Mountain Gear

Mountain Formal

I was dressing for a meeting the other night and asked my husband for advice.  He works from home, so anything without an elastic waistband functions as dress clothes in his wardrobe, but my son and my dog have about the same interest in fashion, so he was the only critic available.   “Does this look okay?” I said, pointing to a sweater.  “Maybe,” he said.  “Are you wearing jeans?”  “No,” I said, “I’m wearing the dark pants.” “Is the meeting in a church?”   “Why, and would the denomination matter?” The conversation was failing to produce a strong vote of confidence, so I reached for the other sweater, the kind with the white snowflakes and the silver buttons, dug out the bigger of my two pairs of earrings, and ran for the door.

           The dark pant/Scandinavian sweater ensemble--minus the earrings for the male conservative--is the uniform for any event between November and March in our small snowy town.  It is the little black dress of the mountains, and unlike your average jersey knit, you can wear it while you wait for the tow truck to get you out of the ditch.  It can go from fiddle concert to town meeting, from school conference to fund-raiser.  It shows you have taken more time to dress than you would to go to the Quickie Mart, but avoids the suspicion that you are presenting yourself as a candidate for office. Style is not a big consideration in this neck of the woods. Besides the obvious constraints of living at high altitudes, there are a relatively small number of people who have to spend time up here with you.  Individual fashion statements can get awfully loud. 

            Another big advantage: a patterned sweater doesn’t have to cost a lot.  Some of us still get our sweaters from Sears.  Woolrich produces nice examples.  The professionals in town, doctors and lawyers, buy from Dale of Norway.  Class structures in mountain towns still exist, but they’re rarely the same as those down in the flatlands.  Looking for a label would be about as tacky as showing one off. And for heaven's sake, if you look too good, you'll look like one of the  tourists.  Borrowing from a friend?  Well, no one will ever notice the sweater isn’t yours, because we’ve all seen so many of them that they start to blur together.  By mid-winter we all start looking the same to each other, like sheep: lanky, geometrically-patterned sheep.  

            Regretfully, precisely because we are such a small community, it’s possible to attempt scrupulously commonplace attire and still offend someone.  In one sartorial scandal, members of an anti-Walmart organization were preparing for a presentation at a town board meeting.  “I guess we’d better dress up a little,” one of them must have said.  “Not look too anti-establishment.”  So they made an effort, and showed up in lovely corduroys and some real nice sweaters.  I don’t remember how the presentation went, but all the talk the next day was about how darned dressed up they were, and how did they get off saying they were on the people’s side when they were wearing those fancy clothes?  Later, I asked one of the group’s members if their feelings were hurt.  “I think it’s hilarious,” she said.  “We all bought that stuff at Shirley’s Thrift Store.”