My mother’s shirt is made of a flow-y, cheetah print. The tag reads “100% Rayon”. There are five brown plastic buttons down the middle of the shirt. The collar is one of my favorite parts: it is long and pointed with black trim. Inside the shirt there are two semicircular shoulder pads, also in the cheetah print, and lightly stuffed with fabric.

My mother told me that she bought this shirt when she first heard she was pregnant with me. She is a high school teacher and thought it was appropriate to hide her “baby bump” for as long as possible. So in a way, I suppose I have worn this shirt before, but as a fetus, so I’m not sure that counts.

Every time I’m home for a break, my mother will have a pile of old clothes waiting for me to try on and possibly add to my own wardrobe. Sometimes I’ll take the garments to school with me, other times I leave them at my parents’ house and revisit the clothing later. The latter is the story of this particular shirt. This winter break, having worn other hand-me-down shirts to death, my favorite being the painted denim ones, I decided to give a second-string shirt a try. This one was in the back of my closet but the unique collar drew me in. It wasn’t until I tried it on did I realize how enormous the shoulder pads were!

Interested in the history of fashion and even more intrigued by the concept of shoulder pads, I started looking into its conception into the fashion world. When they first were introduced in the 1930s, shoulder pads were often triangular and stuffed with cotton or even sawdust. The style did not really take off until post World War II when women, coming off of doing men’s jobs during the war, adopted a more militarized fashion. However, the shoulder pad craze is most commonly associated with the 80s and even into the early 90s (this shirt being circa 1990 exactly.)

Now I think it is socially acceptable to wear these dated clothes (and maybe that is just my opinion.) I am grateful for this semi-recently-discovered source of clothing (my mother) and I enjoy finding ways to integrate her clothes into my wardrobe. I’d like to think I bring new life into the garments by the way I style them. People will sometimes ask me where I get these interesting pieces from and it makes me proud to say “I got it from my mama.”

Long, Carola, and Harriet Walker. “Shoulder pads: A history.” The Independent, 14 Oct. 2009. Web. 7 Feb 2013.