Do you remember that awkward stage in life – after your mum has stopped buying your clothes, but before you start getting hyper-conscious of what you’re wearing, going on street-wear blogs and buying fashion magazines that give you pointers on how to ‘mix designer with high-street’? Kids where I live seem to be able to escape those misguided years somehow these days, maybe it’s because they’re weaned on grime rather than mysterious girl era Peter Andre, but for me it was four years of dodgy band t-shirts, string vests (eugh I know), super baggy jeans, fisherman’s hats, stupidly chunky DCs and those plastic bracelets that meant you were supposed to have sex with whoever broke them. Imagine if in twenty years we get an ‘early noughties revival.’ Everyone would be walking around with this shit on.

Yeah, I actually wore one of these. Proudly. For about three years. Don’t freak out too hard though, it didn’t have those graphics all over it – just navy blue with a white trim. I was straight up EPMD…only I’m white, middle-class, and I was repping Clapham rather than Brentwood.

I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to wear one of these ironically. You know how you see hipsters wandering round in Slipknot t-shirts, but with mustaches and loafers – that is JUST passable (as annoying as it is), this on the other hand, is not. I didn’t have this particular one – mine was the front cover to ‘Chocolate Starfish & the Hotdog flavoured water,’ which as an album name would be kind of funny from someone like Blink 182, but from Fred Durst and his gang of goateed henchmen it’s just sort of creepy.

Best things about studded belts: 1. They make you look HardXcore. 2. You can wrap them round your fists and use them as The Warriors style ninja gloves. 3. Most people in emo bands wear them. 4. If you spin around real fast when you’re wearing one you basically a human disco ball (no homo.) 5. They’re the perfect mix of classic rock leather and hard rock metal spikes.

For some reason these were massively popular when everyone got in to skating, so obvs I started wearing them so I could at least look like a skater when all I could really do was a half second manual and a poor attempt at an ollie, cue “how high did I go? can you watch and tell me how high I got?” Problem was they would get all caught up in the wheels, rip and turn in to flares, which were inexcusable – even though these are basically just glorified flares without the skinny bit at the top. They’re pretty much impossible to find now except for on the legs of those cyber-goths with pink and green dread-locks wandering round Camden market trying to look like they’ve been shooting up for the past three days.

I couldn’t find a picture that did justice to how big the tongues were in the DCs that everyone I knew used to have, so I had to use this one instead. You know the shoes I’m talking about though – the really chunky, super ugly ones with MASSIVE tongues. You probably owned some.

This entry was tagged as 1990s, chunky shoes, criminal damage, dc, i used to dress like a lesbian, noughties, studded belt, STYLE..