I bought a pair of skinny jeans and it gave me shocking flashback

A history lesson:

More years ago than I can count on two hands and two feet, when I was impressionable, the trend was to wear your jeans really, really tight. Really, really, really tight. The thing is, although today you can buy baggy jeans, skinny jeans, bootleg jeans, stretch jeans etc etc, back then you could just buy plain jeans. And there was no such thing as lycra.

So, what we had to do was to buy a pair of these plain jeans - but they had to be the smallest size you could get your hands on and your ar$e into. Then you took them home, turned them inside out and assaulted them along both inside legs with the sewing machine.

You would try them on, and if you could get into them without cutting off the circulation to any part of your body below the knee, you took them off and got the sewing machine out again for a second go. Such a waste of money, as you usually ended up throwing away half the fabric from each leg in pursuit of the correct fit. The entire alteration process was only successfully completed when the jeans cut off the circulation at both the knee and the ankle.

To wear these items of fashion, you had to have great upper body strength, loads of time on your hands and decent floorspace. Jiggling your bits into the denim whilst pulling the waistband with all the force you could muster was not a job for the faint-hearted, or those with nails, and you couldn't just 'slip on a pair of jeans'. Getting into them could take up to half an hour, with the last 10 minutes reserved for lying on the floor trying to get the zip up.

With a pair of white baseball boots and a poodle perm to complete the 'look', the fashion was totally impractical; you could neither sit, bend nor run in the trousers, and God help you if you needed the toilet in a hurry. But boy did we look cool as we strutted about like Frankensteins monster!

With hindsight, this fashion trend should have come with a Government Health Warning. Looking back, its a mercy teenagers weren't dropping dead on street corners of DVT, in fact, is it any wonder I had to have surgery to remove varicose veins at 35 and a hysterectomy at 40!