red shoe, and one blue one.
My friend had the reverse.
Wearing two wristwatches.
Gilby Clarke as a sartorial role model.
My long hair.

For some reason, I went through a cardigan phase. I had at least three of them. The worst was purple. I wore it to the pub once; people laughed at it and I never wore it again.

Long hair (including beard) in my first year of uni was a,bad look, as my hair is wavy when long.