Jennifer Groft

It makes sense, I believe, as I resume blogging, to comment on something that everyone else has already commented on:

The Gen Z Fashion Judgements of late.

Generation Z, born after 1995 or 1996, depending on who you ask, has issued a decree via social media that side parts, skinny jeans, and <cry laugh emoji> are sure signs that you are old. Glamour or some such fashion magazine’s social media picked up their screed and boosted it out into general knowledge to a lot of women over the age of 26, who first clutched their pearls (another sign of age) and then gave a collective shrug.

Back in the olden days, when I was a kid in the 80s, we attended a Baptist Church right on the edge of a community (city, really) of old people who had an actual rule that you had to be over 55 to live there. Those were still the days when “old” women cut their hair short and had shampoo sets at the salon once or twice a week. And it seemed to be a rule that once a woman was past a certain age, longer hair just wasn’t done.

(Yes, I know there are communities or parts of the country where people already didn’t care about the age of a woman or the length of her hair. Scratch that – the age of a woman always matters to society. See, for example, “woman of a certain age” as a descriptor.)

Anyway – these little coral-lipsticked women with puff ball hairstyles, wore – ugh, it kills me just to think about it – double knit polyester pant suits or skirt suits in carefully chosen pastels or even bright (Gasp! How risky!) colors. With the suits came atrocious “comfortable dress sandals” in a pale gray or white (depending on if it was before or after Labor Day) worn with pantyhose.

Those were the days when I knew it all and cared deeply about what others thought about what I was wearing. I refused to wear anything close to what my mom would wear, not to mention those old ladies.

Now, though, as I look around at women my age or who have kids the same age as mine, moms no longer take on a “more mature” way of dressing at a certain age. Fifty now doesn’t look like fifty did in the 70s and 80s. I suppose I could be deluding myself, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.

But the idea that I would want to wear the baggy pleated “mom jeans” that these girls who don’t even have hips yet think are fashionable?

I already did that. The only people who can pull off such a look are razor thin and welcome a little help in the hourglass department.

And here’s the thing, even my Gen Z kids aren’t following these trends. It is another flashy headline picked up because they make for inflammatory social media comments and make people click links, buy clothes, and write silly blog posts like this.

I am very satisfied that adulthood now doesn’t look like adulthood did when I was a teenager. I can verify this by talking to actual Gen Z people – some of whom lend me clothes and shoes and borrow mine.

But as any commentary on fashion goes, I reserve the right to have my mind changed gradually, and to come back here and cringe as I eat my words in a year or two – at how wrong and unfashionable I am. But I will also continue to pick the clothes that are comfortable and that I think I look best in, even if these premature fashion mavens think I am wearing what amounts to pastel polyester pant suits.