There’s a disturbing new fashion trend among teenage girls in Utah of wearing fuzzy house slippers in public. Perhaps its not singluar to Utah, and maybe I wasn’t paying attention when I lived in Los Angeles, but it’s hard to go a day here without seeing a seemingly rational 16-yr old girl walking around in gigantic, dander-producing slippers fashioned in the likeness of rodents.
I’m not terribly surprised about this, primarily because I’ve been conditioned over several years to expect the worst from people in Utah when it comes to fashion. Now, you have to realize that everyone in Utah is blonde and blue-eyed and, if transported to another state, might be wildly beautiful. But when these Aryan specimens are gathered into one gigantic pigment-less mass it’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen.
The typical Utah outfit consists of a starchy white shirt, a pair of pleated khaki pants that hit the leg just above the ankle, a brown belt and brown shoes. I know this doesn’t sound too bad, but even when they mix it up a little bit with a skirt or a sweater they’re still wearing the brown belt and brown shoes. I recently saw a woman dressed entirely in black, with a black silk shirt and black stretchy pants, and she still had on her brown belt and brown shoes. Last time I checked Johnny Cash was not the new Jennifer Lopez.
The next thing you’ll notice about people in Utah, as you glance upward from the brown belt and brown shoes, is the attention to detail they give to the back of their heads. It’s as if the whole state has been told that they can’t possibly go out with the back of their heads looking like that, and so they go back and spend ten more minutes with their backsides to the mirror creating what I like to call The Conflagration! It’s a miniature replica, in follicle form, of the ferocious fire that will swallow the earth at the second coming of Jesus Christ. It’s as if people are bearing testimony with their hair that God lives and is angry.
Now we’ve got the whole frightful furry slipper phenomenon, and I have to admit that I welcome the break from the brown shoes. But I wonder where it will go from here, you know? We can only hope they don’t follow my Aunt Lola’s lead and dress entirely in leopard-print negligee.