We elderly millennials—the 35+ crowd—are having a moment in fashion.
A bad moment.
You know what I’m talking about. It’s cottage core and it’s straight leg jeans, it’s bare ankles in the winter, it’s combat boots and sandals with socks and combinations of midriffs and waistlines that make us look like shapeless drifters hitchhiking our way across Cold-War-era Europe.
I’m not here to tell you why these fashions are bad. If you’re under 30, these fashions might even be quite good, and if you’re not, others have eviscerated this moment better and more thoroughly than I ever could.
For the purposes of this piece, I merely ask that you accept the following premise: Everything in stores right now is hideous.
Perhaps this is all an extension of pandemic hate-wearing, or perhaps it was simply time for the great wheel of fashion to turn once more toward the Age of Ugly. Regardless, when I open the Banana Republic app, I feel like we don’t even know each other anymore.
This is not the first unfortunate fashion moment I’ve encountered, of course. The older I get, the more I realize life is a series of fashion purgatories: swamplands between identities that must either be surmounted or succumbed to. I mucked myself out of the jump from juniors to misses, from collegiate to professional, from 20-something free agent to 30-something overtaxed mom. I’ve climbed out of some thick, cable-knit swamps in my day.
But I’m thinking about lying face down in this one and inhaling.
Yes, the clothes are bad, but even that’s not the real problem. My eyes will adjust to these new, horrific silhouettes eventually, and more mainstream styles will wiggle their way back into my Instagram ads. It’s not really about the clothes.
It’s about the ask.
You’re going to ask me to do this AGAIN? After I just adjusted to skinny jeans and flowy tops for you? After I spent all of the 2000s yanking the back of my shirt over my waistband every time I sat down? After I’ve spent every decade of my life compressing and contorting my body into some new acceptable shape that is still never quite tall enough or thin enough to fit into the clothing as you make it?
I am coming to understand why mom jeans, before their unfortunate renaissance, were a thing. I understand why our forebears decided at some point—probably on the cusp of 40—to allow fashion to move forward without them. They’d been through enough. As low-rise jeans barreled through the nation’s department stores, exhausted women were the lone resistance. Go ahead, they hissed. We’ve found gathered waistbands and generous seats, and Paris Hilton and her elongated torso can pry them from our cold, dead hands.
What’s so wrong with giving up? If it’s taken me 38 years to curate my personal style, why not swing open the door and jump off the train with it?
I could put my foot down right here in January 2022. I could, as countless women before me have done, adopt an asynchronous uniform. I could endeavor to become the last human on earth wearing skinny jeans. A time traveler. A living reminder of where we have been and what we have lost.
I could wear the same pair of skinny jeans every day. I could amass a collection of identical balloon sleeve sweaters and slip-on sneakers and never make another fashion decision as long as I live.
I enjoy this kind of thinking, and not just when I am raging in the middle of an Ann Taylor LOFT. Periodically, I like to throw up my hands and swear off choice in all kinds of areas. I’ll only ever eat toast for breakfast! I’ll only ever paint the walls white! I’ll only ever write with a black PaperMate InkJoy 0.5!
These strategies are supposed to preserve executive functioning (which maybe doesn’t hold up anymore btw), and surely that’s the appeal for me. Now that we’re living in Omicron land and must, AGAIN, make seventeen thousand judgment calls before leaving the house, I am reminded that executive functioning is a precious resource.
But let’s be honest. I’m not going to stop buying new pens. And I am not wearing the same thing every day.
I’ll moan about the current fashion scourge for a while, enough to have made my point, but then I’ll be strapping on a fresh, clompy pair of Doc Martens with the rest of you fools. It may be efficient to remove decisions from your life, but it’s also kind of soul-crushing.
I like variety. I like being fashionable, even when fashion doesn’t seem to like me. And if we’re really digging deep, I like complaining about things.
Humans like to solve problems. It’s one of our primary adaptive functions and sources of satisfaction. And so, in the same way that I enjoy putting together a 300-piece puzzle of a kitten in a T-Rex compound, I will enjoy this fashion quagmire eventually. It gives me something to complain about and something, at some point, to conquer.
In between the rough and final draft of this post, my kids and I tested positive for COVID. We’re now staring down the dark, narrow mineshaft of a ten-day school quarantine, and everything I had planned for the next week and a half has fallen into it. I suddenly have little control over my time, my productivity, or my energy. I’ve spent the past, oh—checks watch—22 months or so bracing for this scenario, which means I never felt fully in control of any of those things, even when I was.
But I can control what I wear.
That’s what fashion remains for me, exhausting as it may be at the moment. A sweet little morsel of control in a world—in a life, in a pandemic, in a HUMAN EXISTENCE—that is uncontrollable. It’s why I am so frustrated when it changes, and why I am so unwilling to let it leave me behind, even when I’m tempted by the siren of windbreaker track suits for eternity.
So, we shall carry on, late 30s and up brethren. Maybe by the time we’re done with all the quarantines, the wheel will have turned all the way back to Mad Men again, and I’ll see you in a structured shirt dress in 2023.
Here’s to hope.
