Emo is short for emotional. If you want to understand the look or even be able to recognize it, Google recording artist Avril Lavigne. She emulates the teen angst that is emo fashion. But emo is much more than just a look. It’s a state of mind and an attitude. It started as an expression for the misunderstood and today it thrives on being misunderstood. Although emo is limited to primarily teens, it has a far reaching effect on the fashion world.

Emo is characterized by the colors black and purple, stripes and Chuck Taylors, Dickie pants and wife beater tanks. Girls wear baggy pants that sometimes just look like they belong to the boys and sometimes rally are boys’ pants. You’ll see a lot of lip rings and spiked or black jelly bracelets. Hair that ranges from long and straight and somewhat stringy to spikes and mohawks. Emo runs the gamut of kids having fun and looking like rockers to true emotional angst that is displayed with extra large safety pins in all sorts of places, black eyeliner (on boys and girls) and clothes baggy enough for the whole group to fit in one pair.

Emo continues to impact the fashion world because it continues to be cool. When more than half the artists and bands on MTV’s top twenty are sporting the emo look, the fashion world has to take notice. When a super star wears something once, it’s a trend. When they adopt a certain look – like emo – as their style and hold onto it, kids will either buy the clothes or create their own. Instead of selling bits and pieces of your line to the kids who are looking to wear a certain style, designers are almost forced to create viable alternatives that will sell. Such as it is with emo fashion. It is still found manly in specialty stores that cater to the young, skater/ rocker crowd, but it is definitely emulated in larger department stores in their tee shirt fashions and accessories. You’ll find arm socks, spiked bracelets, jelly bracelets, tank tops with stars and belts with studs. All these are signature elements of emo.

The one place that you’ll most likely never see emo is in high fashion magazines. The style is too selectively young. Adults just look foolish trying to wear Dickies cut off just below the knees with tube socks and Chucks. What you will see is the edgy, emotional side of emo in high fashion – the dark eyes, the layers of black bracelets and the combination of stripes and designs. Emo really does cut through the ages and the high society fashion world, it just takes on a more adult spin.

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