Fashion After Fifty: A Guide to Real Style

How We Got In This

Mess, The Short Version

Fashion is creativity and self-expression. You can explain your character through fashion, with what you wear and how you wear it. From a very young age, women look in magazines, look at each other, and find an experimental persona. This search and its inspirations changes with regularity. And so, much of fashion is memory, our memories, what we felt when we were very young; the first thrills, the first high heels, the first bra, the first party dress. It is what we continue to feel and experience as we grow older and become more experienced. As fashion distils into our personal style, it then involves what Diana Vreeland called ‘Rejection’ – rejection of what doesn’t suit, what does not explain, what does not enhance. We adjust to fashion and fashion adjusts to us – at least that is how it should be.

My generation was very influenced by the fashions and experiences of our mothers. And they in turn were influenced by enormous, sometimes catastrophic events, e.g. the Depression and global war. Twentieth-century women saw the end of long skirts and the constrictions of corsets. They saw the diminution of the significance of hats. They saw the birth of utility and ease. They saw the slow strangulation of the class system and the opening up of opportunity. There were always fits and starts but the WWI and WWII generation were the pioneers of women’s style development.

Growing up in post-war America in the 1950s, women were bosomy, corseted, wore flowing skirts à la the New Look, flashed their ankles, and wore hats and gloves. A proper woman changed her clothes several times a day. There were house dresses for supervising the housework and greeting the postman at the front door: day dresses and tailored suits; tea gowns, cocktail dresses, dinner suits, evening gowns, and dressing gowns. For entertaining at home women wore long skirts and off the shoulder sweaters. Women wore trousers on sporting occasions only, and possibly on a cruise. They wore flared shorts with halters, sundresses, and divided skirts.

European-influenced designers copied the French, and more forward-thinking American designers invented sportswear. Claire McCardell created a relaxed flowing look for women using Native American references like Navajo patterns on wrap-around blouses over long, pleated cotton skirts. She put pleated silk dresses with wide, soft leather belts. Coats were made to match but had a playful softness in their flowing lines. She worked with knitwear and made play clothes. She virtually invented a new American look. This American look took its cue from Europe but with a difference. American women wanted European elegance, but they also wanted ease to go with their newly suburban lives. Suburbs meant cars for everyone. Cars meant travel, movement, independence, and an expansion of the imagination.

Bonnie Cashin used tweed and leather. She made capes and coats, leather bound with string leather ties over matching skirts in multi colours. They were luscious soft tweeds with a definite sophistication. These tweeds were not for country bumpkins.

Anne Klein and Bill Blass made ensembles: elegant coats over matching dresses and tailored skirt suits. Designers like Tina Leser made relaxed evening clothes.

Our mothers wore these clothes, and we admired our mothers. A fourteen-year-old girl wanted to look and dress like her mother. This is a part of our heritage.

Of course, we had our own choices laid out with regularity each season. There were school clothes that consisted of pleated skirts, round-collared shirts, Shetland sweaters and saddle shoes. For parties you wore a taffeta dress with a circle skirt, a scooped neck, a wide belt and baby Louis heels. We collected cashmere sweaters and flat shoes by the dozen. You wore a camel hair or navy wool polo coat or a three-quarter-length car coat. ‘Cheap’ girls wore angora sweaters, tight skirts and big earrings. That was the look till the end of the 1950s.

When we went off to university the rules changed only slightly. The hip girls played with their wardrobes, they tweaked them with funny old-lady silk collarless blouses, tight sweaters, expensive patterned sweaters, and tailored skirts. We wore tweed suits to college weekends. We wore kilts and tartan skirts and copied the styles from Mademoiselle and Glamour. Winter was warm coats, mufflers, heavy sweaters, and long woolly socks. Winter was a fur coat handed down from your grandmother. Believe it when we say that vintage is not a new idea. We couldn’t wear trousers at first because they were banned from campuses. This was all coexistent with midnight curfews and self-governing women’s punishment boards. We were all afraid of breaking rules, being banned, and getting a bad reputation. We were all afraid of getting pregnant. We wore girdles, pointy bras, and wore our hair in ponytails and long bobs. Rebellion from this rigid style came in the form of rolled-up Bermuda shorts, looking hungover, and borrowing clothes from our boyfriends. Cool was a hockey team jacket with varsity lettering. Cool was a sweatshirt with ‘Harvard’ on it. Cool was a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Cool was what the boys did.

