Socks and flip-flops: alert

We said no, no to many things. "Absolutely not," we said. For a decade we were wearing low-rise pants; pants that allowed showing the navel, and the lace of the panties (pardon the diminutives when talking about underwear; I have written in Marie Claire) because they were so low. If you search the Internet for the concept Muffin top, you will see allegorical photos of people in low-rise pants that are too small. We said we would never wear high-waisted pants again as we had in the eighties. No, no, absolutely not. We would never wear eighties fashion again.

But without knowing how, without realizing it, high-waisted pants have returned. Those pants we used to call "Bertín Osborne pants," to indicate they were like an old-fashioned gentleman's, an eighties gentleman's, of course, more eighties than a highball glass. And now, look, low-rise pants are starting to seem old-fashioned (and uncomfortable) to us. And little by little, we are also wearing higher pants, like Bertín Osborne's, and we say that low-rise ones are uncomfortable, actually. And, one day, we think, ripped jeans will cease to exist and we will also say "it seems incredible, how did we ever wear ripped jeans as standard?"

There is a global conspiracy, of course, there is a lodge that meets in secret to decide, each year, what will be in fashion and what will go out of fashion. "Now we will reintroduce curly hair like Abba's brunette and Eva Nasarre," they say. And we comply. That's why I want to warn, from here, the inhabitants of the tourist city that is Barcelona that what we never thought would happen has happened. For decades we have laughed at tourists with flip-flops and socks. It was perhaps the only consensus we had been able to reach. One hundred percent of the population agreed that flip-flops with socks were undesirable, tacky, ridiculous. But lo and behold, the lodge has decreed that now flip-flops with socks (these pink and blue socks, as if made in a dye workshop) are cute and pretty and funny and fashionable. Some girls on the street already wear them and the other day, the cashier at a Bershka was telling a mother and daughter that it was a trend. I suppose one not-too-distant day the highball glass will return and then we will say: "The balloon glass was very uncomfortable, I don't know how we ever used it...". We are nothing.