You know how when you’re a kid, you think your parents are perfect? And then one day you wake up and realize that they really do make mistakes? Well, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon something that made me (partially) take back that second revelation: my mother made no mistakes when it came to her style back in the 80s — every outfit she ever wore was perfection, and I found the pictures to prove it.
Whenever I go home, I’m always creepin’ around the house, looking for random goodies and things because that’s the exciting thing to do in Springfield. Most recently, as I was rummaging around, I stumbled upon an old photo album that I had never seen before. Expecting to find ratchet/embarrassing family photos, I opened it, not prepared for what I was about to see. There was picture after picture of my mother like I had never seen her before. This beautiful, trendy, 20-something-year-old couldn’t possibly be the same woman who had changed my diapers and fed me mashed peas!
Don’t get me wrong — my mother always looks beautiful nowadays. Her style has simply evolved as she’s passes into other phases of her life. I guess I was just surprised at how in-tandem Old School Mom’s and Present-Day Aseye’s aesthetics really are. I discovered these photos at a time where my own personal style screamed THROWBACK. Even now, my clothes and shoes still look like they’re straight from the 80s/90s, and I sometimes implement blouses and dresses that give off an “old lady” vibe that was probably en vogue in the early 1900s. Eclectic style that involves mixing and matching unexpected pieces is, as I see now, something that my mother passed on to me.
In the following photos, my mother appears to be a very different person than the woman I know today, but there’s still a lot of hard evidence that convinces me they’re still the same person. My mom’s first name is June and her middle name is Caryl. In Guyana, where she’s from, her “call name,” or nickname, just happened to be her middle name (Guyanese pronounce it like “Kah-rill” and say it with lots of attitude and spiciness). Caryl was adventurous — she took risks and experimented with color and volume and juxtaposition. She exuded confidence and expressed herself in ways that were “trendy” yet somehow specifically unique to her. A part of Caryl still lives on inside my mother, and I do believe that that same part lives on in me as well.
You know how when you’re a kid, you swear you’ll never grow up to be like your parents? Well it seems as though I’ve inadvertently inherited Caryl’s eclectic taste and unique styling aesthetic — so I guess the joke’s on Adolescent-Me. If only Mama Agamah had kept all these killer outfits so she could pass them on to my sisters and me…
More.. https://aseyesays.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/caryls-closet-an-ode-to-my-mother-and-her-style-in-the-1980s/
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