Alternate Histories

Imagine, if you will, a world in which the Nazis won World War II.  Now Imagine a world in which some guy goes back in time and gives a crate of M-16s to Confederate soldiers fighting in the Civil War.  Imagine a world in which dinosaurs have laser guns and use them to shoot out of the sky the meteors that were to collide with the earth and render them extinct.  Now imagine Betsy Ross uploading an image of the first American flag to her Facebook.  And just for the heck of it, imagine Winston Churchill using a shake weight on the back of a triceratops while sending a text message to Mary, Queen of Scots.  Pretty tiring, huh?

Fortunately for you, you don't have to do all that imagining.  Leave it to the writers of Alternate History, a branch of science fiction that looks to the past rather than the future and speculates on what might have been.

Let's imagine that, for instance, the South really has won the Civil War.  Since I am not a writer of Alternate Histories, my powers of imagination are greatly limited.  But I am certain of one thing: the makers of Members Only jackets would no longer have to hide behind the thinly-veiled message communicated by their brand name.  If ever such a scenario were to take place (or had this scenario taken place--which it obviously didn't because, I mean, here we are one and a half centuries in the future and the fact that the South did not win the Civil war is pretty much set in one hundred and fifty years of pretty solid stone) their articles of clothing would undoubtedly look something like this:

No, the company would no longer have to hide their agenda behind their highly specialized brand of country club jargon.  So, the next time you think that the perfect compliment to your skinny jeans and serial killer eyeglasses would be Nehru collared with passants, and be pastel in color, you may want to think again.  If not for their ugly brand of exclusivity, then for their dopey and possibly ironic appeal as relics of a thankfully bygone era.

On second thought, just because they became a punchline after their first post-80s decline doesn't mean that they'll fall out of style again.  Fashion is never fickle, now is it?