my Fashion Statement as a Freshman

When I passed the UPCAT, my parents decided that I should study at UP without giving me any opportunity to compromise. For them, all other schools were irrelevant, not because UP was the only school in our region nor are there any other good schools to give me quality education. They preferred to enroll me at UP because that was the only way to free them up from another college tuition fee expense. Being the fifth child in the brood of seven, my entering to college was another predicament for my parents whose meager income could no longer afford to send me to a private school as two of my other elder siblings were then enrolled in a private medical school. The tuition fees and other miscellaneous expenses of my medical student brothers ate up a large portion of my parents’ monthly salary. In a way, to enroll at UP was a blessing in disguise as that would liberate me from wearing a sky blue blouse with necktie and pleated sky blue skirt uniform for four long years! Most of the college students in our region wore that uniform, obviously they were in the same school, and the only evident distinction of a UP student from a non-UP one was the dress code. When school was about to start in June, I was poured with enormous excitement to dress according to my own style and taste, thus, in preparation for school, I had to do some mixing and matching of the few wardrobes I had. I also had fascinations of becoming a campus femme fatale who would get to turn guys’ heads, a fashion icon who will solicit rave fashion commentaries from the socialist and elitist personalities in school, or a luminary in the alluring field of fashion if I wear fashionable dresses. My fashion statement was first exposed to the UP campus on the very first day of school. I was confidently dressed in accord to my own definition of stylistic fashion sense without a minutest hint that it was totally a fashion disaster brought about by my undefined barrio-tic fashion statement confused with incongruous taste for fashion accessories. Imagine I was clad in a violet-collared white shirt tucked in an ankle-length plain sky blue ‘A-line’ skirt with a long slit at one side. The conservative side of me had me wear a “half slip” inside to keep my underwear from being publicly exposed as my skirt was see-through. To un-complement my attire, I wore a beige Timberland leather sneakers shoes with white socks and carried a predominantly red Baguio-knit long sling shoulder bag that reaches my knees. To add more calamity to my catastrophic fashion sense, I accessorized myself with a fake Guess watch in my left wrist that caused itchiness to my ever sensitive skin, a big plastic yellow bangle in my right hand, and a pair of fake gold earrings that made my earlobes swell and eventually got deformed. It was truly an extreme deviation from the fashion genre of that time but nobody cared, or should I say, nobody cared to tell me how awful I looked!