1997-2003

As promised, many posts ago, my highschool "style" timeline (kinda)! Click through for the longest entry of all time ever.

1997 seems a good starting point as it was the beginning of JUNIOR HIGH. On my first day of school I wore a smiley face ringer tee and worried that I'd leave sweat marks due to the unseasonably warm day. Having been cannonballed out of free-spirited "alternative education" into this kind of dark and strange environment (we spent our lunch hour alternating between arcade games at the greyhound station and the pool table in the backroom of a bar on bank street) I clung to the originality encouraged by my previous educators and continued to dress "however I pleased". That included wearing (rather obnoxiously) fairy wings, angel halos, a clothing hanger re-shaped to stick my braids out like Pippi Longstocking's (dangerous), plaid bell bottoms with wooden buttons down the whole front, a whole variety of sparkly knick knacks in my hair, velvet bell bottoms, my dad's nighshirts and a vintage tee forever borrowed from my friend that said "spiney" on it.

I painted all the furniture in my bedroom to match my bed sheets.

12 year old Hannah's Style Guide:

- Ringer T-Shirts
- Plaid Bell Bottoms
- Overalls
- Wire coat hanger to wear on your head
- Victorian lace-up boots (so you can pretend to be a schoolgirl from "A little princess")
- Electric green stretchy bellbottoms from Le Chateau (you will only wear these once, to a Sarah Mclachlan concert with your Dad)
- A ballet bodysuit under EVERYTHING.

In 1998 I changed schools to a much tamer (no buses/bars or brawls) location and started off fresh and kind of conservative. I remember the first part of the year included a blue velvet tank top, khaki pants & vintage baseball tees and completing the year with my first pair of wrangler bellbottom jeans, tight vintage kids tees, a shoulder bag shaped like a chicken and a poor boy hat that forever smelt like incense. My "grade 8 grad" attire included my first and only pair of designer shoes, pretend creepers by Fluevog.

13 year old Hannah's Style Guide:

- Ragged hair (or just hair in rags, wear to school, look like clown)
- Wrangler bellbottoms
- Too small vintage tees
- Animal shaped purse
- V-neck shirts for conservative times
- Fluevog creepers
- Blue eyeliner on your lips and cheeks
- Heart stick-on earring on your forehead
- Bandana, always

This was the only photograph I could find of 1999. The shirt I'm wearing says "Barfie" (heh) which is funny because I was still kinda maybe playing with barbies (just making clothing for them, and doing their hair, and sometimes creating elaborate miniature worlds in my attic room for my barbies to live in.) This was my first year of high school. It is mostly a blur style wise, I think I wore a 70s athletic jacket that said "grasshopper" on it. I spent a lot of this year reciting Shakespeare in my bedroom, drawing pre-raphaelites and praying for y2k to happen so I wouldn't have to go to school and instead I could fetch water from the river and live like my favourite fictional characters did, with trials and tribulations and with a pot under my bed. It was a very romantic non-romantic time for me (I had made a personal vow not to date until my 16th birthday.HA-HA.)

14 year old Hannah's Style Guide:

- Bum length red hair
- Jeans with triangle fabric inserts (sewn in by your grandma's friend)
- Oversized cardigans
- T-shirts with various 80s cartoon characters on them
- Your period for the first time

Pro Tip: If the armpits of your favourite tees go bad sew colourful patches on them (drawing even more attention to your armpits).

2000, there were 54" pants, rAvEz, unnecessary baby paraphernalia (I was a "clean" party kid), pink fingers, first boyfriends (broke my vow, whoops), kissing in trees, collecting shopping carts in my mom's backyard (and rolling down the hill in them/sometimes rolling up to school in one), fun fur, hello kitty rub on tattoos next to my eyes, plastic jewelry to the elbows and teeny tiny bangs.

15 year old Hannah's Style Guide:

- Home cut baby bangs
- Home dyed baby bangs
- Fun Fur on anything (possibly everything)
- Plastic jewels on anything (possibly everything)
- Big smiles
- Blood on your pants from the time you were at the great glebe garage sale sitting on your best friend's mattress (just sold) with your boyfriend and you bled all over it. Lucky folk that got to take the freshly bloodied bed home! Lucky boyfriend too!
- A lot of blood.
- A tickle me elmo in your school photo.

Pro Tip: Try wearing 54" pants in the Ottawa winter, walk 30 minutes to school and fall down stairs because the wet pants wrap around your legs. Do this more than once.

2001 saw a more "sophisticated" youth (see practiced and perfected "bitch face"), this was the transition year. The first time I heard Deathcab for Cutie and Dashboard Confessional and the first time I had had shoulder length hair since being a toddler. I think this was the year I really started interneting, first with Livejournal then with Makeoutclub and a variety of other early "social networks" that only dinosaurs like me can recall and chuckle about.

16 year old Hannah's Style Guide:

- Bandanas
- Cat eye glasses
- Computer
- Tongue piercings
- A hoody with sewn on devil horns

Pro Tip: Ani DiFranco lyrics and ~original poetry by you~ written on your closet walls and homework desk.

(aside: this was the year my boyfriend told me he loved me because I looked like a cigarette - white with orange on top. Thanks guy.)

Here is where things get complicated, 2002 was a year of a billion hairstyles/styles in general PLUS I got a webcam which meant I had to share those hairstyles with my LIVEJOURNAL. I also designed my first line of clothing (a million chuckles). Fashion show consisted of lace trimmed "bloomers", fishnets, combat boots, t-shirts with sock arms, tulle, sequins, combat boots and furry armpits. I had my models do a weird interpretive dance routine to some trip hop song. The little black number below was another one of my creations, it was black velvet and included a dried up orange peel.


17 year old Hannah's style guide:

- Big. Hair.
- Short Hair
- Western shirts (just like Madonna)
- Webcam
- Hairy Armpits
- Yellow Walkman
- No shoes
- Ringworm (from not wearing shoes)

Pro Tip: Try a bra attached to your scarf (somebody will stop you and politely ask whether or not this is the look you are going for).

A long time ago in the province of Ontario we had something called OAC (grade 13) which is why it's 2003 and I'm still in highschool. My final year of highschool was without a doubt my favourite, I had settled into a comfortable crew of pals, was in the throes of first love (my mum recently told me that she'd never witnessed any two people "smooch" so much as we did. I once went to the doctor to inquire about a mysterious rash on my face only to be told that I was "making out too much".) and was fairly confident that I was going to graduate despite being 1 of 4 arty kids in a school for academics (facebook stalking has allowed me to peek in on the lives of my peers and am constantly in awe of their various extraordinary achievements). I continued making my own clothing (including my grad dress pictured above, made from curtains if you couldn't tell and the skirt and "dress" below) and livejournaling, mostly I was livejournaling.

18 year old Hannah's style guide

- Cut up everything and put it on something else, including underpants on t-shirts.
- Wrestling boots cos Nylon told you so
- Mullet
- Mullet and faux hawk, together.
- A tattoo souvenir of your best friend's initial inside of a heart.
- A vhs of Kate Bush performances

Did you make it through that whole entire entry? I feel like you should have a reward for such endurance! Now I'm going to put my computer away because that took me a monstrous amount of time and I'm embarrassed about that. Good night friends, I hope to wake up to a plethora of stories of your own hilarious young one attire!

A mix of some of my favourite jams from 1997 - 2003 here!