Understanding Boomer Behaviour—Part 2

(~5 minutes to read)

Boomers—do you dress appropriately for your age?

Related question; how do you think someone your age should dress?

[This is the second of three articles that discuss age-appropriate behaviour (or misbehaviour). This week’s piece looks at dress sense. Part 1 looks at what we do / should do / wish we could do, and culture consumption choices are explored in part 3.

As far as I know, younger people’s taste in clothing, hairstyles, makeup and so on has for a long time tended to be influenced by fashion trends, whereas older people tend to dress more for comfort.

For example, the ruff—so popular in Tudor times—surely must have appealed more to the young (who would have prized it for its ability to soak up and preserve spilt beer) than to the older and wiser (who would have realized that ruffs catch fire if you drop burning tobacco on it).

And what 60-year-old would want to have worn one of the more outrageous designs of codpiece? (Unless they were the Tudor equivalent of the BMW convertible where sexagenarians are concerned—certainly they’re a more literal substitute than the Beamer…)

Looking at photographs from prior to the world wars, it seems that the generation gap, clothing-wise, was narrower than it was in the decades following WWII. Adults young and old seemed to dress similarly, although perhaps with differences too subtle for a mere male like me to spot.

Of course, so many more people (read “mums”) made their own clothes back in the day, and Mum probably made scaled-down versions of her clothes for her daughters, and did the same for her sons (scaled-down versions of dad’s clothes, you understand…) Sewing ability was also a factor in styling, and probably also a motivator for girls to learn to sew well; they probably would have cringed at the idea of having children and sending them to school dressed in clothes that look like they were made to fit Quasimodo. Plus, choices were limited—fabrics, colours, styles, practicality of care, practicality of warmth and so on. Without these limitations, we may have seen Oscar Wilde dressed like Boy George, Charles Dickens in cargo pants and a hoodie, and heavens, maybe even Queen Victoria in a leotard (black of course!) and neon legwarmers.

But now that we Boomers have hit “a certain age”, it seems the gap has closed again (I mean the generation gap, not the clothing store.) And it’s not younger folk wanting to look all growed up by dressing like their elders that has closed it.

Case in point—fifteen or so years ago, I visited the UK and was shocked to see people of a certain age dressed like kids—in track suits and running shoes. My parents would never have worn Adidas or Nike apparel even if you paid them. Yet here were “most” middle-aged people looking like they’re dressed for a track and field event, wandering around malls and markets. Some of those middle-aged bargain hunters can get competitive, but this trend seemed a little excessive.

Was it the Boomer vanguard rebelling against their middle-age—trying to hang on to their primes? A very successful advertising campaign? Or evidence of a lack of taste in the part of England I was visiting? (This is the same part of England where it’s considered acceptable to wear white socks with dress shoes.)

Whatever it was, I can’t imagine the Millennials were particularly happy about having their fashions stolen by crumbly, wrinkly, old-smelling quinquagenarians.

You have to admit though, a track suit is very practical for the middle-aged. It’s a very relaxed fit (lots of room for that extra padding), has an elasticated waist to accommodate beer bellies and suchlike, and if the top has a hood, it can hide a lack of thatch. Beats me why olduns didn’t think of it before!

More recent fashions have reverted to the pencil-thin cuts popular at varying times in history and which became a symbol of the “bad boy” culture in the 1950s and 1960s. This has made it more difficult for Boomers to hijack Millennials’ fashions – the excess baggage can’t be accommodated. It’s like trying to put a kilogram of putty in a half-kilo tub—you push the second half-kilo in and it evicts the current tenant. And if you do manage to get a pair of skinny jeans on and done up, you can’t sit or bend for fear of being cleaved in two from the nether regions up.

This has created a problem for many Boomers. We’re not ready for the slippers and cardigan yet (in fact, we may never be!), but the only current alternative seems to be skinny jeans and “tailored” shirts. Where did all the “comfortable but flattering” choices go? Are our only options now to starve ourselves to an anorexic weight or resign ourselves to wearing tents?

And on a somewhat related note, why is “plaid for dad” taken so literally by the clothing manufacturers that the shirt racks of many stores look like the cloakrooms at a gathering of the clans in Scotland?

I’d love to have offered my thoughts on the “bolder” clothing choices made by some women of a certain age (what we Boomers might have referred to in less sensitive times as “mutton dressed as lamb”), but as I’m so close to my maximum wordcount, it looks like I’ll be forced to dodge that particular bullet.

“Clothes maketh the man” (or woman) is still as true as it was back in ancient Greek times. Like it or not, we are judged by our personal drapery, and there’s quite a strong case for bearing that in mind when we’re buying clothes or wondering what to wear to our spouse’s work bash. And as Mark Twain is rumoured to have said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

Well, it’s time I quit writing, put on my clown outfit, and went out scaring millennials in the park.

Don’t forget to leave a comment below telling the world what generation you belong to and what you think of the way the Boomers around you dress.