How To Dress Well: Lindsay Weir From Freaks And Geeks

Freaks and Geeks is the best show about high school ever made. I firmly believe that if I‘d seen it at the right time – back in 2000, when I was devoted to the overwrought meta-soap verbosity of Dawson’s Creek instead – that my whole high school experience might have been a bit different.

Lindsay Weir is the ultimate smart-cool girl: even as she loses her faith, starts hanging out with the burnouts, rejects her uncool old friends and makes the usual mistakes a self-aware, insecure, frustrated teenager in a small town might make, she retains her sense of self, learning quickly (but realistically, not too quickly) that being her own person with conviction will earn her the respect of decent people, burnouts and grownups alike. Freaks and Geeks should be compulsory viewing in high school health classes, along with Where Did I Come From?.

The signifier of Lindsay’s defection from the good girls, and her armour, is the huge, shapeless green army jacket she wears in almost every scene of the too-short series, with the too-long cuffs rolled up and tucked over her palms. It’s an item that’s clearly enjoying a revival, and there are perfectly decent ones to be found in most chain stores, but for authenticity you have to be clad in the dull, used-up colours of the Detroit suburbs in 1980. Lindsay’s shrunken sweaters peek out from under the jacket, a subtle nod to the nerd days – pious mathlete Millie Kentner wears prim pink versions, in contrast to Lindsay’s belligerent freak-girl counterpoint, Kim Kelley, who favours dull colours and checks under a voluminous blue ski jacket. Round off the look with the most nondescript blue jeans possible and chunky black leather shoes. The best way to get the flat, resentful attitude is to head to Etsy for slightly ugly, gleefully pedestrian vintage items – clothes that come to you already world-weary and worn-in.

 

Vintage green army jacket from Etsy: $34.89
Shrunken patterned sweater from Etsy: $37.88
Nondescript 1970s jeans from Etsy: $87.73
Chunky black loafers from Etsy: $74.77

—

Caitlin Welsh is the acting Assistant Editor of Sydney streetpress The BRAG. She has also written for Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, The Vine, Beat, dB, X-Press and more.