Can I wear this? What is age-appropriate fashion anymore?
I asked Google what "fashion over 50" is and the results were dismal
Middle-aged and skinny jeans
I once wrote a post years ago on my blog wondering whether middle-aged women can wear skinny jeans. This seems especially funny to me now because I was in my late 30s and would barely call that middle-aged from where I’m currently sitting. Did I really question and debate whether or not I was too old to wear a new trend? Apparently so! That post generated so many comments and threads from others who were also wondering whether they were too old to wear low-rise skinny jeans that it’s funny to think that this was some sort of big decision that we deliberated over.
I can’t remember the last time I had such an internal (or public) debate about any clothing trend since, and that feels like progress. I mean, you won’t catch me in midriff baring crop tops that every Gen Z kid including mine are wearing these days, but it isn’t unusual if my kids and I are dressed in similar outfits or have borrowed each other’s clothes. The more recent acquisition of theirs from our closet is not actually from me, but from their dad. They both like to wear his old cargo shorts which are many sizes too big, but they wear it belted and baggy with fitted cropped tanks. It looks cute and it feels like a throwback to the early 90s.
The fashion of my youth recycled by the next generation
Years ago, our older child happily discovered flannels and started wearing them almost daily. This was in middle school when she still had long hair and was wearing jeans and converse sneakers. Basically, she dressed like Mark in the early 90s, and he and I used to joke that from behind, she was the spitting image of him in college when he too had long hair. Mark wasn’t going for any kind of look in those days; everyone growing up or living in the Pacific Northwest in the late 80s and 90s more or less wore some variation of the same thing. If you’re Gen X, then you know that grunge wasn’t a thing in fashion until magazines and brands co-opted it and started featuring it in editorial spreads even though it was rooted in anti-establishment and consumerism. The irony.