Avenue

Fashion for the Masses

When it comes to clothing, Calgarians find comfort in conformity

By Kevin Brooker
Illustration By Kelly Sutherland

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Having moved from Ontario to Calgary in 1969, a friend of mine recalls his dismay upon showing up at Lord Beaverbrook, then a shiny new suburban high school. “My first thought was: Why didn’t anyone tell me I needed a uniform? Because every kid, and I mean every one, wore the same outfit: V-necked alpaca sweater, Lee stovepipe jeans and loafers. And I swear that on the first wintry day, everyone switched to identical blue quilted Woods down jackets and ankle-high sealskin boots. I thought I was in the Soviet Union.”

Shortly thereafter, of course, the hippies’ do-your-own-thing mentality reached even middle-class Calgary. But that doesn’t mean that our apparently innate need for sartorial sameness has gone away. Fifty nights a year, when the puck drops at the Saddledome, nearly 20,000 Calgarians now automatically don a certain garment of arterial-blood-red polyester. Behold, homogeneity not seen outside of penguin colonies or Red Square on May Day.

Other cities may experiment briefly with twirling white towels or scouring their ward-robes for orange vestments. Yet no other arena in pro sports comes close to the uniformity of our sea of red, which first began pooling during the Flames’ late-1980s Stanley Cup bids. In those years, a reddish T-shirt would demonstrate sufficient loyalty. But ever since the heady 2004 run, it has become all but mandatory that the red flag be of one kind only: a full-fledged Flames jersey.

For Ken King and licensed apparel manu-facturers, Calgary is indeed a dream come true. It is summer now, for instance, but the Flames’ own FanAttic stores — four locations, including the airport — continue their brisk year-round trade. Last season they sold about 24,000 jerseys, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year. Though not all were the $300 ultra-authentic model, it’s still a nice piece of business which, as uniform designs inevitably change, need never diminish.

Not only that, by happy coincidence, Stam-peders jerseys are also red, so Flames fans can get double-duty out of their beloved jerseys, showing their allegiance to the Stamps by wearing their colours without having to shell out for a football jersey.

And, man, don’t we all look cool together. We’ve even come to permit individuality, a smidgen anyway, in the form of customized lettering. For just $90 extra, we can briefly embody Iggy, Dion or Kipper. (Fleury and MacDonald, the leading retro choices, are strictly for fashion renegades.)

Are Calgarians overly standardized?

Do we lack soul? Can we not afford a second go-to-hockey outfit? Who knows — those are matters probably best left to psychiatry. Meanwhile, we ought to consider it a sophis-ticated form of bonding, much like penguins on an ice floe. We’re obviously happiest when we truly feel like we belong.