Boomers\u2014do you dress appropriately for your age?<\/p>\n
Related question; how do you think someone your age should dress?<\/p>\n
\n[This is the second of three articles that discuss age-appropriate behaviour (or misbehaviour). This week\u2019s piece looks at dress sense. Part 1<\/a> looks at what we do \/ should do \/ wish we could do, and culture consumption choices are explored in part 3<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As far as I know, younger people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
For example, the ruff\u2014so popular in Tudor times\u2014surely 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).<\/p>\n
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\u2014certainly they\u2019re a more literal substitute than the Beamer\u2026)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Of course, so many more people (read \u201cmums\u201d) 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\u2019s clothes, you understand\u2026) 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\u2014fabrics, 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.<\/p>\n
But now that we Boomers have hit \u201ca certain age\u201d, it seems the gap has closed again (I mean the generation gap, not the clothing store.) And it\u2019s not younger folk wanting to look all growed up by dressing like their elders that has closed it.<\/p>\n
Case in point\u2014fifteen or so years ago, I visited the UK and was shocked to see people of a certain age dressed like kids\u2014in track suits and running shoes. My parents would never have worn Adidas or Nike apparel even if you paid them. Yet here were \u201cmost\u201d middle-aged people looking like they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Was it the Boomer vanguard rebelling against their middle-age\u2014trying 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\u2019s considered acceptable to wear white socks with dress shoes.)<\/p>\n
Whatever it was, I can\u2019t imagine the Millennials were particularly happy about having their fashions stolen by crumbly, wrinkly, old-smelling quinquagenarians.<\/p>\n
You have to admit though, a track suit is very practical for the middle-aged. It\u2019s 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\u2019t think of it before!<\/p>\n
More recent fashions have reverted to the pencil-thin cuts popular at varying times in history and which became a symbol of the \u201cbad boy\u201d culture in the 1950s and 1960s. This has made it more difficult for Boomers to hijack Millennials\u2019 fashions \u2013 the excess baggage can\u2019t be accommodated. It\u2019s like trying to put a kilogram of putty in a half-kilo tub\u2014you 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\u2019t sit or bend for fear of being cleaved in two from the nether regions up.<\/p>\n
This has created a problem for many Boomers. We\u2019re 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 \u201ctailored\u201d shirts. Where did all the \u201ccomfortable but flattering\u201d choices go? Are our only options now to starve ourselves to an anorexic weight or resign ourselves to wearing tents?<\/p>\n
And on a somewhat related note, why is \u201cplaid for dad\u201d taken so<\/em> literally by the clothing manufacturers that the shirt racks of many stores look like the cloakrooms at a gathering of the clans in Scotland?<\/p>\n
I\u2019d love to have offered my thoughts on the \u201cbolder\u201d clothing choices made by some women of a certain age (what we Boomers might have referred to in less sensitive times as \u201cmutton dressed as lamb\u201d), but as I\u2019m so close to my maximum wordcount, it looks like I\u2019ll be forced to dodge that particular bullet.<\/p>\n
\u201cClothes maketh the man\u201d (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\u2019s quite a strong case for bearing that in mind when we\u2019re buying clothes or wondering what to wear to our spouse\u2019s work bash. And as Mark Twain is rumoured to have said, \u201cClothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, it\u2019s time I quit writing, put on my clown outfit, and went out scaring millennials in the park.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Boomers\u2014do 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\u2019s 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… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[575,490],"tags":[590],"class_list":["post-1248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boomerhumour","category-the-commentaries","tag-dress-your-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}