It was Mrs Jones birthday yesterday. After the highs of our week away, it was a quiet school night in so the main focus was present opening.
Playing safe I’d bought her pretty much what she’d asked for, her main present was the leather-style biker jacket she’d mentioned about a month ago. It looks good on her and she seemed willing to pair it with the animal print stilettos I bought her for Christmas.
These look even better on her in my opinion and I started to wonder what she will wear with them – a pair of skinny jeans or perhaps, in my dreams, a short denim skirt!
Mrs Jones, who is just about in her mid-fifties, cares about fashion, keeps fit, looks amazing in most things and will certainly carry off this rock chick chic look for decades to come
It made me think it’s about time I started to think about what I wear. I’ve never really given clothes and fashion much thought, most of what I wear is chosen and bought for me by Mrs Jones.
Having spent a week in the company of a great many sophisticated French people including a few men of my age who had a certain Je Non Sais Quoi I feel inspired.
One of the benefits of retirement is that you get the opportunity to think about things you’ve never had chance to before and the time to do something about it.
I’m going to make the next few months a bit of focus for this and try and develop my own, distinct style something suitable for a man of my age.
Silverbacks
What I’ve read so far in an unattributed online article certainly resonates:
“The clothes you’re buying when you turn 60 aren’t going to define your style for the rest of your life. That could be thirty-plus years.” I’m totally against this grouping of all older people from 60 to 110 as one category.
“So we’re going into this with the understanding that “sixty-plus” is a big age range. Your style will grow and evolve during that time the same as it has every other month, year, and decade of your life. But sixty is a good benchmark for the time when a man can start really shifting from the fashion of middle age to the fashion of the elder gentleman. This is not a bad thing. Some of fashion’s greatest icons have been silverbacks. They just got better as they aged. Both money and taste tend to accumulate over time, and the results make for a whole different school of fashion from the younger generations.”
There’s a lot to take in here and I’m going to give it some thought. Apparently it’s all down to fit, gravitas and capability. More specifially waistcoats are in so is soft tweed which is good as they both already feature in my wardrobe. Definite no-no’s are logo t-shirts, novelty neckties and Hawaiian shirts.
The article continues: “Our culture is not always generous to its elders. Be aware that, as your hair silvers or vanishes people are going to start treating you a little more dismissively or condescendingly. It’s obnoxious, but it’s something that realists should plan for.
“Just as the younger man needs to dress a little sharper and a little more aggressively in his business attire if he wants to be taken seriously at a firm filled with middle-aged men, the older man in his retirement needs to still dress like someone with places to go and people to see.”
I like that, still places to go, people to see.