What Does It Mean to Be Old Enough to

Ignore the Dictates of Fashion?

Free at Last? Or Merely Irrelevant?

by Patricia McLaughlin

“All of us realized with joy that we could now wear the clothes we liked best.”
—Alison Lurie, “The Day I Threw Away Fashion”

When I read that line, it reminded me of a four-year-old I used to know who was so besotted with her purple miniskirt—pronounced poorple miniskoort—that she wanted to wear it every day, and every night, too.

No dice, kiddo: Come bedtime, her mom insisted she put on her pajamas, so she did, and she slept in them—for a little while. But sometime in the night she’d get up, pull on the beloved mini over her PJs, and go happily back to sleep.

This is not uncommon behavior among little girls. What they like matters more to them than what other people consider appropriate to various locations and occasions. So, from time to time, you’ll see one of them draggling through the kiddie science museum in a seen-better-days pink tulle Disney princess skirt, or out to lunch with mummy in a favorite tutu, or at the Nutcracker in the proper little velvet-collared woolen Sunday coat that can only be a gift from Grandma—topped off with a dimestore tiara left from Halloween, its tinfoil edges bent and dogeared but its plastic diamonds still sparkly.

Lurie’s essay, published a couple of years ago in the UK Guardian, suggests that, if we live long enough, we can all hope to regain that state of grace, and once again wear what we truly love instead of what we’re told we ought to.

As Lurie framed it in her essay, she was “abandoned by Vogue magazine and all its clones” shortly after she turned 60. Apparently, she had “permanently alienated them, simply by becoming old…. They were not going to show me any more pictures of clothes I might look good in, or give me useful advice about makeup or hair.” At first, her feelings were hurt, but then her sense of panic and abandonment yielded to a rush of euphoria: She was free.

She quit dyeing her hair, tossed her makeup, and expelled from her wardrobe all the stylish clothes she had been talked into but didn’t really like, along with anything uncomfortable, “everything too obviously ‘sexy,’” and all her high-heeled shoes. And that was only the beginning. Next she started wearing all the hopelessly outdated things she’d hung onto anyway, because she loved them too much to part with: Long patchwork hippie skirts, big floppy hats trimmed with feathers or flowers.

She noticed friends making similar moves. One tossed all her skirts and kept only pants and jeans. Another sat down at her sewing machine and equipped herself with a new wardrobe of the long, loose smocks and muumuus that are thought by some to be the ultimate white flag of I-give-up.

So: Are Lurie and her friends embracing and celebrating their true selves? Has advancing age and society’s view of it as an insuperable universal disqualifier freed them to find the much-trumpeted good of “personal style”? Or have they simply, as we used to say, “let themselves go”?

Persons of good will may disagree. For that matter, so may the women themselves: Some may delight in their freedom, while others find it a painful reminder that the world considers their appearance to be utterly irrelevant.

Either way, it’s clear that age grants us some degree of immunity to the zillion messages we all receive about how we ought to look and act and what we ought to want and do and buy. In some other kind of society, that might be seen as a good thing: The inability to be swayed by the opinions of others might be seen as strong-mindedness, even wisdom. But, in the consumer society we live in, it has a different effect: It means you’re ignored. You disappear from the radar. You no longer matter to the makers of messages.

A list of stories on similar subjects that accompanies Lurie’s piece on the Guardian’s website led me to an essay by Germaine Greer on the controversial Annie Leibovitz photo of a sheet-draped Miley Cyrus that Vanity Fair published in 2008, much to the dismay of millions of pre-teen fans of tween icon Hannah Montana.

American tweens, Greer reports, “spend $51 billion of their own pocket money annually; ...an additional $170 billion is spent on them by friends and family." Marketers love them because they’re so vulnerable to advertising. She quotes branding expert/entertainment lawyer Ken Hertz, who says that, "by the time someone has reached their late teens, they're much more difficult to influence."

What more do you need to know to understand why the average age of the people you see on TV is about 12? If advertisers view 18- and 19-year-olds as too set in their ways to be easily influenced, it’s no wonder they’ve long since written off everybody over 50. (Well, except for the advertisers of FloMax and Viagra, Depends, reverse mortgages, and gated “resort communities” devoted to retirement living.)

In old-style producer economies, older people can be valued for their long experience, store of knowledge, consummate skill, practiced judgment—any of which may prove crucial to one or another production process. But when you live in a consumer economy, you are valued for your propensity to consume: Your importance is a function of your suggestibility. The experience, knowledge, skill and judgment that we like to think come with age make us less and less suggestible, and more likely to be written off as irrelevant.

It’s one more reason to reconsider the wisdom of basing our whole society on shopping.

Patricia McLaughlin is a Philadelphia-based Universal Press Syndicate columnist writing on fashion and style trends. Her “RealStyle” column appears each Sunday in 100 newspapers across the United States and Canada. Patricia last contributed to