Today marks the official start of the spring season. The weather is already much warmer than it was just one month ago. Time to dig out those short-sleeved shirts, skirts, and sundresses from storage! But who wants to wear last year’s fashions, am I right? Even worse, who would want to wear outfits that haven’t been trendy in going on a decade now? Nobody would! Well, nobody who had any sense of taste or decorum.
But what’s a girl to do if she can’t afford to update her wardrobe every single time Halley’s Comet passes by the Earth? It’s truly a dilemma for which only a certifiable genius could find a solution. Sure, you could read any of the ten thousand fashion guides brought to you by experts in the industry who have seen and done it all, but can you really trust someone’s judgment just because they know what they’re talking about? I have a sneaking suspicion you know the answer to that question…as long as you’re not an idiot, that is (the answer is no, you idiot!).
Because I’m just too gosh darn nice for my own good, I’m not even going to charge you a service fee for letting you in on my best and latest fashion secrets. You might get hit with a user fee or a parts and labor fee, but no service fee (by having read up to this point, you have already agreed to my terms and conditions). So without further ado, and with even less playing for time, I give you Quinn Paxton’s Spring Fashion Guide for People Who Want to Wear Trendy Clothes But Are Too Poor to Buy New Clothes at the Moment!
TOPS:
All the big fashion guides are touting “reversable print t-shirts” as this season’s highlight. For those of you not “in-the-know,” that means you can wear a t-shirt one way, turn it inside out, and then wear it that way too without it looking like you’re wearing an inside out shirt. The secret is in the fact that it has a print on both the inside and the outside, giving the illusion that you’re always wearing your t-shirt correctly!
For those of us who must be economical with our t-shirt purchases, we can’t afford to drop an extra seven or eight dollars on a fancy reversable print t-shirt. What we can do is use a little fashion hack I picked up from the summer camp I attended when I was twelve: get yourself a plain white t-shirt, grab yourself a black Sharpie marker, and write “Taylor Swift Era’s Tour 1943” on the front.
Now, here’s where the real trick comes into play: flip the t-shirt inside out, use that same Sharpie to write “Marlene Dietrich USO Tour 2026” on this side of the shirt, and voila! You’ve got yourself your very own reversable print t-shirt for nothing more than the cost of a pack of Hanes plain white t-shirts, a black Sharpie marker, and a sizeable portion of your dignity.
SKIRTS:
When you think of springtime skirts, what do you think of? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I don’t wear too many skirts, so I’m not sure where to begin. Ah well. I’m sure I can figure this out…oh! Okay, here’s something: since it can still be a bit cooler in the spring than the summer, you might not want to get out your miniskirts just yet. But it’s definitely waaaaay too warm to wear a big maxi skirt. Why not split the different and wear a midi skirt? They’re perfect for those days that start around 70 degrees F, but then gets down to 55 degrees F after sunset.
What? You don’t have a midi skirt? Why didn’t you say so? That’s no problem at all. If you have a maxi skirt and a pair of scissors, you pretty much have yourself a midi skirt already. Just measure out approximately half the length between the waist and the hem exactly, apply pressure to your scissors while they’re touching the fabric, and watch as the bottom half of the skirt falls away. There you go—your very own midi skirt! If you have an unsteady hand and your cuts are uneven, still no problem. You can insist you have an artistic soul and the asymmetry of the skirt represents the contradictory emotions you feel when you think back on your childhood.
“But wait!” you cry far too loud for no particular reason because I’m literally right here. What does one do if one only has miniskirts in one’s closet for one to wear when one wants to meet one’s friends for two drinks? Obviously, you can’t cut a miniskirt to make it longer. What you can do is choose your favorite two miniskirts and lay them out on the bed, one on top of the other, then grab a roll of duct tape, and fuse the two miniskirts into a single midi skirt. It really is that simple! Don’t you feel a bit foolish now for even having to ask?
DRESSES:
Dresses are always a major staple of any fashion era. You can wear them just about anywhere and people won’t judge you the way they would if you tried to wear a hazardous waste suit to the supermarket or a vest covered in dynamite to the bank. My favorite dress is actually this cute Eisley princess dress I had when I was five, but it’s gotten much harder to squeeze into in the last few years thanks to my love of chocolate donuts and the passage of twenty years. But that’s neither here not there. We’re talking about you.
If you want to join in on this season’s trendy dress options, you better have invested your money wisely and not tried to hit the jackpot on video slot machines by placing $1500 bets each spin and then kept spinning even after failing to get a hit for 72 straight spins. Totally apropos of nothing: does anyone have $108,000 they can lend me? I can’t pay you back ever, but I would be ever so grateful for the next few weeks. My loan shark, Crackbone Legbreaker threatened to lightly tickle my feet if I don’t pay up by Saturday, and I hate having my feet tickled!
Where were we? Oh, right—dresses. To be honest, I’m really starting to feel like I’m the only one putting any effort into this relationship. Why do I always have to be the one giving fashion tips to you? How about maybe just this once, you prove to me that you actually care about me as a person and aren’t just using me for fashion advice by combing through thousands of social media posts to aggregate the latest clothing trends and then parsing them in a manner which anyone with at least a doctorate-level education can understand? Yeah…didn’t think so.
So there it is, folks—Quinn Paxton’s Spring Fashion Guide for People Who Want to Wear Trendy Clothes But Are Too Poor to Buy New Clothes at the Moment. I can promise that you won’t find another guide anywhere on the internet just like it. Will these tips and tricks help you land a spot on the runway in Milan or the cover of Fashion Quarterly Magazine? Probably not, but let’s be honest…that’s more of a “you” problem than my advice being terrible. At least you’ll be able to go out to a semi-public location if there is poor lighting and everyone else has cataracts without feeling like a fool for wearing outdated clothes. And before you say it—yes, I know. You’re welcome.
-Quinn Paxton, Acting Editor-in-Chief, Emerson Valley Gazette
Emerson Valley Gazette 
Leave a comment