—Being seventeen is a big challenge.
—All I have to do is to study, study, study....
—I want to be outstanding—to dance crazily, speak gently, and skate gracefully.
—We are haughty and we are arrogant, because we are young.
—Sometimes I feel I am too old now to have any feeling for anything. My heart is quiet as dead water.
—I have a question: Are we born for study?
—The sun is shining brightly, but somebody is lonesome and blue.
—Power and prestige are nothing.
And so it goes...in the process of growth, the developing young adult meets headon, the adolescent's instability. "Teacher Chang," a teenager's psychological consulting service, adds: "Under the pressure of exams and their own growth pains, teenagers need a vent, a way to ease their tensions. One good way is taking time to adorn themselves, a much better way than fighting, drug and alcohol abuse, smoking. Many teenagers complain because high-school girls are allowed only to wear straight, short-cut hair, a white shirt, and navy blue skirt, and the boys, crew-cut hair and khaki uniforms, while foreign students can dress themselves in numerous ways. So, we should not object if students deck themselves in outlandish clothes sometimes. It is harmless relaxation."
On Taipei streets, out-of-class teenagers often have color added—clothes, hair, shoes, bags, and ornaments all tinged in tones of youthful fashion.
Usually, they have copied fashion from magazines—a way of taking an interior vacation from study. Basically more conservative than their counterparts in Japan and the United States, they normally follow fashions from abroad rather than innovate.
But boutique owner Chang Hsin-wen now notes: "Dainty dresses and dressup suits are no longer welcomed. Teenagers like comfortable, casual clothes, which are not neat but natural. Jogging shoes, jackets, T-shirts, and jeans are always beloved." Last year, jogging dress was the prevalent fashion, and may still be seen everywhere.
The Parco, Attractive, Why & 1/2, and San Shang chain stores are today's in boutiques for young girls; Elephant, Jun, and Space Shuttle, for boys. They are gathering places most of the time, Meccas for teenage window shoppers. Recently, near Taiwan University and Ming Chuan College, college alumni have opened a few teenager boutiques.
High-school girls cope with their straight-short-cut-hair formats, by using small tricks to create individual styles, but also pass the teachers' inspection; and they are joined by a few boys. One fad is to die one small pinch of hair red, yellow, or purple.
David Yuan, a high school senior, commented: "It's just for fun. I am a good student, but I like to change my image on a weekend. I am in fashion with the dyed hair spot, loose shirt, and fitted jeans. I go dancing or motorcycling. It is not important, just for relaxing, for satisfying another side of me. Monday morning, I will dress for school and be a good student."
Recently, trends have shifted somewhat. Some young adults are trying to set their own styles instead of blindly following fashion, according to designer Liu Wei-lin: "Last summer, the new fashion—'beggar-style' clothing, many layers and net-like cloth hanging on the body—did not sell as well as expected. This does not mean teenagers are not style conscious. But, instead of buying the modish dress of the boutiques, they began to tailor their own beggar styles. By cutting pieces of cloth or shaping a scarf, a designer's beggar dress is very easily accomplished. Wearing self-made clothes makes them feel more individual, fashionable, and most important, complacent. So, last summer, beggar dress flooded every street corner, but permeated with personal ideas, most costumes were unique.
"Besides wearing self-designed dress," Liu added, "the girls like to pin on ornaments as brighteners. Sometimes, they put more emphasis on the small accessories than on the dress. Things like a broach matched to a cap, and glasses connected to a silver ring are examples of their creations." Accessories attracting teenagers include familiar utilitarian shapes—shovels, irons, closet sets, pins, tennis rackets, combs—pinned on sweaters, hung on purses, worn as earrings.
Anti-traditional ways of dress now prevail. We see casual shirts with formal ties, short coats with long shirts tailing outside, blue jeans with suit jackets. What adults may think is a long way from fashion, the young suppose is very much in fashion.
A new fad, pasting patches, is fascinating today's teenagers—a checkered cloth patching the elbow of a plain dress, a Nazi mark slapped on a T-shirt back. A patched teenager pointed out, "By spending a little, I can make my own designs."
As time flies on, the gap between avant garde and archaism narrows to just a crevice. Talking to some modish boys, I found they had deliberately made a combination of old fashioned and modish items. One showed me proudly: "My grandpa's pleated pants makes a great combination with the latest shirts, right?"
In the past, complementary, harmonizing, colors were treated as a rule, taken for granted. Now, there is no definite style standard. Designer Chang Hsiun-wen comments: "Young adults are now more subjective in selecting colors. Generally, they love direct, primary colors, like pure red, bright yellow, natural green, and the direct blue. Combinations of these primary colors create new styles. The young stylists are born artists, putting their artistic pens to their clothes."
Photographer Yang Li-teh notes: "Young adults have their own present sense of beauty, which differs from ours as adults. Decorating themselves via their own recognized standards is real style too."
After high school, a completely new life begins. The first thing most girls do is to change their hair style, curling it or combing it out everyday to shape its growth. And, unlike Chinese college girls of the late 40s who wore navy blue chi-paos, today's coeds wear their own individual styles. Last year, casual clothes prevailed at college—in class, on picnics, at extracurricular school activities. But for dances, important functions for Taiwan college students, jeans are not welcome.
Another teenage dress fad is the American "princess" style—light-colored fabric, skirt with lace, etc. They are especially picky about the dress quality.
A great many young adults ignore modish styles here as anywhere else. Youths from the countryside and conservative urban homes usually favor colored shirts with blue jeans, spending neither much time nor money on their wardrobes. "Natural is beautiful" is their motto. Lee Nan, hailing from a small town in eastern Taiwan, confessed. "If I wear new clothes, I am embarrassed, sensing that people are staring at me. I would rather wear clothes which make me feel at ease."