Chasing a Croatian Girl: A Survivor's Tale by Cody McClain Brown

Author:Cody McClain Brown [Brown, Cody McClain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, Travel
ISBN: 9781516959549
Google: 0WQyjgEACAAJ
Publisher: Cody McClain Brown
Published: 2015-09-03T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Fashion

Whenever I would fly back to Oklahoma I felt like I was shedding layers of culture, like a snake sheds skin. The move from Europe to Mid-America always took me from a place where almost everything had an air of elegance, from the small cups of coffee to my finely dressed compatriots flying alongside me, and dropped me in a place where elegance is a word more likely to be mistaken for elephant. At each successive gate, at each successive airport I could tell I was getting closer to home by the decrease in concern for outward appearance and an increase in concern for jumbo-sized everything. Finally, I arrived at the gate for Tulsa, Oklahoma and a little bit of me died inside. Sure it’s one step away from home, but it’s also filled with people wearing sweatpants, shorts with calf-high white socks, matching his-n-hers Eskimo Joe’s shirts, flip-flops, tank tops that hardly hide tufts of armpit hair, and oversized basketball shorts on a pack of slack-jawed yokels. While the U.S. may have our security agencies reading our emails and monitoring our phone calls, one thing we clearly do not have is the fashion police.

Imagine going from Split where you see and laugh at the poorly dressed tourists, to ending up on a plane, then in a state and finally a city filled with them. This was me each time I went home. It wasn’t always this way. My first summer in Split I was decked out in my white socks, shorts, and tennis shoes ready to hit the riva, the main seaside promenade. I was quickly informed that I was ready to go nowhere. My punica[6] forbade (YES! FOR-BADE) me from leaving the house in what I had been leaving the house in my whole life. At the time I thought this was a little repressive. I figured why should this lady care what I wear out. It’s not like people on the riva will know that I’m her son-in-law (actually, I later learned it is totally like that). I actually believe my mother-in-law was trying to save me from myself. Another time I went to the center in a raggedy old hooded sweatshirt and felt like a homeless man (except homeless men in Croatia are dressed better than this). Feeling out of place by a publicly inadequate level of dress was a new experience for me. In the U.S., anything goes.

Croatians are generally a pretty stylish bunch. Though not everyone dresses or looks the same. There are people who dress more alternatively, there are hipsters, punks and goths. There are people who (attempt) to dress stylishly what we would call preps, or trendy folks. There are the super stylish, the fashionistas. And there are cajkuša. There is really no translation for cajkuša. No matter which style one adopts, people here are dressed with a self-awareness or self-consciousness that demonstrates a commitment to looking good: Stylistically diverse, but stylish nonetheless. Even at the university here I have never

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