Jade Varden Official Blog

    “We just need you to sit in here. Someone’s already on their way over.” “My parents were supposed to be on the way over! Where’s my mom?” I could feel the tears bubbling in my eyes. Why wouldn’t anyone tell me what was going on? Had Carsyn denied my story? Did the store say I was shoplifting after all? Was I going to get charged with a crime? And why was my dad in handcuffs? “Just sit in here.” We were back in the waiting room. “Please,” a few tears spilled out of my eyes and down my cheeks. “Just tell me what’s happening.”                 He must have taken pity on me, because I saw something soften in his expression. “Your mom and dad are being held for questioning right now.” “Questioning? But they didn’t have anything to do with the bracelet. I didn’t even call to tell them I was going shopping. I’m probably in trouble for that already. They really didn’t know about any of it!” I des...

There are fashions you wear every day that are so ordinary, so innocent and so simple, you would never think they all began from very violent military origins. Khakis Khaki is a color but it's used so frequently in pants, the word "khaki" alone is enough to describe a pair of paints in a nondescript, light brown sort of color that has become the uniform of customer service representatives around the world. It's a color that has been used to make everything including pants, from home furnishings to curtains. You can even get khaki car paint. Today, khaki is associated with the most benign fashion and decor. It's downright boring, vanilla, run-of-the-mill. And yet, this color has a rather violent past. The year was 1846 and the British military had been occupying India for about 70 decades. The British, being British, wore heavy wool uniforms in bright red, the same kind of stuff they were wearing when they fought the colonists in America in the 1770s. And frankly, ...