I totally understand why… today’s teens make such poor fashion choices.

 NOTE: This piece was inspired by an experience I had during hall duty. I looked around at my seventh graders and realized that 11 of them were wearing skintight leopard-print leggings. 

Today's adolescents make extremely poor fashion choices as a result of blindly following trends in an attempt to fit in. Guess what? I TOTALLY GET IT. Middle school is the time for experimentation, growth, and asserting individuality. If you’re going to wear skinny jeans despite the fact that they make your legs look like sausages, then 7^th grade is the time to do it for the following reasons:

• You can get away with it, and pass it off in later years as an endearing childhood story. Once you hit high school, your fashion choices go from dry-erase to permanent marker in the minds of others, and trust me, you don’t want anyone remembering those platform Velcro sneakers you rocked for 3 months sophomore year. Not that I would know. 

• Most of the 7^th graders around you are inevitably making equally or more horrible fashion decisions, so you’re in good company. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they certainly make one of those wrongs look less wrong by comparison. Fact.

• You don’t have enough money to do much financial damage with unfortunate impulse buys. How much can you really spend on distressed mustache t-shirts from Wet Seal? It’s not like in the real world, where you have one beer too many, come home to an Amazon account with your credit card saved, and order a pair of grey slouchy boots while watching The Vampire Diaries in your room so your male roommates don’t mock you. Not that I would know. But hypothetically speaking, those boots did cost more than 4 mustache shirts. I mean WOULD cost more. If I had in fact purchased them. Luckily, this is just an example. That’s not about me. Clearly.

• Seventh graders, developmentally-speaking, are incapable of taking halfway decent photographs. All photographic evidence falls into one of the following categories:

a.     slanted

b.     poorly-lit

c.     partially obscured by the phone you’re holding to take the picture in the mirror (when did that become okay? NO. Just NO.)

d.     Instagrammed beyond recognition

e.     blurry

f.      grainy

Bad photos = LESS PROOF THAT YOU LOOKED TERRIBLE. Roll with it.

So go on, 7^th graders. Rock those cringeworthy fashions. You’ve got bigger fish to fry anyway. If you make it through middle school, you'll be so thrilled you survived you won't care that your ill-fitting rompers were documented.