Jeans, my favorite purse, and watches

OK, clearly there were some things I left out of my recent posts of "Things that remind me of the '80s."

Because there's no way I can sleep at night without reminding you of a few key labels that I was so excited to wear on my hiney in elementary, middle and high school.

In third grade, my white Gloria Vanderbilts were MY LIFE. I would have worn them every single day if I could have.

In fifth grade, I got my first and only pair of red Chic jeans. Yes. RED.

And in middle school I went with the high-waisted chalk-stripe Lee jeans ...

... Before finally moving on to that glorious upside-down triangle known as Guess? in high school.

That label appeared on a pair of acid-washed jeans as well as a pair of light-blue-wash jeans that were so light they were almost white. And of course I wore them four out of five days of every school week, usually with an Outback Red shirt (with the collar flipped up, fer sure).

And in middle school I got the best gift ever ... a Liz Caliborne purse like this one:

But in the teal green color shown on the left below:

So it looked like this one, only more, um, VIBRANT.

I carried it no matter what color scheme I had going on in my clothes. I can still remember the sound that zipper made as I opened and closed that purse, and I remember the feeling of those little raised triangles as I rubbed my thumb across them. NOSTALGIC.

I've always been kind of an avid timekeeper. If anyone in the group was keeping tabs on when we were all about to narrowly miss breaking curfew, it was I. If anyone needed to know the time, they asked me. I started out keeping tabs on time pretty early, with a Mickey Mouse watch.

In middle school I graduated to a Swatch watch in my favorite color: plaid.

In high school, I moved up to a Fake Gucci like this one, but I wore the men's (larger) model instead of the women's. I think I found it abandoned somewhere; I didn't buy it. But BOY did I like it.

It was less girly-girl than the very popular interchangeable-face Gucci watches, which several of my friends owned. That just seemed like a lot of WORK to me. I couldn't be bothered to switch purses occasionally, so I certainly wasn't about to be roped into changing my watch face every. darn. day.

As a college student, I eventually found my way to the reasonably priced Anne Klein II line. It had bunches of options and some of them were dual-toned, so you could wear a partially platinum watch that still coordinated with your gold engagement ring and wedding band. Brilliant. I'm probably on my sixth or seventh one of these watches (in various iterations).

So that might wrap us up on the '80s for a while, because I think I might be out of ideas. But if you think of anything I've missed, let me know and I'll eventually get around to it!

And P.S. I HATE that when I looked up all these things on Google, I got better image results when I added "vintage" to the beginning of the search term. GAH.