The Fashion Missteps of a Wannabe
Rocker Girl 
by Paige Redmond 

          I wouldn’t say I had any particular style when I was younger, I just knew I wanted to be cool and the only things I thought would make me cool was sneakers and music. Growing up, my parents only played what you could call “black” music, i.e. Motown, 90s R&B, and hip-hop and I’d always wanted to play guitar ever since I saw Prince’s Rave Un2 the Year 2000 concert; he had better hair and shoes than me and he was a master guitar player. My dad gave me my first guitar when I was eleven, it was nothing special just some no-name piece of shit he found under his bunk in Afghanistan. He knew I always wanted one, so he brought it home to me. We were living on Fort Campbell at the time back when you could find decommissioned planes and helicopters on seemingly every corner and officer’s wives who thought too highly of themselves (they thought they should be saluted to for the proud American service of being married to an officer). For most of our time on Fort Campbell, my dad would deploy for a year then he’d be stateside for a year, and the years that he was here went by way too quickly which led to me constantly being angry. The only way I knew how to deal with my anger was to lash out and then write about it.  

          During my junior high years, I had a bunch of sneakers: high top, low top, brand new, or hand-me-down, it didn’t really matter to me as long as they fit, and I had every brand from Nike to Adidas to more obscure ones like Pastry and Baby Phat, a real blast from the past. My favorite pair were these black and blue Pastry high top sneakers that also had plaid cloth in them that I swore were the greatest shoes ever, but now looking back they were absolutely hideous. By the time I reached high school and moved to middle of nowhere Kansas though, my shoe and music preference had changed completely. I started listening to more indie bands like Florence and the Machine which helped me get a better sense of what kind of music I wanted to play, and I always wore combat boots because fifteen-year-old me wanted to be a rockstar and boots seemed like the kind of shoe a face-melting guitarist would wear. They were only $40 at Target and came in two colors: brown and black, and I wore both to the point that the heels were worn down and there were holes forming in the soles. Once I started taking lessons and learned how to play g, c, and d chords, I figured I knew everything there is to know about music, so I’d be writing little ditties dripping with teenage angst and drenched in too much reverb wearing boots that made me look more like I was ready for war than the wannabe rocker girl I thought I was.