My days sometimes have themes. As I'm moseying around, I'll be noticing classes or sorts of things -- odd things people are carrying, how few young women can actually walk in high heels, what people put in their recycling bins, that sort of stuff.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a day when it seemed every other person I saw could be classed as 'mutton dressed as lamb'.
I looked the phrase up. This one refers to older people in general, but most definitions are sexist like this one and refer only to older women.
I find that peculiar. Some of the worst offenders are men, at least to my eye. But then, women are much more sensitive to the charge, I guess.
Here's Linda Grant in the Grauniad obsessing about it last December. (She also has an interesting blog called The Thoughtful Dresser.)
She was looking for a leather jacket and found what she thought was the perfect one.
I wore it for a month until I discovered from veteran fashion writer Sarah Mower in the Daily Telegraph that, in buying my leather jacket, I had unwittingly fallen into the saddest fashion category of all: mutton dressed as lamb. "Everyone past the age of 40 needs a 'mutton monitor'," she wrote.
Grant talked to a couple of fashionistas of a certain age. One, Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue, who turned 50 in November, said:
The danger is that you have to tread a middle ground between looking boring and a bit tragic.
Well, if that's the choice, it's a no-brainer for me. I'll take boring.
The people -- of all genders -- with the badly dyed hair, the bold bling, the too-tight-too-revealing-too-with-it clothes just look sad to me.
Ah hell, maybe they think they look fabulous.
Me, I don't think I look fabulous. But then I never aspired to fabulous. I think I look pretty good for my age. And I don't cringe when I look in the mirror.
4 comments:
Who says that you can't blog about this kind of stuff when we hit the big time? I've read ah ..., erm ...., shallow blog posts at Progressive Bloggers.
Just avoid posting pix of atrocious fashion faux-pas like this one and everything will be hunky-dory.
Well, you know, dBO, the boyos at PB are kinda squeamish about pink, girly things.
But I'm working on becoming as shallow as the next person. *duck*
Yes. Pink, very pink. We are that.
But girly? Gorilly maybe.
Oh, I dunno, dbo, that dude on the right, with the knee-highs, isn't too hard on the eyes, if ya know what I mean.
Just doing what I can to step into the shallow pool. *grin*
BTW, I'm liking this new branch of feminazism you've created here, DAMMIT JANET!
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