Roy Rogers: Fashion Icon

The real fashion influence in my early life was not Cary Grant. It was Roy Rogers.

I craved anything western, from suede jackets with fringe and brown plaid shirts with contrasting stitches in pointy arcs, to red cowboy boots and a dad-gum wide belt with bullets and a holster.  Howdy-Doody and Buffalo Bob had the same effect on me, but to a lesser degree than old Roy. (It was probably the gun thing, right, Dr. Freud?) And the most lasting influence of this infatuation has been in my choice of shirts.

My favorite picture of myself as a kid is of me standing outside the farm stand where we bought our pumpkins for making Jack-O’Lanterns. One foot on the wooden steps, smiling bravely at the camera, I have on a navy shirt with a little red windowpane check and pearl-covered snaps and pockets with flaps, green corduroy pants held up by a Indian-patterned, beaded belt, chaps, a holster, red cowboy boots and a brown rolled-brim hat with beads around the crown. Like Jesse James out in front of the Dry Gulch Saloon, I was.

I realized, some time in my adulthood that the picture was taken at Halloween. We were buying pumpkins. I was in my costume! This led to a kind of epiphany about dress, the appropriateness of certain kinds of clothing, and of the nature of dressing in costume versus dressing for my regular life. I know there is a fine line, perhaps, between the two, in as much as I dress in a business costume sometimes, when I dress for important business occasions, for example, but costumes are always artificial.  

I am convinced that costumes are fine for masquerade parties and Trick-or-Treating. All other occasions, (including the Academy Awards ceremony,) call for more conventional, authentic dress.