Throwing Shade(s)

Some people are “fashion forward”, in that they look and dress in a manner that is ahead of the curve when it comes to trends. They bear themselves with a certain composure and have a sense of style that inevitably leads to others emulating the way they look and dress. Whether we care to admit it or not, these people influence the way the rest of us end up dressing.

I am not one of these people. If anything, I might be able to make a case for myself as the exact antithesis of “fashion forward”, where the clothes and accessories that I personally gravitate toward are precisely what the general buying public will NOT gravitate toward, given a pile of cash and the freedom to make their own choices. It wasn’t always this way. As a teenager, I desperately wanted to be cool, or at least somewhat in step with what the perceived zeitgeist of cool was in 1980. Fashionably speaking, that was a time that did not age well, all things considered. But nevertheless, I wanted to look the part. Mirror shades, hair parted right down the middle, ball hugger shorts; the basic antipodean uniform of the late Magnum P.I era.

Sometime after I got into mountain bikes, I experienced a shift in my priorities and my perspective. Maybe it was tied to the fact that cycling attire in the late 1980s wasn’t very far removed from what wrestlers were wearing. There was no way I could consider dressing like a cyclist as broad spectrum cool, even as I desperately wanted to cultivate the exact same shaving rash and tan lines as Maurizio Fondriest.

“Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government…” as the line goes. Supplant “grown men wearing brightly colored skintight clothing who shave their legs three times a week should not be consulted in matters of sartorial style” and you kinda get where I am going here.

I became increasingly discontent with the notion of style and fashion as it pertains to our culture, bruised as my sensibilities were by the 1980s and the barrage of MTV’s influence. Everything seemed plastic and shitty and it increasingly felt like we were all subjects in a social experiment that was by turns torturous and comical. It is an understatement to say that I became disenchanted with the status quo. I broke. The exact moment is easy to trace. It coincided with the release of Oakley Blades. So, 1986.

Jesus, has it really been that long? Oakley Blades were introduced right as I was getting my feet wet for the first time with mountain bikes; they would have perfectly matched my brand new teal Diamond Back Apex. But they just looked so incredibly shitty in all the ways that so much of the 1980s looked incredibly shitty. They looked like the kind of thing that beach volleyball players would wear, to go along with all that oiled muscle, Katin shorts, and frosted tips. As someone who was still very much in the early stages of my cycling baptism, Oakley Blades were a step too far. Hell, even Rick Astley wasn’t wearing them. No. He chose to Rick Roll all of us while staying timelessly safe with a pair of Ray Bans Wayfarers. But the rest of the world? Hell, they just gobbled that shit right up.

The big-ol’ faceshield look that Oakley was pushing had a lot of steam behind it. Arnold fooled many of us into thinking that we could look as cool as he did in The Terminator if we rocked up in some Gargoyles, although Brian Bosworth and Dale Earnhardt did a whole lot to undo that potential cachet. For a few years there it seemed like you couldn’t look to one side or the other on the start line of an XC race without seeing yourself reflected back in the mirrored lenses of a million spatter-framed Bollé Edges. Hard to figure out the begats on all this, but the race was definitely on to see who could make the loudest, most over the top sunglasses on the market.

Personally, I just wanted to be cool enough to rock some Vuarnet Skilynx glacier glasses. But by the end of the 1980s my eyesight was deteriorating enough to need prescription lenses and Vuarnet was probably already reeling from the gaudy, iridium coated, bright purple plastic handled dagger that Oakley had plunged into the eyewear industry. Paradoxically, Vuarnet eyewear had become decidedly uncool. Oakley Blades meanwhile, perhaps even more paradoxically, were the very tip of a questionably fashion forward spear that skewered the entire action sports world in ways that I completely failed to comprehend. This was when I knew, deep in my heart, that I would forever be out of step with style, that my fate was such that I would never, ever, be fashion forward. Watching mountain biking evolve into the 1990s was like watching a very slow motion, incredibly garish train wreck. I sighed in resignation, quit wearing gloves, started wearing Hawaiian shirts or wool depending on the weather, and began stockpiling old American Optics acetate frame safety glasses.

Oakley would go on to twist the dagger/spear plenty of times over the next decade or two. At the peak of Oakley’s style dominance, it was difficult at times to tell if they were trying to advance eyewear in ways that us regular punters were just too stupid to understand, or playing an elaborate, expensive, Star Trek; The Next Generation themed joke on the whole world. And nowhere did that great joke play out more impressively than the sport of mountain biking.

We went from hippies in cutoff jeans and hiking boots (and probably some fucking sweet Vuarnet Skilynx glacier shades, just sayin’), through an extended session of wearing loudly branded variants of road racing apparel (I’m looking at you, 1996 Primal Wear catalog), to letting Steve Peat and Shaun Palmer dictate to the rest of us that skinsuits and visorless helmets looked dumb (and I still gotta wonder if they ever dared say that to Tomac) and got them banned from DH racing, which led to an era best described as “active pajamawear”, before somehow, for reasons that I am thankful for but completely unaware as to how we arrived at them, we began to evolve away from dressing like runaway circus performers. Oh, and don’t forget the “goggles worn sideways on a half-shell helmet for trail rides” look. I blame Oakley for that one as well. As far as awkward adolescences go, I contend that mountain biking “fashion” experienced one that lasted about 26 years.

But like I said already, I don’t know shit about fashion. Maybe it was all cool. I am thankful though, stylistically speaking, that we now experience an abundance of choice in terms of how we dress. If we want to dress up in our favorite road team kit, we have scads of options. If we want to dress like roadies but don’t want to be festooned with logos, or clad in petrochemical sourced fabric, we have options. If we want to fly the flags of our favorite teams or athletes in emulation of pro DH or Enduro racers, we have options. If we want to wrap ourselves in earth-toned cloaks of near-invisibility, we have options. In the same way that mountain biking is no longer something that can easily be described as a uniformly common experience for everyone who calls themselves mountain bikers, there is such a massive surplus of quality kit out there that we can choose clothing that not only fits and works, but that also allows us to express our individuality or conform to the status quo as we go. And when it comes to the way we protect our peepers from the glare and dust of this harsh world, man, do we ever have options.

Oakley, bless their quasi-futuristic heart, are still churning out eyewear that looks a whole lot like the Eyeshades and the Blades that started this whole line of thought, but now they seem almost quaint and carefully restrained by modern standards. I’m wearing some Sweet Protection Ronins that most of my friends would have ridiculed as garish “jizz-shields” a decade or so ago, and they also look quietly understated in today’s setting. Hell, even Vuarnet are back in business. Maybe it’s time for me to kiss peripheral vision goodbye, flex the credit card painfully, and pay homage to the late Sir Edmund Hilary. That, or shut my piehole and get some Pit Vipers…