B
y the time we reach our forties, most of us have discovered that fashion history repeats itself. What goes around comes around – even if we can’t button it across the middle.
This occurred to me during a recent trip to the local mall, where I was haunted by the ghosts of my high school wardrobe in nearly every clothing store I visited. There were racks of gossamer peasant skirts, rows of ballet flats embellished with embroidery, and stacks of pre-washed jeans covered in beads and sequins.
My inner teenage hippie desperately wanted to buy everything in sight – including a spiffy military jacket that must have been inspired by Paul Revere and the Raiders. But the voice of common sense – the voice belonging to my inner middle-aged mom – told me it was time to shop for something more mature. Something “age-appropriate.”
I’m still grappling with the whole concept of age-appropriate dressing. I mean, with Goldie Hawn posing for magazine covers in miniscule tank tops, and Mick Jagger prancing around in the same hip huggers he wore back in 1968, what do fashion editors mean when they tell us to dress our age? How does a person ripen gracefully?
In my early thirties, not long after I became a mother, I went through the obligatory matron phase. Totally focused on parenting duties, I schlepped around grocery stores and school parking lots in oversized T-shirts and ankle-grazing denim jumpers – outfits that made my Grandma Ruby’s housedress look seductive. And while I'd always lusted after sexy shoes, I never wore anything more flirtatious than square toes and one-inch heels. It took years to correct those fashion mistakes -- and I have a family album of photographs to prove it.
Not long ago, a stylish friend in her eighties reminded me that reaching maturity doesn’t have to be synonymous with looking foolish or frumpy. Echoing the late Coco Chanel, my friend believes that achieving a style of one’s own can take a lifetime – and that a woman should never stop trying. I admire her savoir-faire.
As a young girl, I spent hours reading Seventeen magazine and experimenting with fashion accessories. Clothes were my costumes, part of my creativity. Over the years I tried on several different looks until I found one or two that came close to expressing the authentic self I was trying to become.
Today I have no desire to revisit my youth; I don’t miss the insecurities or the acne or the go-go boots. But I do miss the unbridled fun I had with fashion when I was 15. I haven’t outgrown my weakness for romantic, handcrafted details -- and I’m still crazy about anything vintage.
During another visit to the mall last week, my college-age son asked if we could stop at one of his favorite clothing stores. Walking the aisles, I pointed out that a lot of the merchandise bore an eerie resemblance to the getups his dad and I had worn at his age. (I didn’t even flinch when my son called the style “retro.”) He wandered off to look for a new track jacket while I admired a gorgeous display of hippie jewelry.
“That was neat stuff,” I told him as we left the store and headed for the mall exit. “But it’s probably way too young for me, and I suppose I’d look silly in most of it…”
My son rarely has an opinion about women’s fashion – mine or anyone else’s. But this time he repeated verbatim what I always tell him when he asks for my opinion on his clothing choices.
“If you like it, that’s what matters,” he said, shrugging.
And that was all the encouragement I needed. Next week, I’m going back for that cool military jacket.
Writing from Royal Oak, Mich.,Cindy La Ferle is a nationally published freelance writer, newspaper columnist, and essayist whose essay collection, Writing Home, won four awards for creative nonfiction. Currently at work on a midlife motherhood memoir, she blogs on her Web site,
www.laferle.com.
