Aug 31, 2020 4 min read

I admit that it was the headline that attracted me: “For Some Reason You Can Never See Their Pants.” The way things are going in the Year of COVID-19 – and with political conventions hard upon us – I expected the story to reveal that the Trump sons thought the Republican National Convention was being held on Zoom and had appeared in their underwear.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the headline was about. It was about VSCO (pronounced “vis-co”) Girls, who are named after VSCO, an app for photo editing and sharing. Probably you are unfamiliar with this term, as was I. Lauren Strapagiel explained the concept in a 2019 article on BuzzFeed: “Your typical VSCO girl has a very specific list of items – a Hydro Flask water bottle (possibly covered in stickers from Redbubble), a scrunchie around her wrist, a crop top from Brandy Melville or oversize tee, handmade friendship bracelets, a puka shell necklace, and Birkenstocks or Crocs.” Don’t worry that the story is a year old: VSCO Girls are still a thing.

In a 2020 update on the VSCO Girl phenomenon, Heather Schwedel interviewed several teenage girls for an article that appeared in the online magazine, “Slate.” “It seems like it’s something that only exists on the internet, but there’s a decent amount of them that I’ve actually seen in real life,” 15-year-old Julia said. “Usually, we point them out to each other … and we might laugh at them a little bit, just because they’re so conformist. Their entire wardrobe is oversize T-shirts and Nike shorts.” Another interviewee, Kelly, provided the headline: “You can never see their pants for some reason.”

I never forget the first time I couldn’t see a girl’s pants. I was 16, and my high school band was visiting the New York World’s Fair in 1965. The band stayed in a high-rise hotel near the fairgrounds, and most of us stayed up very late because there were too few chaperones to wrangle us. Sometime well after midnight a drummer (it’s always a drummer) startled the six brass players in our room by pounding on the door, which I opened.

“You gotta see this!” the drummer said, quivering like a just-used trampoline. “The majorettes aren’t wearing pants!” We stormed behind him to the roof of the hotel, where most of the 150 kids in the band had congregated, and threw the metal fire door open. In retrospect, we must have looked much like the picture on the poster for the Tom Hanks movies “Bachelor Party”: seven guys bursting through a hotel room door to see the black nylon-clad legs of a woman, one of which is extended seductively while she sits on the end of a bed.

Except there was no bed. Or nylons. Or any female older than 17. What we saw, instead, was a writhing mass of band members, both male and female. Most wore jeans or Bermuda shorts. We were unimpressed. Until …

The head majorette (whose name I will not reveal in case she’s running for political office) appeared as if in a dream. She wore a T-shirt that covered about half of her white cotton panties. Not far behind her came three more majorettes, similarly clad: I’ll call them “Dasher,” Dancer” and “Bambi.”

“Egad!” we cried in unison. Yes, even at our tender ages most of us had surreptitiously stolen peeks at “Playboy” centerfolds at the drugstore magazine rack. But these were three-dimensional females, and none of us – even those who had sisters – had ever seen a girl’s panties except in the lurid lingerie section of a Sears catalog. It was an epiphany.

As was one other thing we saw for the first time on that memorable trip: Coca-Cola in cans.

Put on your pants, and I’ll tell you all about it.