The whole T-shirt industry was yet to be born. T-shirts were Fruit of the Loom or Carter’s, were white, loose, had no letters or logos, and rough boys tucked their cigarette packs in the sleeves.

No one worked out, except for crew or football players. No one did aerobics. Gym was an activity you wished to avoid. We chose either golf, folk dancing, or volleyball, remained overweight and miserable about it throughout our college years. We took diet pills to stay up all night and study, and the healthy thing was something your mother told you to do. When we returned home for the school holidays, we wore what our mothers wore. We borrowed their clothes, wore their fur coats to go to the big city, stuffed our feet into stiletto heels and pulled up our hair in beehives. We all wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Kim Novak in Vertigo, or the original Sandra Dee. We wore little black dresses for dates and there was little youth culture.

All that changed in the mid 1960s. Maybe it was inevitable after the post-war puritanism of the 1950s. With the development of the birth control pill came the miniskirt and the geometric haircut, and then everything changed, seemingly forever. Fashion magazines, which we all read, changed overnight from featuring frosty models in beautiful gowns and jewellery to Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, dressed by Mary Quant. They were tall and string slender, childish with huge black-rimmed eyes, and they gangled and dangled their long limbs in the shortest and sparest of skirts. We went from being adolescents to women and then little girls all over again, complete with short skirts, Mary Jane shoes, and tiny little tops, dresses our mothers would have loved on us at nine, and that were now associated with the Youthquake, a new world made up of people under thirty.

It has probably taken all of us years to understand that this attitude in fashion that eliminated adulthood oddly coincided with the Women’s Movement. The designers have simply followed this contradictory trend. On the one hand, women were liberated from the constrictions of the past. On the other hand, the fashion industry no longer designed for women but for girls.

In the 1970s we saw the Japanese come and deconstruct our ideas about clothes. We were encouraged to wear trousers with three-quarter legs, sweaters with holes, dresses with shredded seams, everything in non-colours. This developed into complex origami shapes that didn’t conform to the body, and by conforming to this new anti-fashion, we were ultimately the most fashionable. We wore strange black hats and heavy, flat boots. Dr. Martens shoe styles, masculine and aggressive, became a cult look. Simultaneously a few women designers made complementary styles emphasising ease of dress. Sonia Rykiel perfected sweater dressing with chopped-off jersey trousers and tiny fitted shoulder-padded sweaters that featured stripes and bows. These you wore with boots and funny little flat broad-brimmed black felt hats. Jean Muir developed a fabulous jersey fabric that clung but did not reveal and suited women, especially dancers.

The financial climate changed in the early 1980s from economic stagnation and high interest rates to a burgeoning, no holds barred stock market, and suddenly style went off in a new direction. Skirts, along with the market, climbed shorter and shorter, and Karl Lagerfeld at the reinvigorated Chanel was king. His goddess was Ines de La Fressange. For a fleeting time the magazines featured a beautiful model woman, someone with the sophisticated features to add to and stylise a look that was glamorous, playful, tough minded, and luxurious. Chanel had always designed elegant useable clothing that featured accessories and a woman’s own attitude. Women wore Chanel, and still do as a combination statement of taste, femininity, and status. But this lady-like, sophisticated look segued in the late 1980s into non-existent skirts and shoulders like Samurai warriors.

