Post 50, past fashionista

This remark, from hotcha-blogger Style Spy, struck home:
"It seems to me that hard-core fashionistas in their 20's and early 30's these days divide into two camps: those for whom fashion is about showing off their sexy bodies as much as possible, and those for whom fashion is about costuming to a degree that they would look right at home in any number of video games or science fiction movies."

(Shown above, Alexander Wang's "wild power-babe" look,which, according to Style.com "clearly speaks to twentysomethings".)

If I'd ever been a "hard core fashionista" I certainly am not one today. In my 30s I evidently had aspirations, because a friend said recently said that I always wore the latest (if not the most flattering) styles. I shredded paycheques in boutiques and drank white wine spritzers with the saleswomen on after-work Fridays. The gossip was even hotter than the merch.

I've read those fashion editorials called "Style at Any Age" which assure me that I can wear runway looks by making them age-appropriate. But I don't need Vogue to nudge me into a Donna Karan jacket; I can figure it out by now.

At going on 62, I'm largely uninterested in fashionista fever, by which I mean trophy labels, trends, and costuming myself to look at home for any game other than Texas Hold 'Em, which I play once a month with a rowdy group of women in non-designer jeans.

What still interests me still is beauty. Fashion does not consistently deliver beauty; its primary agenda, to drive the engine of consumption, requires the evocation of desire. If the clothes are merely beautiful, the designer is a sitting duck for a charge of complacency, and soon out the door.

Guy Trebay's "Taming of the Runway" in the October 8, 209 New York Times, quotes Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdales: "The trick to stimulating the customer is to make her believe she needs to update her wardrobe, to make her feel there is something she needs to have to get that emotional lift."

But if you've developed (or consulted) an aesthetic talent, like Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani clearly has, you will choose what is beautiful on you. Though her clothes are no doubt luxury goods, it's colours that are arresting. The ensemble is classic, the season of acquisition undefinable.
(Photo from The Sartorialist)

You may consult 'fashion', but are not run by it. You begin to notice that those trend reports sound the same year after year: studs, animal prints, dots, military-inspired, neon, statement-this-or-that spin before you like a never-ending roulette wheel.


Life after hard-core: what to care about?

I look for fine fabrics. High-quality materials do not perforce confer beauty, though. I looked through racks of Geiger clothing recently. These Austrian woolens are classic in the extreme: think Eileen Fisher crossed with the von Trapps. They did not incite the slightest flush of clothing lust.


On the literal other hand, I caressed a printed-silk Etro blouse. Perhaps too safe for a fashionista, but I wanted it.

The second aspect of clothes that escape high-fashion fever is wearability, a dreary word compared to fashion. Even its synonyms, utility and longevity sound as exciting as a flannel nightgown. But there it is.

When I regard the vertiginous heels of which Style Spy is so fond–and wears with sirenish aplomb– there's little longing. I need to negotiate subway stairs. For me, they're an impediment, not an accessory.

The code word fashion uses for wearable is classic, and in my 20s and 30s, I remember recoiling. "Classic" was out of it, boring, uninspired. Stores selling classics were to be avoided like kryptonite: goodbye Peck & Peck, hello Paraphernalia.

While classic still invokes fear of the too-safe and matronly, if I see no classic items in a shop, chances are I am in the land of the short, tight and disposable, and I flee.

"Showing off the sexy body" is relative– showing that you still have a body is more like it— and requires more fabric and different cuts in the sixth decade than the second. (Shown, Caroline Charles Phyllis tweed jacket, £696.)

I still enjoy a runway slideshow on Style.com or Style Spy's trenchant observations on the latest designers. Each season, fashion rains ideas, colours and cuts, sometimes something wondrous, like this Hermès crocodile coat.

Post-fashionista, I would still sell my mother's china for this Dries Van Noten jacket and skirt, because, if you didn't guess from the audacious colourway who made it, it could be from three different decades. Longevity wrapped in singularity.

And if I'd bought this Van Noten leather skirt in 2008, I'd still be wearing it when I'm seventy.