I’ve been perusing a new website called “My Parents Were Awesome.” It’s a compilation of photos people have sent in, showing their parents 20, 30, 40 years ago, when they were young and hip and fashionable. Or, younger and hipper and fashionabler, anyway.
I like this site because the older parents get, the easier it is to forget their former fabulousness. My parents are good, solid, predictable people who haven’t changed their clothing and/or hairstyles since 1980 or so. But back in the 60s and 70s, my mom wore miniskirts, my dad wore skinny pants and ties, and the two of them tooled around in a TR-3 convertible.
Looking at these photos, I just want to dress in lemon yellow capri pants and keds, toss a scarf over my hair and face the world in my cat’s-eye sunglasses. I wonder if my parents felt particularly hip when they were young adults, or whether it’s just a product of the times. And I wonder if, 30 years from now, photos of us taken today will seem so surprisingly fresh. If I get those yellow capri pants, they probably will.
My guess is that my mom’s beehive and my dad’s thick black frames and skinny ties were probably not seen as hip or fabulous at the time. Some of that stuff only becomes fabulous as it becomes retro. Still, people wearing bell-bottoms, platform boots, and wide-collar polyester shirts in the early ’70s? I think they must have known how fabulous they were.
I think about this a lot as well when I look at old pictures of my parents (and other peoples parents). Of course, youth = beauty, so that’s half the battle. I have a ton of pix of my folks when they were young, and I, too, think they were fabulously fashionable and beautiful. I wonder if “hipness” had the same weight then as it does now, and how much of it was just “fitting in”. In any case, I’ve had the good fortune to meet your folks and I think that they’re still super cute and fun.
Wow, your parents really were awesome, LP. Right on.
I remember seeing some pictures of my mom with long, straight hair playing folk guitar, but nothing as mod as the Parrishes.
It’s definitely weird to see these pictures, thinking of them as someone’s parents, when the kids in them are younger than I am now. Time: It’s a trip.
Totally awesome. And they feel more like us in these photos instead of those people separated by a generation of culture, like you’d be friends with them. I too have totally awesome photos of my parents…including some “wild” party where women in mid-60s mini-dresses are sitting on the knees of men on a sofa – I suspect that was the apex of the debauchery but who knows…