Lagerfeld led the way with his aggressively accessorised style, à la Dynasty, but St Laurent as a guru was his equal. He, having made his reputation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, became the intelligent choice for many fashionable women. He developed a modern look which was a carefully thought-out play on gender and role. Trouser suits, loose shift dresses, blazers with brass buttons, exotic harem pants, bellhop jackets, leather jackets and skirts, ‘transparent fabrics’, tuxedo jackets and matching trousers for evening called ‘le smoking’, high heels with trousers, bitter, contrasting colour combinations – acid green with burnt almond. He worked out these themes every season, adjusting lengths and shapes. We all looked forward to his Rive Gauche collection because it meant instant resolution of the age-old problem of ‘what to wear’. You bought a pair of flannel trousers, a gabardine skirt, and a perky, curvy coloured jacket to go with them both. You bought a draped dress to wear to a cocktail party or dinner, a fur-trimmed raincoat for day and a black dress or suit for any occasion that warranted dressing up. He had a variety of sweater styles in unusual colours which you mixed and matched to create your look. To finish off he had chunky costume jewellery, stylish shoes, fabulous studded belts, and a few hats.

We never worried about looking right. No matter how old you were at the time there was an excitement and a modernity, a cleanness of line, a kind of liberation that came from a disciplined style that made you feel correct. You never felt defensive or apologetic about yourself. St Laurent was expensive and grown-up but at the same time a bit rebellious. We would wait for the sales if we couldn’t do the beginning of the season. He was enormously influential on the High Street. There was something for a young woman, with hopes and dreams of being stylish, and for her mother. And if he were designing today, we would all be happier.

There were other favourites, of course, especially the ultra-feminine Emanuel Ungaro. Ungaro’s clothes were what the French called ‘flou’. They had softness and movement, colour and pattern, they were tucked and ruched and flirty. Even if he did black leather, it was gathered and moulded to ease itself onto the body. His man-tailored trouser suits were feminine and cut close to the body. There was nothing to compare to the sexy Ungaro cocktail dress in jersey or silk crepe.

But alas the zeitgeist changed as the social and economic landscape mutated, bringing confusion. The financial distress of the 1990s brought in social resistance, Grunge, and minimalism. Grunge was a reaction to the padded shoulders and social demarcations of the l980s excesses, brashness, elitism, and collapsed dreams. Grunge was a social reaction to success, mobility, and snobbery. It was the rejection of excess. Minimalism too, the rejection of colour and pattern, creative design ideas, was an expression of disgust with the power dressing of the 1980s.

There have always been these actions and reactions in fashion, historically, but soon we women were dealing with entirely different phenomena. The first phenomenon was the amalgamation and incorporation of the fashion industry. Maybe Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, is the saviour of fashion houses and designers and maybe not, as time has begun to tell. He is one of the richest men on the planet and the so-called fashion industry, especially for us, is in chaos. The industry always laboured with boom-and-bust financing and a manufacturer with one or two bad seasons could easily go out of business. There was and is always panic in this business of ideas, ephemera, ego, and rapidity of change. Louis Vuitton/Moët Hennessy (LVMH), as a fashion conglomerate, attempted to lessen the financial risks to one designer’s business by spreading it amongst others who were more successful in a particular season. Trouble is, eventually everyone is measured by the same quarterly results criteria. In a public company there is little tolerance for unprofitable divisions. So what happens is homogenisation, stifled creativity, and more and more emphasis placed on those things that sell well: accessories, bags, shoes, and perfume. There isn’t a great deal of time for a new designer to develop a signature, to evolve, to experiment in a subtle and incremental way, and an established designer gets caught in the trap of predictability.

There is an emphasis on sensation, eccentricity, change for change’s sake to capture the imagination of the powerful fashion press, and two contradictory trends have emerged, both based on the great common denominator of SEX. On the one hand the designer has less to say. He or she must follow the trend. The bandwagon and climbing on board or clinging to its sides is common business intelligence. Thus advertising and sensationalised promotion is much more important. And sex sells everything, as Joni Mitchell puts it in a song. Grunge has mutated into combat trousers and tattoos, the tightest and most revealing of tiny tops and bottoms, the highest sandals, the wildest hair, vulgarity. Minimalism is the last refuge of the bored and frightened. There is a limit to the number of heavyweight cashmere sweaters, terribly tasteful shift dresses, and sleeveless coats even a minimalist can buy.

Fashion minimalism was always about clean lines and clear colour. It was about form following function. It was, originally in the days of Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin, about modern, comfortable, corsetless