Even though I’m an old lady I like to look reasonably attractive and even stylish when possible.
I’m horrified to see that this year’s “personal style” from couture designers resembles a pile of rags.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/t-magazine/paris-fall-fashion.html
The garment industry is big business. The purpose of style is to entice women who already own plenty of clothes to buy new clothes.
After seeing this I’m planning to shop in my own closet for my “fall collection.”
Wendy
Fortunately, the article is behind a paywall. Women’s high fashion has been the subject of ridicule, at least since the early 60s, from my personal memory. I don’t know what was more stupid: huge shoulderpads, greasy makeup, and tangled rat’s nest hairsyles. or cut out shoulders. Yet, people buy this crap up, year after year.
I donated my suits to Salvation Army a few years ago. Outside of one sport coat and pair of slacks, to wear to Stryker shareholder meetings, which they have not had in person since the plague, all my suits went to the Salvation Army. I wear a t-shirt/dress shirt/flannel shirt, depending on the season, with jeans and sneakers. I would not want to be a member of any club that demands anything else.
…then there was the see-through thing Streisand wore to the Oscars in 1969.
Steve
Yes, when Wendy posted this I thought the same: in living memory, the annual traipse of new fashion has nearly always been unusual, at least compared to what 99.9% of what people actually wear, want to wear, or eventually will buy and wear. Some of the “ideas” on the annual hit parade trickle down, but that’s usually it.
Pete
And yet if you see a photo from some decades ago it is pretty easy to (approximately) date it. Styles do change, even if they’re not ‘high fashion’.
DB2
Oh, [imitating Miranda Priestly in “Devil Wears Prada”] I think you’ll find a lot more than “trickles down”. The “big shoulder pads” was huge and lasted for years. Hairstyles change every few years, and dramatically. You can tell the era of a photograph by looking at the women (lesser the men, but still some). 40’s flip, 50’s tease, 60’s ironed straight, 70’s etc.
Big shoulders was a thing for at least a decade, and every women at work had it. Pointy bras, natural curves. Athleisure. Below the knee skirts to mini to even micro (for a while). When’s the last time you saw a 50’s poodle skirt? Or pleated skirt?
Movies can date a time period just with simple costuming tricks, and it’s as simple as that. Think “Hairspray” as one obvious example. Fashion changes everything and it changes every few years. Bell bottoms! Hairstyles take longer, but it’s the basis of multiple billions of dollars of trade - and it’s happening faster than ever these days.
I’m sticking with my style that never seems to go out of style; Casual Slob.
A 2020s “fashion” that puzzles me is the “slashed” jeans. The ones with multiple gashes across the thighs to “distress” them.
ralph
True, there are definitely trends. I’m old enough to remember tie-dyed shirts everywhere, bell-bottom pants, and polyester Travolta suits that evolved into skinny ties, designer jeans, and scrunchies/headbands. Many, if not most, of these trends evolved from the ground up or were adopted from innovative movie and music icons and not the fashion industry. Not a little few of these trends were actually incorporated into the high fashion industry after they were being worn first by other, often outside, people or groups (see wild, quirky Madonna, cowboy hatted & booted George Strait, hip-hop, grunge). A lot of these trends were “trickle up.”
Pete
Ever since humans have been making stuff, we’ve had fashion and complaints about fashion. Archeologists track stone-age cultures from pottery decorations. Otzi the iceman, 3250 BC, had 61 tattoos, perhaps fashion, perhaps healthcare. Roman curmudgeons complained that silk hugged the curves of the body too closely yet they still imported enough silk to cause a trade imbalance. Barbra Streisand has nothing on the 25th century BC Egyptian woman who wore this dress
Decades ago, Mish’s inlaws lived in metro Detroit. He and his first wife (passed some years ago now, from ALS) would visit from time to time, so Mish and I would catch lunch, and wander around. One time, we were going through a local mall, checked out “Hot Topic” and a couple other “trendy” clothing stores. I couldn’t help laffing, and commenting on the new jeans in the stores “I through jeans out when they look like that”.
“Fashion” proves, once again, people are idiots.
Steve
A girl I dated in 78 talked about how much she loved women’s clothes of the 40s, because of the shoulder pads. Of course her clothes did not have padded shoulders, because they were not a thing. Bet she was in heaven in the 80s.
Here’s a couple shots of Lizabeth Scott in “Dead Reckoning”, made in 47. Yes, big shoulder pads, but not the absurd extremes of the 80s.
Steve
Every generation of youth wants to distinguish itself from the ones before. Some want to look “badder” than the rest. Some dress Goth and some slash their jeans. Then the mainstream picks up the trend.
The hideous slashed jeans will be mocked even worse than padded shoulders in decades to come.
I donate my jeans when they begin to split from overuse in case someone wants them.
Wendy
I love the styles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Flattering and feminine. Here are my parents in a photo taken around 1950. My mother’s dress was dark green velvet. I know it well because she kept it and I tried it on when I was in my teens.
Velvet isn’t shown anymore because it’s expensive, hard to sew and hard to take care of.
I used to design and sew my own dresses, including this costume.
Wendy
One thing that is constant in fashion is “women’s skin”. Of course it gets boring if it’s the same thing all the time, so it moves around. Bare arms. Shorter skirts. Chest. Midriff. Cleavage. Skirt slits. Sandals. And “slashed jeans” is just another way to display.
It may have something to do with grunge, tattoos and other body art, and other trends, but I’m going with “skin”.
We had this conversation before. Give me men’s clothes from the 30s, like Gable’s jacket from “It Happened One Night”. I’ll take his hat too.
Steve
Male bowerbirds create a structure called a bower which is used in the mating ritual. Bowers seem to follow trends, where bowerbirds will copy each others designs and decorating ideas.
Fashion is not just a thing for humans, apparently.
When I worked at IBM (1960-65) they had very strict dress codes, business suit, white shirt, and well polished black shoes.
Pre damaged goods are very popular in Portugal
but they have some other dress codes. Around graduation time colleges student wear
For Summertime I get to convert old, worn out jeans, into shorts to look stylish.
The Captain
My Grandfather and his brother came from Poland to London, and then Gramps to Dublin. The brothers had two women’s dress shops in London, and Gramps in Dublin.
Gramps, not his brothers, kept five years behind the high fashion. He did what would sell in Dublin. Every trip to the US he’d flip through my mom’s Vogue magazines.
See this cardi? Not quite the oldest item in my wardrobe but the one with most history. It’s part of a twin set and houndstooth check skirt I purchased at Marshall’s in Jerico, NY on 9/12 2001. I arrivedat the office that morning to find all appointments canceled so my office manager sent me out to do some shopping (per Mayor Giuliani) to get me out of her hair after making a nuisance of myself for a few hours.
I’ve abandoned the sleeveless turtle neck and the skirt but this item stays out all year round…..and gets worn frequently. Good as new……or as good as I need it to be.
My father commented that men’s hats that had been in style in Germany in the 1920s and 30s were back in style in the late 1950s. He got to reuse his old hat on a trip to Europe. In Venezuela we mostly don’t use hats.
The Captain
