Before quiet luxury was flattened into blandness, before normcore was diluted to mean “basic clothing,” there were elderly people and their aspirational approach to getting dressed.
Today’s old people dress really, really well. No irony: I’ve always been fascinated by how effortlessly the elderly wear clothes and it feels like the greater culture is only just now starting to catch on.
I most pondered this upon seeing the costume that actress Lily James wore while filming thriller flick Relay in mid-April. Minimal makeup, trench coat, modest v-neck knit, flowing slacks: “this is the stuff that stealth wealth inspo pages are made of,” I initially thought.
But then I took a closer look and realized that I was wrong. Folded newspaper, functional hiking sneakers: James is actually affecting the wardrobe of the elderly.
And I don’t mean that as a diss. I think she looks fantastic; huge ‘fit and an incredibly imitable one at that.
It made me wonder, why aren’t we giving older folks due accreditation for being incredibly stylish? And why do their clothes dovetail so neatly with the current fashion zeitgeist?
Everything starts with the clothes.
I’m aware that I’m generalizing here but the point is, elderly folks don’t care about impressing anyone; they dress for themselves, according to tropes they’ve internalized over decades of dressing. Oh, and they dress for comfort.
Big tops, easy pants, chusioned shoes. Hell, there’s a reason they call ’em dad shoes — guess who was wearing those Air Monarchs and New Balance 992s long before you whippersnappers started buying them?
But we aren’t collectively paying attention to pages like @gramparents just because of what elderly people wear — it’s how they wear it.
Like, the excellent BEAMS x LL Bean campaign from the other week wasn’t hot fire simply because the clothes were nice.
I mean, they were, but it was the adorable elderly models who sold the collection’s fairly normal-looking checkered shirts and beige hoodies.
This sort of casting…
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