Fashion Luddite

It is as if I am living in the past century, or rather the century before that. I like narrow ties, no more than 2 inches wide, yet they are pretty much impossible to find. Thankfully I have a few that I was able to pick up in second hand stores 20 years ago and, since I don't wear a tie that often, I make due. I went shopping for shorts and all I could find were cargo pants that went down to the knees. Cripes, they can't even be called "shorts" anymore. I blogged not long ago about my difficulty in finding a particular style of underwear, searching a list of retail stores in the area and finally having to order online.

My latest issue is with biking gloves. I've found the Trico Handshock 1000 Crochet gloves to serve my purposes. They have plenty of gel padding, the leather palm is durable and the crochet back is cool. A minor drawback is that I get a unique fish-net tan line on the back of my hands. Given the other goofy tan lines I earn from riding a bike, it doesn't even register as a minor inconvenience.

So, when I finally wore holes in this pair of gloves, I set out to find a replacement. The place I usually found them in Squirrel Hill didn't have them. In fact, of the half a dozen shops that I looked at in the area not one had any gloves with the crochet back. They all had nylon backs and most didn't even have the XL size I needed for those. One clerk even went so far as to say that people didn't buy them anymore because they didn't have gel padding.

Except that the Trico glove does have gel padding. My only guess is that the crochet-back gloves are no longer fashionable. Everyone is going for the nylon fabric. It looks like I will need to go online to order what I want.

Feh.