A Fashion Statement

Armando was a highschool kid in the central valley of California. The central valley was known for its agricultural attributes to California, certainly never its style. That changed when Armando unintentionally changed the fashion industry forever. Armando was in a rush one day for school because he woke up late. He realized that he forgot to throw his clothes in the dryer from when he washed his clothes the day before and all his clothes were sopping wet still. He had to be at school in 15 minutes and there was no way he was going to be able to get his clothes dry in that amount of time. Armando ran to his room and frantically was going through his closet looking for something to wear. All he found was a faded pair of mint green pants he bought and never wore and a ripped light pink shirt he forgot he even owned. Armando thought the combination of colors was such an eye sore and he didn’t want to be embarrassed he thought about skipping school but he had an important test that day and couldn’t miss it. He swallowed his pride, got dressed, threw on his white vans and went to school. He walked into those school gates, worried he was going to be ridiculed and made fun of for the outfit he was forced to wear. He thought he looked like a watermelon! Well, in fact he kind of did. Everyone was looking at him but not in the way he thought. He was expecting looks of disgust or despair but instead got looks of encouragement and applause. “This is great!” he thought. He finally had the confidence to make it through the day. At lunchtime he was standing in line waiting for his food when he heard someone say, “Hey nice fit man!”, he yelled back “Hey thanks!”. One of his friends came up to him taking a video and playfully said “Who is this? Armando is that you?” implying that the outfit was very out of character for him. Armando couldn't believe that an outfit could attract so much positive attention. As days passed, a number of his classmates went to the stores looking for the combination of clothes to look like him and re-create his outfit. Armando felt what it was like to be popular, he felt wanted. Eventually other schools around town started to copy his style too. He saw online that other kids were starting to dress with the color way that he started. They even started a hashtag online called #thearmandofit. Word and style started to travel south, everybody liked Armando's thrown together outfit. He thought they were crazy, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Armando was scrolling through instagram only to find that one of his favorite movie stars had posted a picture of him wearing the outfit! He even captioned it #thearmandofit. Armando almost had a heart attack right then and there. It was like a dream. Never in his life did he think he would have any impact on an industry so big, especially the fashion industry. It was almost as if he was dreaming. Word had spread so quickly through the grapevine that within a week he was seeing thousands of people posting pictures and captioning them #thearmandofit. Armando was ecstatic. I mean, he had his own hashtag, and his own hashtag that people actually use, not very many highschool kids can say that. Word had travelled all the way to Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Orange County, some of the biggest places for fashion in the US. Armando’s social media was blowing up constantly, he felt like a celebrity, he almost was one, locally anyways. It was all so surreal to Armando, how things could travel so far, so quickly, and become so large. What once was a makeshift outfit for him became a major fashion statement for people now. He felt accomplished. Armando took all of this as an inspiration, he knew he could make something of this and he wanted to. With lots of social media attention, he began to use that to his advantage. One morning, Armando got out his computer and went to work. He wanted to start his own clothing brand, something that would catch peoples eye. He’d obviously done it before and he was sure he could do it again. Armando was searching up every website he could find to try to find out the best and least expensive way to start his own line of clothing. His brand would be very colorful, that's what made him famous. The weird color combinations were an eyesore to him but they were amazing to everyone else. By the end of the day Armando already had his first designs and a name for his company. Throughout the week he was fine tuning his design, website and social media pages for his brand. At the end of the week he ordered his first prototypes. As Armando was processing this all he still couldn't believe so much came from one outfit, but he figured he might as well take advantage of it. Armando reached out to all the people he knew; friends, acquaintances, people from other schools, even the celebrities he saw wearing his outfit, and he let them know about his brand and asked them to follow his pages and be on the lookout. Armando was ecstatic to start his very own brand. To him, the best thing for Armando was that some of the celebrities actually answered back! They agreed to help promote his brand. He had this in the bag, so many people would see his age through celebrities that he didn’t know if he would be able to fulfill all the potential orders he hoped he’d be getting. Regardless, at the moment he didn’t care, he was just so overwhelmed with all this happening at once. Armando was more than ready for this venture and he swore he was going to do anything to make it work.