Oh my god, Galaxy Tights are back. I thought they’d disappeared for good but it turns out they’d just been put away for summer. Galaxy tights, solar system stockings, lunar leggings—whatever you want to call them—those tights that are covered in colourful splotches of shooting stars and supernovas. My brother’s girlfriend, infinitely more fashionable than me, assures me I’m wrong to hate them, but I think they’re universally ugly. Frankly, if you don’t work at the planetarium, I don’t see why you’d want to wear them.

Apparently the design is an actual photo of an actual galaxy as supplied by NASA. I can’t decide if this makes them better or worse. I’d like to say it’s added a degree of sensibility to the fashion, what with them now being linked to science and all, but in 12 years of schooling I never passed a single science exam so it’s hard to impress me in this area. I think I’m leaning more towards it making them worse, purely because what’s an organisation like NASA doing letting their images be turned into fashion that makes girls so open to ridicule?

There’s a lot that scares me about the thought of myself in a pair of Galaxy tights, but one thing in particular is far too frightening to ever contemplate buying a pair. It’s not that the girls wearing them look like they’ve got some terrible, blotchy skin disease; and it’s not that a lot of the time they’re being mistakenly worn as pants instead of leggings, thereby showing us a little too much of the effect gravity can have on the female body. It’s not even that I’d be worried about my less than perfect body distorting the universe in such a way that Pluto ended up closer to Mars than Jupiter. It’s that I have brothers, and brothers are unforgiving when it comes to sisterly fashion.

Galaxy tights are a sure fire sign that a girl doesn’t have any male siblings. There is NO way you’d catch me in a pair of them, even if I thought they were sexy, because the chances of me walking away unscathed if my brothers found out I wore them would be zero. I can actually hear their dulcet tones despatching all the black hole, Uranus, Saturn’s rings, and moon jokes in my direction, not to mention how many times I’d have to hear about how large the universe was. And if I think about what my father’s reaction would be . . . well, I can’t even type that, let alone expect it to be approved by the editor.

Cover my legs in the solar system? No thanks, it just isn’t worth the beating this celestial body would take.

This article first appeared in The Urban List:
http://www.theurbanlist.com/brisbane/a-list/galaxy-tights-are-back