Little Yellow Dress
Wait! What?
Margot Albrecht’s Column.
The 90s, for Gen-Xers like me, was the Golden Era of music and fashion… Seattle Grunge and Nirvana’s poster-boy-for-disaffected-youth Kurt Cobain, with his Christian Roth sunnies and infamous MTV Unplugged thrift shop mohair cardigan (which, btw, in 2019 fetched nearly $500,000 at auction); plaid shirts and space buns; Britpop and Pop Punk; Nu Metal and Trance; the East Coast/West Coast Biggie/Tupac feud; slip dresses and Doc Martens. In Adelaide, all these influences interfused in an alternative melting pot that was The Big Day Out, Thebarton Theatre (The Thebby), Crown and Anchor (The Cranker), The Tivoli, LeRox, and the iconic Mars Bar.
I was a prolific op-shopper. Anything went. I paired para-boots with 70s Levis, Docs with disco dresses, lace-up long boots with 50s knitted suit sets. Back then, to open the doors of my musty second-hand wardrobe was to be engulfed in a mushroom cloud of moldering vintage, stale tobacco and the sickly-sweet scent of smoke machines. Among the coolest retro clothing stores was The Little House of Treasures, located down a flight of stairs in a Rundle Street basement (I’m happy to report this basement is still peddling retro and re-purposed wares under the moniker Fox on the Run Vintage). It was in this space, many moons ago, that I first set eyes on The Little Yellow Dress... a 60s mod mini dress, shot through with gold glitter thread. It was love at first sight.
Somewhere in this timeline, I was on a quintessential girls-night-out with my housemate/bestie. I was glammed up in my Little Yellow Dress, zip-up knee high boots, replete with glitter-smattered eyelids and ubiquitous patent mini backpack. Arms linked, my friend and I were on a city crossing, giggling and chatting about everything and nothing, when suddenly a young woman, crossing in the opposite direction, broke away from her own girls-night huddle and spat on me.
Wait! What?
She SPAT on me.
Then she was yelling in my face … freak-weirdo-slag. My friend and I were too shocked to react. Later, that same night, we were passing a pub, when someone inside slammed against the window like a dog flinging themselves at a fence. Face pressed to the pane, hurling abuse at me, was the same crossing woman who’d spat on me.
This time my bestie and I laughed at the absurdity of it. What on earth must have happened in that individual’s life to provoke such a viciously vitriolic reaction to me?
But it wouldn’t be the last time my appearance aroused a hate-fuelled response. My then boyfriend and I were visiting my bestie on her Uni break in her middling sized country hometown. When we walked into her local pub, it was like a scene in an old Western; a hush fell and we were surrounded by a group of punters who’d taken an instant dislike to the strangers in their midst. They seemed especially triggered by my boyfriend’s waistcoat, which, according to them, meant he was ‘gay’ and at my Little Yellow Dress, which meant I was a ‘cross-dressing freak’. This township’s lore deemed that we deserved to have the proverbial shit kicked out of us. Suddenly, a huge bikie dude (whose fashion choices arguably denoted their own negative connotations) came to our rescue. He told us to stick with him and he would protect us. We clung to that bikie dude, like a pair of remora fish, for the remainder of the night.
This happened to me nearly three decades ago and yet, only last weekend my sixteen-year-old son was walking in the city with a couple of his queer friends when some teens rode past on their bikes and yelled ‘Emo C*nts’ at them. My son and his friends laughed it off. While I’m proud of their resilience—of the way they own it and wear it like a badge of honour—it also angers me that they regularly have strangers hurling abuse at them because of their alternative appearance.
We humans, it seems, just can’t unscramble our hardwired predisposition to stereotype based on the way someone looks.
Recently, as I was doomscrolling through social media, I was struck by the following ‘inspirational’ quote: Some people will never like you because your spirit irritates their demons.
I would love it if you wanted to share your own ‘Wait! What?’ moments where your spirit has irritated the demons of others.
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EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2023.