My favourite teen outfit was memorable for the wrong reasons. Age 14, in a desperate attempt to be cool, I bought a graphic print T-shirt depicting a bright green can of 7Up with bubbles effervescing from the top – oblivious to the fact that it didn’t say 7Up at all, it said, “EUp”, and the bubbles were not bubbles, but MDMA pills being dropped into the can. To make matters worse, the image also included Fido Dido – the cartoon mascot for 7Up – sporting bloodshot eyeballs while smoking a spliff. Little did I know that I, an innocent, drug-free Muslim girl, was a walking endorsement for ecstasy.
I wore it in 1992, the year my dad decided it was time for a grand family road trip across Europe. There were 12 of us in total, aged between five and 50: aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins – we all piled into a minibus my dad had hired from a care home, with the words “Never too old for fun” emblazoned on the front and back. Thus began our Asian National Lampoon’s Vacation as we took the ferry from Dover to Belgium for a three-week adventure.
Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. We got lost, bickered, ran out of local currency, lived off watermelons and boiled eggs for two days, accidentally stayed in Amsterdam’s red light district, itched from bedbugs and nearly drove off a cliff edge in Switzerland.
My accidental drug-chic was immortalised in our Kodak holiday snaps as I posed under the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. Looking back, it is clear that the holiday was an early moment of sartorial independence for me. I’d packed a mashup of what I thought were uber-trendy T-shirts (one even had shoulder pads – I shudder) alongside traditional Indian shalwar kameez – a long tunic top and loose trousers, lightly decked in multicoloured embroidery. Back in the UK, I only wore shalwar kameez at family gatherings or community events, but here I was, embracing my heritage and ancestry in public, under the quiet liberation of being a tourist.
It helped that no one questioned, or even batted a bloodshot eyelid, at my polar opposite looks on this holiday. It was only flicking through photo albums years later that the peculiarity dawned on me. While quirky T-shirts faded from my wardrobe as I grew older, I have recently rediscovered my love for them – only nowadays I read the small print.
These two looks also summed up who I was back then: a young teen, trying to be cool, wanting to be cultural, and haplessly embracing the differing sides of my identity. This coming-of-age trip gave me the space to bring it all together, unapologetically. So maybe I was dope, I just didn’t know it.
