The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

This is something I realized the other day in school. Most of my students wear Jordans. How they get the money for Jordans, I don't know, but that is beside the point at the moment. Anyhow, if you were a student in my high school and you were putting together an outfit for the day what you would need to do is pick a color scheme and go with it to a ridiculous extent. That is to say you match your shoes with your t-shirt, with your belt, with your headband, and probably also with your shoelaces. So you look like one color with a pair of jeans walking down the hallway. My kids tell me all the time that I don't match because I'm not wearing all one color and I try to explain to them the idea of contrasting colors and what not, but they just don't get it.

Anyhow, the phenomenon I realized the other day is that the Jordans now have like 3 or 4 colors in them. And amazingly the kids come to school wearing clothes with those 3 or 4 colors. The shirts match perfectly with the shoes, and the other accessories do as well. I satarted thinking about how the kids must be really good shoppers if they were going to these great lengths to find matching clothes and then I realized, no. In fact, the opposite is true. The people who make these clother are making them *to match with the Jordans*. There are these Jordans that you would all recognize from your youths, since all they're doing now is recycling the old Jordans, calling them retro styles, and charging $180 for them, that are mostly black, but have tinges of orange, yellow and red. And then I saw a kid with those Jordans on and a shirt that had black, yellow, orange, red, and white horizontal stripes. I thought the shirt was really busy and had an odd color combination and then looked at his shoes and realized that the shirt had exactly the same shades of yellow and orange as are in the shoes and the only possible explanation is that the shirt was designed to match those shoes.

In any event, I just think that's weird.