A bright green, drug-themed graphic T-shirt purchased at 14 featured an altered 7Up can with MDMA pills and Fido Dido smoking, turning an innocent Muslim teenager into an inadvertent advertisement for ecstasy. The T-shirt was worn on a 1992 family road trip across Europe with twelve relatives crammed into a minibus plastered with "Never too old for fun." The trip became chaotic: getting lost, running out of currency, subsisting on watermelons and boiled eggs, accidentally staying in Amsterdam's red light district, bedbug infestations, and a near-cliff accident in Switzerland. Kodak holiday photographs immortalised the accidental drug-chic under Parisian landmarks, and the journey marked an early moment of sartorial independence mixing trendy T-shirts with traditional shalwar kameez.
My favourite teen outfit was memorable for the wrong reasons. Age 14, in a desperate attempt to be cool, I bought a graphic print T-shirt depicting a bright green can of 7Up with bubbles effervescing from the top oblivious to the fact that it didn't say 7Up at all, it said, EUp, and the bubbles were not bubbles, but MDMA pills being dropped into the can.
I wore it in 1992, the year my dad decided it was time for a grand family road trip across Europe. There were 12 of us in total, aged between five and 50: aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins we all piled into a minibus my dad had hired from a care home, with the words Never too old for fun emblazoned on the front and back. Thus began our Asian National Lampoon's Vacation as we took the ferry from Dover to Belgium for a three-week adventure.
Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. We got lost, bickered, ran out of local currency, lived off watermelons and boiled eggs for two days, accidentally stayed in Amsterdam's red light district, itched from bedbugs and nearly drove off a cliff edge in Switzerland. My accidental drug-chic was immortalised in our Kodak holiday snaps as I posed under the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe.
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