Midlife Fashion Crisis Mirrors Society
March 27th, 2008
Article Copyright 3-24-08 Jacquielynn Floyd. All Rights Reserved.
Midlife Fashion Crisis Mirrors Society
09:58 PM CDT on Monday, March 24, 2008, Dallas Morning News
Buoyed by the promise of spring, I went shopping for a new outfit, something bright and becoming that didn’t have to be dry-cleaned. What I got was a sartorial reminder that ordinary grown-ups seem to be disappearing from our cultural radar. The large and reputable department store I visited had two styles of clothing for adult women: juvenile and geriatric.
The former, of which there was a vast but strangely uniform selection, ran toward hideous baby doll blouses with puffy sleeves, shrunken T-shirts with glitter and rhinestones and blue jeans cut to circumnavigate the torso in a death grip just south of what is euphemistically called the “bikini line.”
The other style option comprised mix ’n’ match pastels suitable for the early bird special at Luby’s and bus tours of Branson, Mo. There wasn’t much available for what I guess is the esoteric niche market of persons between the ages of 25 and 65. “Don’t you have anything between ’Teenager’ and ‘Grandma’?” I wailed to a hovering saleslady. She just smiled and shrugged apologetically. Those were the only choices.
Question: What happened to the broad, leisurely category of “middle age”?
Answer: It was subsumed by “old.”
What used to represent, for many people, a comfortable midlife period of stability and contentment instead became a frightening transition from young-hip-edgy-and-trendy – cool! – to boring, Buick-driving irrelevance – not cool at all.
Hence the unlovely specter of adults in their 40s paying good money for gibberish tattoos in phony Chinese characters (”The artist told me it means ‘wisdom through strength and spiritual centeredness’!”) and littering their written communications with text-message abbreviations and those idiotic emoticons.
Y’all, we are being suckered. Apparently, the chirpy assertion that “50 is the new 30!” has been interpreted not as a celebration of health and longevity, but as a signal to get a 20-year head start on that embarrassing midlife crisis. This is sad for a multitude of reasons, most of which are more serious than finding something to wear. Saddest of all is that we are wasting a precious gift our ancestors would have viewed with awe and reverent envy: life. Not so many generations ago, human life was short, difficult and scarred by tragedy. If you lived to see your 40th birthday, you had beaten the odds. The average American can expect to live more than twice as long as his colonial forebears – a miracle that means more than the advent of cars, computers, iPods and Facebook combined.
What are we doing with all those precious bonus years? Pretending to be teenagers. In an insightful essay written for our Sunday Points section, my colleague Bob Moos reflected on the “ageism” that poisons our culture, even as more and more of us are marching toward the dreaded ranks of the aged. It all seems so dumb, so insulting, so unnecessary.
Aging, in fact, isn’t the awful tragedy our silly, superficial popular culture seems to think it is. A 2006 University of Michigan study found that people over 60 report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than their younger counterparts, even though both groups believed – erroneously – that younger people are happier as a group than those who are older.
“People’s happiness results more from their underlying emotional resources – resources that appear to grow with age,” one of the study’s authors said in a summary issued by the university. ”People get better at managing life’s ups and downs.”
My best friend, a pal since childhood who is exactly three weeks my junior, remarked with a sigh the other day, “We’re old now.”
I started to remonstrate with her sharply – We’re not old! –but I knew what she meant. She meant that we’re no longer young, that we have outgrown crushes on rock stars and sappy “chick flicks” and giggly conversations (thank God) about our dates. She didn’t mean “elderly,” but “old” is the only word in our cultural vocabulary for “not young.”
Well, I’m not young, and I don’t expect to be old for a while yet, either. Until I get there, I guess I’ll just have to wear what I’ve already got.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OPINIONS ANYONE?