Our Outer Beast

Animal prints are the new black. That's what the fashionistas are saying anyway.

Just as I have tried, in the past few years, to move beyond basic black from head to toe, I am trying to resist outfitting myself in trendy garments that make me look like some middle aged wild thing who has lost her way. Not that the look would be a misrepresentation; I'm just not ready to out myself like that to the world at large.

And so it was that some rare good sense and a lingering bit of worry over what everyone else thinks were the only things standing between me and some overpriced "premium denim" in a subdued but unmistakable leopard print. Even though they fit like a second animal skin. Even though they were, oddly, slimming -- possibly because the jungle spots detract attention from the occasional fat pocket. I even passed on the crinkly solid gray skirt paired with a muted pink tank. Too much like a bunny riding an elephant. (I did, for some reason, become so enamored of a leopard print ruffly top that it somehow made it home with me; it makes me look a bit like a big cat in a tutu, but I'll stick it the section of my closet earmarked for clothing that should only be worn on vacation or when everyone -- including me -- will be hopelessly shitfaced.)

Young women come into the store looking to be transformed. They are -- many of them -- relatively new mothers, women who cannot remember what it felt like, only a few years earlier, to have males other than a suckling baby eye their breasts with desire, males other than a frightened toddler grab their ass. Still barely out of their twenties, they wear sensible flip flops and granny pants and baggy clothes speckled with cheerio stains and stretched shapeless by impatient toddlers. They come into the store seeking to recapture a lost youth I would kill for these days, not realizing how much it is still within their grasp.

It's a mere animal print away for some; for others, it's a pair of short shorts. Denim shorts that cost more than a month's worth of babysitting, but totally worth it for the way it makes them feel. These women are still too young to have become accustomed to the gravity and puckering and varicose veins that come with bearing children, and have not yet learned to embrace their physical imperfections. I would tell them that they will, one day, but I suppose I would be lying. Accept, maybe. Embrace? I'm all for fantasies, but that's a bit far-fetched.

To say that the clothes make the woman would be shallow, not to mention expensive. But if a young mother who has lost sight of herself can put something on that makes her smile while she's pushing a cart through the diaper aisle at Babies R Us, why knock it. People will react to her in kind; smiles beget smiles, and there's nothing like a healthy -- albeit brief -- dose of humanity to brighten an otherwise tedious and isolated day.

We are, we humans, inherently social. It's the nature of the beast. And if it takes an animal print to bring it out, I say go for it.