Gail Sheehy discovers that fashion's possibilities bloom rather than wilt, with each passing decade.
Gail Sheehy discovers that fashion's possibilities bloom rather than wilt, with each passing decade.
It was the crucial job interview of my 20s, and I had nothing to wear. My dream, that summer of 1963, was to be hired by Eugenia Sheppard, the women’s feature editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the nation’s top fashion cop. Two things I had been warned that Sheppard found unsightly: Old people and pregnant women. I was young, but I was pregnant. Very.
I stayed up half the night before, sewing an orange--and-purple-striped knockoff of a Marimekko tent dress. I remembered a pregnant Jacqueline Kennedy wearing something like it during the 1960 presidential campaign. That dress freed me to fake confidence. Sheppard even gave me a (backhanded?) compliment on my choice.
"Interesting colour combination"
I got the job.
Don't we all present a fake front in our 20s when we’re trying to block the thought, What happens when they find out I don’t know what they think I know? I learned early that fashion can be our head fake. Being a journalist gave me license to dress to play the part of the cultural outlaws I covered. To blend in with the streetwalkers who were terrorising the upscale blocks around the Waldorf in the late ’60s, I pulled on blue suede hot pants and white vinyl go-go boots. I was in my early 30s, well past prime time for harlots. But I actually began to like my short shorts and matching jackets and, yes, the high-heeled boots that brought me up in the world. When that look later rose from the streets into It girls’ closets, I started to trust my instincts for dressing more freely, no matter how old I was.
As a divorcee, I began keeping company with a man-about-town who loved women’s fashion. He took me to Emporio Armani and introduced me to grown-up, elegant glamour. I can’t forget the tomato-red pantsuit that I would never have had the nerve to try on. My beau, seated in the sugar daddy armchair, said appreciatively of the flattering fit, “It’s pretty enough to wear out to dinner.”
Many dates later, my beau, soon to become my husband, confessed, “Once you let me buy you that pantsuit, I couldn’t pass a ladies’-shop window without seeing you in whatever the mannequin was wearing. You hooked me!” I didn’t remind him that I’d paid for the pantsuit. From then on, I wore bright colours, especially at night, when everyone else was a blur of black. Goodbye to those grey and beige scarves. I wasn’t going to age in neutrals.
By the time I hit the menopausal passage, no matter how religiously I did Pilates, I couldn’t button my skinny jeans. A ring of flesh circling my midriff followed me around as faithfully as one of Jupiter’s moons. When the hormonal chaos settled down in post-menopause, that it was quite possible to become lean again. Proof? I was shopping for some great pants to wear to my 55th-birthday party. The saleswoman at Saks Fifth Avenue brought out a pair of black leather pants. REALLY? But they slithered over my thunder thighs and it felt like a second skin.
Those leather pants became my winter staple. When I went to the very corporate office of a woman editor, wearing a slithery silk shirt over them, she was insultingly envious: “I couldn’t get away with dressing like that.”
For many women today, the 60s offers a route to fearless outspokenness. I so admire Elizabeth Warren for plunging into electoral politics in her early 60s. For me, that was the caregiver stage. My beloved husband was battling cancer. We had moved from high-heeled New York to Berkeley, California, where I felt reborn as a biker chick (only a two-wheeler), wearing tees, tights and Arche sandals. Any excuse to get into flat shoes is worth taking.
In my 70s, my counter cultural approach to ageing has been simple: Dress as young as you feel. Sure, some days I feel a hundred and never get out of my gym clothes. But most days I still wear bright turquoise and boots or stacked-heel sandals in summer to compensate for the inches I’ve lost. And I still haven’t given away my leather pants!
